09/10.19sooner have we all checked into our rooms
than we have to get right back off the ship.
Roll up your sleeves, Ford tells us. Time to
clean up a beach.AT FIRST GLANCE, Long Bay Beach looks
suspiciously like paradise. The golden sand
sparkles. The waves glitter. Bermuda is a
wealthy island that regularly cleans up its
shoreline. Sure, the odd flip-flop is poking
out of the wrack, but rather than any sort of
environmental angst, I feel a strong desire to
work on my tan.
Then Marcus Eriksen, cofounder of the
5 Gyres Institute and the expedition’s lead
scientist, tells me to look closer. A former
Marine with a buzz cut and unyielding blue
eyes, he’s been crusading against ocean
plastics for 15 years. In 2008, he lashed
15,000 plastic bottles underneath an oldCessna fuselage and sailed it from California
to Hawaii to raise awareness. He’s led trips
to all five of the world’s major ocean gyres—
vortexes of current where microplastics and
other marine garbage swirl. He’s published
papers about the plastics found there and
lobbied relentlessly.
None of which has made a dent in the
business practices of the big plastics pro-
ducers, something he’s dearly hoping to
change in the next 72 hours. “This is huge,”
he tells me. “Nothing like this has ever hap-
pened. It’s been my dream my entire career
to take the people who run the plastics in-
dustries out to sea. Once you’re at sea, you
can’t go anywhere. You have to talk.”
And one of the things he most wants to
talk about is right at my feet.
At first all I see is sand and seaweed. But
then, at the high-tide line, something blue
catches my eye. Then something pink. I
kneel to get a better look, and—impossible—
the shell bits resolve themselves into a con-
fetti of colors. Half the flecks I thought were
pieces of shell are actually bleached plastic.
The problem with plastic is that it never
rots, never goes away. But contrary to pop-ular misconception, Eriksen explains, it
doesn’t form floating islands of trash. It
disintegrates. “Sunlight makes it brittle, the
waves crush it constantly, and the fish and
turtles and seabirds just tear the stuff apart.”
The pieces get smaller and smaller until
they’re tinier than a grain of rice and qualify
as microplastic. By Eriksen’s count, there are
more than five trillion pieces of microplastic
in the oceans—more than there are fish—and
despite some well-publicized debacles like
Ocean Cleanup’s dysfunctional 2,000-foot-
long boom, which was supposed to sweep
the seas free, no force on earth is going to
get that plastic out. The best we can do is
prevent more from going in.
I’m still absorbing this when a local natu-
ralist takes a group of us around a point to
Nonsuch Island, a sanctuary for the Ber-
muda petrel, one of the world’s rarest sea-
birds. The island is off-limits
to the public and doesn’t see
regular beach cleanups. As a
result, here, collected into a
massive ridge, is 18 months’
worth of civilization’s de-
tritus: bottle caps, tooth-
brushes, tires, coolers, crates,
ropes, nets, glue bottles, soda
bottles, bleach bottles, jer-
ricans, fishing totes, fishing
line, styrofoam cups, shellfish
sacks, Parkay bottles, sleds,
spackling buckets, mesh,
toys, Ensure bottles, Glade air
fresheners, car bumpers, fenc-
ing, sneakers, flip-flops, car consoles, cush-
ions, spray guns, shotgun shells, mattresses,
floats, noodles, sponges, siding, labels, caps,
hard hats, ribbons, zip ties, trash bags, gro-
cery bags, pail handles, foam buoys, sun-
glasses, drink lids, wrappers, milk jugs, tent
stakes, boat hulls, and hundreds of plastic
octopus traps that washed up from Africa.
What’s weird is that almost every piece has
serrated edges. “Those are turtle bites,” Er-
iksen points out. “See those smaller triangu-
lar bites? Triggerfish.”
From the largest whales to the smallest
zooplankton, everything is eating plas-
tic. Plastic particles at sea act as magnets
for toxic chemicals and organic pollutants.
Plastic has been shown to make shellfish
sluggish. It’s in virtually all seabirds, which
becomes obvious when they die, flesh melt-
ing away to reveal the plastic within like
trash in a spring snowbank.
Back in 1950, at the dawn of the plastics
era, the world made just two million metric
tons of the stuff per year. By the seventies,
we were up to 50 million metric tons a year,
and by the nineties, 150 million metric tons.
Then production exploded as the Asianon a ship, steam out to the plastic-studded
wastes of the North Atlantic Gyre, distribute
snorkels, and, in a kind of epic swirly, stick
their faces in the problem. Then haul every-
one back aboard and hack a solution to the
fucking thing.
SoulBuffalo had to write a “very big
check” to book the Resolute, which was en
route to the Arctic from its January cruising
grounds in Antarctica, before Ford knew if
anyone would come to his party. “We bet the
company on this,” he confesses, “pushed all
our chips into the middle.”
When I ask why, his voice rises. “How
many whales with 60 pounds of plastic in
their guts need to beach themselves? How
many turtles with straws up their noses?”
More, apparently, because most of the 70
corporations Ford invited said no. But be-
fore going down with his very pricey ship, he
elected to raise the stakes. “You know what
the tipping point was? When we decided to
invite Greenpeace. When people realized that
Dow and Greenpeace were going to be on the
same ship, they were like, Whoa, this is real.”
And while Greenpeace may be the most
anti-corporate of the greens on board, it’s
not alone: Break Free from Plastic, Up-
stream, Ocean Conservancy, World Wildlife
Fund, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the
5 Gyres Institute are all here to hash it out
with Dow, Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola,
Nestlé Waters, GE, Colgate-Palmolive,
Hasbro, Mary Kay, Kimberly-Clark, Clorox,
HP, and other industry behemoths. (The
391 tons of carbon dioxide generated by
this little soiree will be offset by SoulBuf-
falo through the Kariba Forest Conservation
project in Africa.)
Quarters are tight. Unless you’re willing to
pay $25,000 for a private stateroom (which a
few of the bigwigs are), everyone has to share
cabins, and one of the assignments is drop-
ping jaws: the reps from Greenpeace and
Nestlé Waters—which have been at war for
the past month, after Greenpeace launched a
campaign against the bottled-water giant—
are bunking in a cramped stateroom with
beds three feet apart, at Nestlé Waters’ re-
quest. (“Haha,” Ford initially wrote back.
“Very funny.”)
As word spread that silos would be crum-
bling in the middle of the Atlantic, 20 com-
panies said yes. But still, Ford says, “That’s
fifty noes!” I won’t call out the chickenshits,
but you can pretty much figure it out. There
are no retailers on this ship. There are also
no oil companies, and plastic is basically oil
whipped into a hard, waxy meringue.
But Ford says he’s fine with the noes.
“This isn’t a boot camp for clueless execu-
tives. It’s a leadership summit.”
And leadership begins with service. No
PUT ALL THE STAKEHOLDERS
ON A SHIP, STEAM OUT TO THE
PLASTIC-STUDDED WASTES OF
THE NORTH ATLANTIC GYRE,
DISTRIBUTE SNORKELS, AND, IN
A KIND OF EPIC SWIRLY, STICK
THEIR FACES IN THE PROBLEM.