78 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 09/10.19
economies took off: 213 million metric tons
in 2000, then 313 million metric tons in
2010, and now more than 400 million metric
tons per year. About half of this is single-use
plastic—the bags, bottles, spoons, straws,
sachets, and wrappers that make modern life
überconvenient and utterly disposable—and
most of it has nowhere to go.
Recycling is a joke. For all our careful sort-
ing, less than 5 percent of plastic in the U.S.
gets recycled. That’s not a typo. The only
types of plastic that are widely recycled
are #1 PET (soda and water bottles) and #2
HDPE (milk jugs and laundry-detergent
containers), and even they are guaranteed
to be recycled only if they’re clean, pure,
and not mixed with nonrecyclables. Almost
everything else gets incinerated or dumped
into the ground or the sea.
In the U.S., which has a well-developed
waste-management system, only about 2
percent of recycled plastic gets mishandled,
meaning it could potentially wind up in the
ocean. For developing countries like China,
Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, 70
to 90 percent goes into the drink. Until 2018,
when China stopped accepting most of our
recycling, a lot of that plastic started out in
America. Chinese recyclers picked out the
usable bits and disposed of the rest. Star-
ing at that ridge of very familiar items, I can
only wonder how many pieces of plastic I’ve
tossed into recycling bins over the years that
were dirty or the wrong kind of plastic or just
mixed with too many questionable things
and wound up in the South China Sea.
Back in 2010, scientists estimate, the
oceans contained about eight million metric
tons of plastic. Now we add that much every
year. Today there are about 75 million metric
tons of plastic in the marine environment,
and in five years we can expect 150 million
metric tons.
Perhaps this explains why the whales of the
world keep beaching themselves and expir-
ing with wads of plastic in their guts, a kind
of gruesome global protest. And why bugs in
the Mariana Trench, 36,000 feet below the
ocean’s surface, are packing plastic.
So are you, but we’ll get to that later.
THE NORTH ATLANTIC Gyre is one of the
three great endpoints for the world’s plastic.
It and the Indian Ocean Gyre each hold about
60,000 tons of the stuff, a figure topped only
by the trash in the North Pacific Gyre (a.k.a.
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch), which
holds 100,000 tons. Each gyre has its own
character, according to Eriksen. “The North
Pacific is the fishing-gear gyre. The North
Atlantic is more like the bottle-cap gyre.”
The best place to find those bottle caps is
inside the free-floating sargassum seaweed
that accumulates in an area of the North At-
lantic Gyre known as the Sargasso Sea.
“To the heart of the gyre!” Ford directed
the captain of the Resolute, a no-nonsense
Russian.
“I have no idea where that is,” the captain
replied.
“Just head east until we hit seaweed.”
As we knife through calm seas, we begin
our three-day “design lab.” That’s tech-bro
talk for what used to be called brainstorming:
get as many different perspectives as possible
on how plastic leaks out of the circular econ-
omy, break into multidisciplinary groups,
stress-test the best ideas against the needs
of all stakeholders, then come back as a group
on the final day with concrete action plans.
The ship is a rolling spark session. Bonnie
Monteleone —a North Carolina artist who
creates Hokusai waves out of ocean plas-
tic—is schmoozing with Ellen Jackowski of
HP, which is incorporating millions of Haiti’s
plastic bottles into ink cartridges. Gaelin
Rosenwaks, a filmmaker fresh off a subma-
rine exploration of Belize’s Great Blue Hole
with Richard Branson, is chatting with the
AI guru Tom Gruber, one of Siri’s inventors,
who has become a prominent ocean advo-
cate since retiring from Apple in 2018. A
dude from the World Bank is huddling with
Tensie Whelan, the former president of
Rainforest Alliance, who now heads up New
York University’s Stern School of Business.
I sidle up to Bridget Croke, vice presi-
dent of Closed Loop Partners, an impact-
investment firm that steers money from
corporations toward recycling innovations.
Croke, who is also a pretty badass rock
climber, strong-armed a lot of her clients
onto the Resolute. “All of a sudden they de-
cided they couldn’t miss it,” she says.
Considering the speed with which the
world is turning against single-use plastic,
showing up seems like a no-brainer. Plastic
bags and bottles are becoming as socially
toxic as cigarettes. Hundreds of U.S. cit-
ies, states including California and Hawaii,
and countries such as China, France, Kenya,
South Africa, India, and Saudi Arabia have
all announced bans, and more are on the way.
“The companies that are here are smart,”
says Croke. “They understand the trends
coming down the pike. What business leader
would say no to that opportunity?”
Well, apparently 50 of them, but never
mind, the icebreaking has begun in the aft
lounge, where Greenpeace and Nestlé Waters
are on stage for a “Sleeping with the Enemy”
panel discussion. John Hocevar, the ocean-
campaigns director at Greenpeace, looks a
bit spooked by the eyes of so many longtime
foes. “I was just saying to someone on board,
‘Oh, the last time I was at your office I washanging off the front of your building.’ And
the last time I was at Nestlé’s office we were
there with a giant trash monster.”
Hocevar is long and lean, with a graying
goatee and body-length tattoos. He’d be
at home in Brooklyn, but his roommate on
this trip is Nestlé Waters’ chief sustainabil-
ity officer, David Tulauskas. Clean-cut and
Midwest friendly, Tulauskas directed sus-
tainability efforts at General Motors before
shifting to Nestlé Waters in March 2019.
When Tulauskas extended his sleepover
invite, Hocevar was guarded. “I regularly
have conversations with people we’re run-
ning campaigns against,” he later confides to
me, “but sharing a small room? And a bath-
room? That’s definitely next-level.” Many
Greenpeacers were against it—espionage!—
but he thought it was a rare opportunity.
“For this insane experiment to make any
sense, we have to establish a real connec-
tion,” he says. “We have to build some sort
of a human relationship. But ultimately,
he represents a company that we are cam-
paigning against for good reason. They have
a massive footprint, and they have taken
very little responsibility for it.”
Nestlé Waters (whose portfolio of about
a dozen brands includes Arrowhead and
S.Pellegrino) produces 1.7 million metric tons
of plastic packaging every year (topped only
by Coke’s three million metric tons), almost
all of it single-use. “We’ve done brand au-
dits after beach cleanups around the world,”
Hocevar says. “Everywhere we look, we find
that the companies producing the trash are
American or European.” In 239 cleanups
around the globe, Coca-Cola was the most
common brand, followed by PepsiCo and
Nestlé Waters. Polystyrene was the most
common material, followed closely by PET.
For its part, the plastics industry points
toward the need to fix waste-management
systems in the countries doing the polluting.
But to Hocevar, it’s disingenuous to blame
people in Southeast Asia. “These compa-
nies are fully aware that their packaging
is not going to be recycled, and yet they’re
flooding those markets with this material.”
To him the bottom line is simple: “Single-
use plastic has to go.”
Eriksen agrees that would go a long way
toward solving the problem. “For a long
time, the industry has harped on consumer
behavior and deflected all responsibility for
how plastic is used in society.” The onus
should be on companies, he says, to reduce
their packaging and come up with new de-
livery systems. Instead they’re pushing
chemical recycling. “That’s the new buzz-
word. You’re gonna hear a lot about it on the
boat. You’ll hear ‘chemical recycling’ every
other word.”