– Andrea Benn

• Saturday 17 September: Dr Peter Ryan, ornithologist, on “Oceans of plastic – impacts, sources and solutions to plastic pollution in marine ecosystems”.

Plastic, plastic, plastic! Why do we use it? Because it’s versatile (soft plastic bags to hard kitchenware), cheap, lightweight, and has a very long lifespan. Have you ever thought that the plastic that was first produced is still around?

Peter Ryan, our guest speaker for the September talk at Harold Porter Gardens, is based at the Percy Fitzpatrick Institute at UCT. With several publications to his name, his original interest in 1989 was in migratory birds.

Peter showed us some pictures of beaches in Indonesia – a surfer catching a wave, surrounded by bits of floating plastic; another, the words “Mankind was here” spelled out of plastic litter; and another of plastic at Inaccessible Island, 3000 km from any source of plastic!

Plastic became an available commodity after the Second World War. Peter Ryan’s studies with migratory birds have shown alarming statistics showing how plastic impacts on the environment. He showed pictures of animals and birds entangled in plastic litter, and of the stomachs of birds containing many bits of plastic waste.

But why do birds ingest this plastic? Three possible reasons are:

1. Plastic is ingested through contaminated prey such as plankton and fish. An albatross will feed her chicks food which she regurgitates.
2. Plastic is ingested accidentally as it is attached to prey such as shellfish.
3. Plastic is ingested deliberately as it is mistaken for prey through colour selection, for example, jellyfish.

How are we affected? We are what we eat! Surveys show that 40% of fish species can contain plastic which contains toxins like plasticisers, flame retardants, and other chemicals, like DDT, which cling to any surface. All can interfere with our hormones.

South Africa is the eleventh-worst polluter in the world, ahead of India. It is estimated that we produce 2 kg of plastic waste per person per day. But where does this plastic waste go? Much of it goes via rivers into the sea where currents tend to accumulate it in the middle of the main oceans. In another 100 years, the North Pacific could become the toilet of the world. Comparatively the southern oceans are relatively clean.

Saturday 16 September was National Beach Clean-Up Day. Does beach combing and clean-up help? Probably more on the educational side than reducing the mass of litter. Instead we should work on tackling the origins of the waste. Peter listed five areas where plastic is not fantastic: earbuds, sucker sticks, sweet wrappers from sweets which are already packaged in a plastic bag, nipple caps from plastic bottles, and plastic straws.

The solutions include Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Resist. In addition, we can Replace with alternative materials. Unless we all do something to reduce our litter load, it will outstrip our population growth.