How We Can Keep Plastics Out of Our Ocean | National Geographic

8 million metric tons of plastic trash enters the sea from land every year; the equivalent of five plastic bags filled with trash for every foot of coastline in the world. Across our ocean, plastic trash blows into circulation, dispersed almost everywhere but concentrating in huge swaths in the midst of global currents. Breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces, it is ingested by species across the marine world and sinking to the bottom of the sea.

Anyone can make plastic anywhere in the world and sell it anywhere else in the world. There's no design paradigm; there's no barriers. In order to solve the plastic packaging problem, we need to effectively rethink the entire system. A system from one which is linear—“take, make, dispose”—to one where it can be recovered and fed back into the economy as a valuable plastic material, or one where it is biob benign and it can enter the environment.

The ultimate goal of the new plastics economy is to design an economy where plastic packaging never becomes waste. To do that, we need every single player in the chain to change the way that they do things. But marine pollution comes in many forms. Industrial, agricultural, and urban waste also sweep into the sea, fueling explosions of algae that rob marine ecosystems of the oxygen they need to survive.

With sustained pollution, these areas become dead zones, which already exist in more than 400 locations across the globe. But nutrient pollution can be managed through changes in major contributing systems like agriculture. If you eat, you're involved in agriculture, so it's a problem that all of us have to work together to solve.

Soil health is critical for water quality; it's the first thing we have to focus on here on the farm. Organic matter is the key thing that we try to improve. The more organic matter you have in the soil, the better the soil can hold on to nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen. Organic matter keeps it from leaching out of the soil; it grabs onto it, and that's good for the farmer, but it's also good for water quality in the bay.

For any farmer to change their system is tricky, and it takes a lot of work. I think all farmers want to; it's learning different processes and practices that allow you to do it effectively that becomes a key.