09/10.19 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 79
True that. A lot of people here are pretty
jazzed about chemical recycling, which can
take the worst plastics, all the unrecyclable
stuff, and cook them down into fuel. If I’m
China or Vietnam right now, bleeding riv-
ers of plastic into the sea, that would sound
pretty good to me. But to Eriksen, it’s a
Band-Aid that just perpetuates the fossil-
fuel economy. Considering the urgency, says
Croke, whose Closed Loop Partners invests
in chemical recycling, the only strategy that
makes sense is all of the above. “There’s
nothing we don’t need to do.”
I’m still stewing on that, thinking that
whatever PR genius came up with the term
chemical recycling should never work again,
when a special announcement crackles over
the Resolute’s speakers: Sargassum ahoy.
AS THE SHIP CRANE lowers black Zodiacs
into the swell, the crew of the Resolute gives
us our snorkel briefing: Here’s how to use your
snorkel. Here’s how to use your life jacket.
Don’t take it off under any circumstances.
Accustomed to Arctic conditions, the sailors
are a bit freaked out by the thought of 150
bodies bobbing in the water, but they roll
with the plan. We flop like penguins from a
metal gangway into bucking boats, and then
we’re off.
I find myself up front, between Stan Bi-
kulege, the chairman and CEO of Novolex,
one of the world’s largest plastic-bag manu-
facturers, and Bruce Karas, the vice president
for the environment and sustainability for
Coca-Cola North America. To anti-plastic
crusaders, Bikulege is the devil. He’s also a
decent guy who hangs on to the back of my
life jacket as I lean over the front of the Zo-
diac to haul passing crates and sneakers out
of the sea. But sometimes you just find your-
self on the wrong side of history.
Karas is here, as far as I can tell, to not get
left in the dust as the issue evolves. Coca-
Cola—which has spewed plastic across the
planet like few other companies and has
staunchly opposed bottle bills, one of the
most effective ways to increase recycling
rates—has not been a leader on fixing the
plastics crisis. From what Karas tells me,
he’d like it to be. “I have to be able to carry
the message back to our franchisees that I’ve
been to the gyre,” he says. “I’ve seen it, I’ve
held the plastic in my hands, and it’s real.”
That shouldn’t be a problem. We snorkel
through alphabet soup, collecting spoons
and toothbrushes and bottle caps. I’m never
out of reach of another piece. I grab a hunk of
sargassum, I give it a shake underwater, and
suddenly I’m in a snow globe, white flecks
swirling all around. We don’t see any of
Karas’s bottles or Bikulege’s bags, but that’s
because such things disintegrate fast, helped
along by tiny marine life that can pick a sin-
gle plastic bag into 1.8 million micropieces.
Back on the Resolute, we pile our booty
into a creepy altar, capped by a toilet seat,
and break into a dozen design-lab teams.
Croke peels off with the money folks to
crunch ideas on funding. People from Dow,
the World Bank, and the Pew Charitable
Trusts put their heads together on new mar-
kets for used plastic. Tulauskas leads a wildly
eclectic squad trying to disrupt retail pack-
aging that includes executives from Dow,
Clorox, and Kimberly-Clark, the founder
of a startup called TAP that’s been billed as
the Waze of water, an official from 5 Gyres,
NYU’s Tensie Whelan, Gaelin Rosenwaks,
and Ovie Mughelli, the hulking former full-back for the Atlanta Falcons, who has started
his own environmental foundation.
The groups huddle; the hours fly by;
voices rise in frustration and fall in consil-
ience; the windows of the Resolute fill with
Post-it Notes as I dolefully watch the blue
sea flash by behind them.
That evening I drink a beer with Tulaus-
kas and ask him how he’s getting along with
his roommate. “Great,” he says. He and Ho-
cevar have shared lots of personal details. “I
know that his parrot is freakin’ crazy, and I
know he has a beagle named Otis and a blue-
tick hound.” The night was not without is-
sues, however. “Apparently, I kept him up
with snoring, for which I apologize. I was
hoping the rocking of the ship would make
me sleep like a baby.”
Somewhere amid the snoring and small
talk, they got into it. “We did exchange
high-level business perspectives,” he says.
“He shared his view on Nestlé Waters. We
talked about his criteria for corporate en-
gagement. It was enlightening. I feel like it
would be a lot easier to reengage if we ever
get the chance.”
Powerful day, Tulauskas admits. “Seeingall that plastic speaks for itself. How do we
close the loop? We can design lighter bottles.
We can do it in ways that make recycling
more efficient. We own that. But we need to
move faster and farther with the use of recy-
cled content, and there’s great partners here
for that.” (Days after the trip, Nestlé Waters
will announce that Poland Spring plans to be
the first major water brand to convert to 100
percent recycled bottles.)
We drain our beers and watch the sun sink
into the ocean. “This needs to be a transfor-
mative experience for me,” Tulauskas says
softly. “I need to come back a new person.”BY DAY two, I’ve identified the espresso
machine on deck five as the choke point
through which the entire
summit funnels. I stake out
a nearby table, and people
stumble past and tell me things
they shouldn’t.
I hear that Coca-Cola is
secretly planning for a post-
single-use-plastics future.
Ask Coke about that, my source
whispers to me. I can’t, because
I’m not supposed to know.
I learn that, back in Decem-
ber, when it looked like Soul-
Buffalo wouldn’t be able to
pull the trip together, Ford’s
partners began referring to it
as the Gyre Festival, after the
disastrous Fyre Festival that so
famously belly-flopped in the
Bahamas in 2017. But the scoop that dark-
ens my day is the rumor of a disturbing new
study, not yet released, estimating that we
each have about a credit card’s worth of plas-
tic in our body, to which I respond: (A) What
the fuck are you talking about?, and (B) How
do I get it to scan?
Later I check out the details with other
scientists on the ship. There’s a grim con-
sensus that the plastics crisis is much more
than an ocean issue. As microplastic keeps
breaking down, it eventually becomes small
enough to pass through cell walls and migrate
into organs and flesh. Yes, that means it’s in
our seafood, but crossing calamari off your
list won’t help. It’s in our beer, our salt, our
tap water, and our bottled water, sometimes
at concentrations of thousands of particles
per liter. The average wash load of clothes
launches 700,000 plastic microfibers. A
single car trip whips clouds of microparticles
off our tires. Plastic sloughs from civilization
like hay off the back of a chicken wagon.
No one actually knows what effect it’s
having on our lungs, guts, blood, or brains.
The science is too new. One source tells me
to look out for some freaky news about whatWE SNORKEL THROUGH
ALPHABET SOUP, COLLECTING
SPOONS AND TOOTHBRUSHES
AND BOTTLE CAPS. I GRAB A
HUNK OF SARGASSUM, I GIVE
IT A SHAKE UNDERWATER,
AND SUDDENLY I’M IN A SNOW
GLOBE, WHITE FLECKS
SWIRLING ALL AROUND.