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Richard Thompson remembers being surprised by the amount of litter that washed up on the shores of the tiny Isle of Man, when he first arrived there in the 1990s.
He was a PhD researcher at the time, and began to conduct beach clean-ups with his team. In their first year, they collected 20,000 pieces of trash, he recalls.
These were, by and large, the kinds of things one sees washed up with the tide: the odd shoe, a weathered tyre, fragments of fishing net, bottle caps. But then Thompson noticed something he couldn’t explain.
“I realised that the most abundant thing were these tiny pieces of plastic,” says the British marine biologist, now 61. “There was no category for them in the beach clean-up data sheets, so we began to collect these bits separately. We also wanted to establish how common they were.”
Thompson began to suspect that they were coming from all the plastic that had ended up in the oceans. It wasn’t biodegrading; he knew that. But was it coming apart? It turned out it was.
In 2004, Thompson published his seminal paper, Lost at Sea: Where Is All the Plastic?, co-authored with seven others. In it, he coined the word “microplastics”, birthing a new field of research.
The report rung the first alarm bells on this form of pollution. It explained how biologically available these bits were to sea creatures; how they could wreak havoc, and end up in the food chain.
Thompson now heads the University of Plymouth’s International Marine Litter Research Unit. He and his team there published a follow-up paper in September, in the journal Science, titled Twenty Years of Microplastic Pollution Research — What Have We Learned?
What does it say about where we are, and the way forward? Excerpts from an interview.
* What did we think was happening to discarded plastic, before you figured it out?
I’ve got a book that was my grandfather’s, published in 1937, predicting the future of plastics. At the time, they were using plastic for highly durable items such as light switches, door handles, window frames. Plastic products were seen as superior and long-lasting, and were more expensive than traditional materials.
What was not foreseen in the book was the flip side, which is the accumulation of plastics as waste when you finished using them. That’s particularly important if the use is very short.
About 40% of all the plastics made today are used in packaging. So the majority of production for what is an incredibly durable material is directed at something that’s used for an instant, but will persist as waste for hundreds if not thousands of years.
This challenge emerged in the 1950s, when the technology to mass-produce plastics at a low unit price became available. Suddenly, for the first time in our history, we had the ability to make single-use and disposable items in substantial quantities. Before that, from the Stone Age on, a lot of effort had gone into making things that would last.
Now, we could use stuff for a moment and then throw it away because it was so inexpensive.
And yet we were using this same material, one of whose key properties was durability.
* Why don’t we care more about this?
While we are aware of substantial harm to the environment, I wonder if our lack of urgency is in part because we don’t yet know the full effects on human health.
My viewpoint is that we’ve got enough evidence that it is harmful. So I would advocate a hazard-based approach, where we assume that all plastic has the potential to be hazardous and harmful, reduce usage, and make sure that what we do produce is more sustainable.
There really is no reason to delay reducing our exposure to microplastics.
* When did you realise this was going to be a global problem?
In that first paper, we described long-term accumulation of microplastics in a few locations around the UK. We then started to look in more remote places, like the deep sea and Arctic sea ice, where I didn’t necessarily expect to find them. But they were there, and in surprising concentrations.
That was a surprise at the time. But then you learn something about the transport mechanism, you realise… it’s not so surprising.
A few years in, some of my students said: You found it in the environment, it must also be in the creatures. At the time, nobody had really done any studies with natural populations. So we started to look, and yes, we started to find it.
And then one student produced a paper in 2013 where we looked at over 500 fish taken from the English Channel near us in Plymouth, and she found plastic in a third of all the individuals that we looked at.
* Do we know how long it takes for a solid plastic object to begin to yield microplastics?
It’s a really important question, but there can’t be a universal timeframe because degradation is a system property — it’s a factor of the material, but also the environment in which it finds itself. Conditions that promote degradation are warm temperatures, exposure to high levels of ultraviolet light, availability of oxygen and, to some extent, moisture. So conditions for degradation on a tropical beach will be more conducive than in the deep sea or in the Arctic.
* What can we do about the microplastics already in our environment?
I would not encourage spending money on clean-up just yet, because plastics are flowing into the environment at a rate far faster than we can take it out. The priority right now should be to change our practices and business models, and find ways to turn off the tap.
* Do you think we can turn off the tap?
This is an environmental challenge that we can solve. I don’t believe it’s about banning all plastics; it’s about starting to use these materials more responsibly than we have so far.
What is hopeful about plastics for me is that they can bring societal benefits. Think of lightweight parts in cars and aeroplanes that can reduce fuel usage and carbon emissions.
Irresponsible use has led to a failure of what is a wonderful series of materials. We failed to even consider how to use them responsibly.
