Investigative Report Traces Pollutants from Sea to Sashimi

The Public Education Center’s (PEC’s) DC Bureau has published a two-part investigative report titled Fish and Paint Chips: The Science and Politics of Ocean Trash, which explores “how plastic and other debris in the world’s increasing pollutants could be channeling toxins straight onto our dinner plates through tainted seafood.” The first part considers research suggesting that once in the ocean, “small bits of plastic are thought to soak up chemicals from paint chips, old metal and other garbage and eventually end up in the guts of the fish we eat.” According to PEC, these floating plastic pellets can act as a “toxic sponge,” absorbing chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), when passing through “five so-called pollution gyres – massive fields of waste collected by wind and ocean currents in the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific and Indian oceans.” Although some experts are apparently reluctant to extrapolate human health risks from this scenario, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has reportedly started preliminary studies to better under the potential impact of pollution gyres on the food supply. “While NOAA predicted the existence of pollution gyres as far back as 1988 based on scattered data, there has been little concerted effort to measure their impacts on human health,” Holly Bramford, director of NOAA’s Marine Debris Program, was quoted as saying.

The second part of Fish and Paint Chips examines the “political angle,” alleging that both the plastics and seafood industries have hampered environmentalist efforts to reduce waste and educate consumers about ocean pollution. While the American Chemistry Council has purportedly worked to block “even minimal local regulation,” seafood restaurants have reportedly refrained from publicizing the problem for fear of tarnishing their “$55 billion a year” business. In addition, PEC accuses politicians of “not wanting to rock the proverbial boat” by championing a cause with no easy fixes. “What is left now is for researchers to establish whether the plastic and other waste already known to infest the world’s oceans poses a health risk to humans, and if so on what scale,” concludes the report, which exhorts consumers to “demand to know more about what we eat.”