Garbage, Coastal Debris, Flotsam, and Jetsam Everywhere!

Heather Rogers is a writer, journalist, and filmmaker. Her documentary film "Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage" (2002) screened in festivals around the globe. Her articles have appeared in Utne Reader, Z Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, Bad Subjects, Punk Planet, Third Text, and Art and Design. Her book "Gone Tomorrow" is getting excellent reviews. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Here is the scoop: "Over the past 30 years, worldwide garbage output has exploded, doubling in the U.S. alone. Gone Tomorrow explains that, despite popular wisdom, this torrent of rubbish is not primarily the responsibility of the consumer. In fact, shoppers often have little choice in the wastes they generate. Consider packaging: tossed cans, bottles, boxes and wrappers now take up more than a third of all U.S. landfill space. More prolific today than ever before, packaging is garbage waiting to happen."

A huge percent of the worlds refuse is dumped on coastal garbage facilities or hauled offshore and "disposed of" in the ocean. For those of us who study CZM this is a living nightmare. We have sen this stuff wash ashore and we know that it accumulates in "garbage patches" in the Pacific and Atlantic. In the Caribbean just go to the windward side aof any island (especially one's like Aruba or Bonaire which have large countries nearby. Here you will find the accumulated waste of an increasingly consumer frenzied humanity.

The book overview continues, "Once buried or burned, trash is hardly benign. Landfills, even the most state-of-the-art, are environmental time bombs. They spew greenhouse gases, and leach hazardous chemicals and heavy metals into groundwater and soil. Waste incinerators are no less disastrous. They emit 70% of the world’s dioxin, and pollute the air with toxic particulate matter and a host of gases that cause acid rain."

What does garbage as well as other ocean and coastal debris such as abandoned ships, dumped containers, adrift or sunken fishing nets, and overboard sewage and other flotsam tell us? How can we use this threatening waste to better understand the behavior of oceans and currents? How can Debris help us in finding solutions to this offense? What public policy, regulation, education, enforcement, and punishment can be put in place to alleviate this threat to sea life as well as to humans?

Stay tuned! SEAS LLC is launching the Ocean Garbage and debris initiative this year - 2010.

Steffen Schmidt CEO, SEAS LLC
Paul Schmidt, Senior Researcher