For Clean Oceans, Action Must be Local and Global

Innovative financing is needed to restore the cleanliness and viability of the world’s oceans. Photo: Marek Okon

For maximum impact in the effort to clean the world’s oceans, we need to reduce the use of plastic, improve waste management and build capacity for large-scale clean up.

Whenever we eat seafood as a family, it makes me wonder how much plastic my young children might be ingesting—and how much of it the world’s children will eat over their lifetimes now that plastics have firmly entered the food chain.

At the current rate, there will be more plastic than fish by weight in our oceans by 2050. Already about a quarter of the fish caught contain microplastics in their guts. The scuba diving industry—a source of jobs in many tourism-dependent island nations—will need to adapt as encounters with underwater debris become more common than encounters with marine life.

Bad trash management is a problem that affects all of us in some way or another. Waste mismanagement and the continuing popularity of single-use plastics in many countries means that about one garbage truck is emptied into the ocean every single minute. There are some commendable efforts underway to find solutions for recovering plastics in the ocean at scale, such as Ocean Cleanup and Ocean Works.

Exploring the viability of options for regional recycling systems can help tackle both the issues of providing treatment facilities for recovered plastics from the ocean, while proving the needed scale for recycling scrap metal and plastics of the small Pacific countries. Continuing and growing our project work at the local level is essential for improving health and quality of life, protecting the environment and for optimal use of precious land. Without getting it right at the local scale—and continuously building local capacity of local systems for the 4 Rs (refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle)—the prospects for successful systems at ocean and regional scales will remain a distant dream. After all, without basic sorting of waste locally, it will be difficult to make a regional recycling network viable. These steps are just the beginning but they hopefully will help us avoid a world where plastics are a basic food group. That is not the world I want for my children.