Melanie Bergmann Lars Gutow Michael Klages Editors Marine Anthropogenic Litter Marine Anthropogenic Litter Melanie Bergmann · Lars Gutow Michael Klages Editors Marine Anthropogenic Litter Editors Melanie Bergmann Michael Klages HGF-MPG Group for Deep-Sea Ecology Sven Lovén Centre for Marine Sciences and Technology University of Gothenburg Alfred-Wegener-Institut Fiskebäckskil Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Sweden Meeresforschung Bremerhaven Germany Lars Gutow Biosciences | Functional Ecology Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung Bremerhaven Germany This publication is Eprint ID 37207 of the Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung. Permission for photo on cover: Crab Paromola cuvieri walking over plastic litter at a deep-water coral reef off Santa Maria di Leuca (582 m depth), Italy. Also shown: the coral Madrepora oculata and a sponge carried by the fifth pereiopods of the crab as a defence. The image was recorded during dive 728 of the remotely operated vehicle QUEST (MARUM, Bremen University). Reprinted with permission from A. Freiwald, L. Beuck, A. Rüggeberg, M. Taviani, D. Hebbeln, and R/V Meteor Cruise M70-1 Participants. 2009. The white coral community in the central Mediterranean Sea revealed by ROV surveys. Oceanography 22(1):58–74, http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2009.06. ISBN 978-3-319-16509-7 ISBN 978-3-319-16510-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16510-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015935215 Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2015. The book is published with open access at SpringerLink.com. Open Access This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non- commercial License, which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) For Rosa, Frida and Piet. Foreword Synthetic polymers, commonly known as plastics, have made themselves a perma- nent part of the marine environment for the first time in the long history of plane- tary seas. No sediment or ice core will reveal ancient deposits of these materials or the biological consequences associated with high concentrations of synthetic poly- mers in the planet’s prehistoric ocean. However, current ice and sediment cores do reveal an abundance of this material. Only a broad combination of traditional fields of scientific inquiry is adequate to uncover the effects of this new pollutant, and it seems a pity that a field of study, rather than springing from insights into natural phenomena, arises from new ways that natural phenomena are compromised. Reports of plastics in the marine environment began to appear in the early 1970s. At the time, Edward Carpenter of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution specu- lated that the problem was likely to get worse and that toxic, non-polymeric com- pounds in plastics known as plasticizers could be delivered to marine organisms as a potential effect. Carpenter’s speculations were correct and probably more so than he imagined. The quantity of plastics in ocean waters has increased enormously, and toxic plastic additives, as well as toxicants concentrated by plastics from the surrounding sea water, have been documented in many marine species. The rapid expansion of the use of synthetic polymers over the last half century has been such that the characterization of the current era as the “Age of Plastics”, seems appropriate. There is no real mystery as to why plastics have become the predominant material of the current epoch. The use value of the material is truly surprising. It can substitute for nearly every traditional material from millinery to metal and offers qualities unknown in naturally occurring substances, so that it now feeds a worldwide industry. The plastic industry creates new applications and products with growth trending sharply upward and showing no signs of slowing in the foreseeable future. Laser printing using plastic “ink” will guarantee expanded use of polymeric feedstocks. Although the majority of plastics produced today use petroleum resources which are finite, the carbon backbone of synthetic polymers can be fashioned from switchgrass, soya beans, corn, sugar cane or other renewable resources— price alone determines industry’s preference. The fact that synthetic polymers can vii viii Foreword be made from row crops (so-called biopolymers) need have nothing to do with their biodegradability. Olefins are still olefins and acrylates are still acrylates, and behave like their petroleum-fabricated counterparts. Furthermore, biodegradability standards are not applicable in the marine environment and marine degradability requires a separate standard. Marine degradable plastics have a negligible market share and are not poised to make headway into the consumer plastics market at the present time. The difficulty of recycling plastics has made their profitable recovery a problem, which in turn results in failure to provide take-back infrastructure and results in accelerated pollution. Given the proliferation of plastics into all spheres of human activity, and their increasing use value in the developing world, the phenomena associated with plas- tic pollution of the marine environment will continue to merit scientific investi- gation. These studies, however, are hampered by the lack of basic geospatial and quantitative data. Estimates abound based on limited sampling and modeling, but the ocean is the biggest habitat on the planet by far and knowledge of its plas- tic pollution will require new methods of data acquisition. The role of citizens in the monitoring of plastic pollution will increase in the coming years, and the truly “big” data they document must become part of the science of plastic pollution. For the present, it is fortunate that a few pioneering scientists around the world are engaged in attempting to understand the consequences of the plague of plastic that contaminates our precious ocean. Long Beach Captain Charles James Moore http://www.algalita.org Preface The ocean is of eminent importance to mankind. Twenty-three per cent of the world’s population (~1.2 billion people) live within 100 km of the coast (Small and Nicholls 2003), a figure, which is likely to rise up to 50 % by 2030 (Adger et al. 2005). Furthermore, the ocean sustains nearly half of the global primary pro- duction (Field et al. 1998), a great share of which fuels global fisheries (Pauly and Christensen 1995). The marine environment hosts a substantial biodiversity, and tourism is an important and constantly growing economic sector for many coastal countries. Although human welfare is intricately linked with the sea and its natural resources, people have substantially altered the face of the ocean within only a few centuries. Fisheries, pollution, eutrophication, deep-sea hydrocarbon exploration, ocean acidification and global ocean warming accompanied by sea-level rise as a consequence of rapid glacier melting and thermal expansion of sea water (IPCC 2014) are prominent examples of man-made pressures exerted on the oceans with severe ecological and socio-economic repercussions. As a result, marine environ- mental protection and management have become integral political and societal issues in many countries worldwide. However, effective environmental manage- ment requires a proper understanding of the ecological implications of human activities and should, therefore, be accompanied by sound multidisciplinary research, scientific advice, education and public outreach. In recent decades, the pollution of the oceans by anthropogenic litter has been recognized as a serious global environmental concern. Marine litter is defined as “any persistent, manufactured or processed solid material discarded, disposed of or abandoned in the marine and coastal environment” (UNEP 2009). Since its first mention in the scientific literature in the 1960s, research efforts addressing marine litter have constantly grown as has the amount of litter in the oceans. Many stud- ies have shown that it consists primarily of plastics with a continuously increas- ing global annual production of 299 million t (PlasticsEurope 2015). It has been estimated that 10 % of all plastic debris ends up in the oceans (Thompson