Some journeys seem to last a lifetime, others last for centuries.
On January 10, 1992, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean between Hong Kong and Tacoma, a cargo ship hit a severe storm and in the melee which followed, lost a container overboard which held 7,200 packages of plastic toys. Each package contained a red beaver, green frog, blue turtle, and a yellow duck.
In one of the best articles I’ve read in a long time, Moby-Duck: Or, The Synthetic Wilderness of Childhood, Donovan Hohn obsessively traces the subsequent journey undertaken by the 7,200 ducks as they spilled into the ocean and rode the waves and currents around the world.
Unfortunately, Harpers, where the article occurs, has not posted it online. But if you hurry, you can still rush out to your local bookstore and read it in the January 2007 issue (or listen to an NPR interview regarding the article here).
It’s well worth your time. Hohn humorously focuses on only the wayward ducks because of the strong childhood association most people have with the quintessential yellow rubber ducky. “What misanthrope,” he writes, “what damp, musty November of a sourpuss, upon beholding a rubber duck afloat, does not feel a crayola ray of sunshine brightening his gloomy heart?”
Yes, this is the style of writing employed by Hohn who jumps between philosophical meanderings about childhood and rubber duckies to sober assessments about the impact plastic garbage has had upon our oceans.
Like the ducks themselves, Hohn journeys around Alaska where many of the plastic floaties still continue to wash up nearly 15 years after they first plopped into the ocean. He joins a group of scientists and beachcombers who are equally as fascinated with not only the ducky spill but many of the other objects which routinely spill into the ocean from the estimated 10,000 containers lost at sea annually-the most famous being 80,000 Nike shoes lost at sea in 1990.
For many, the fascination is purely scientific. Such spills allow scientists to track currents and devise complicated computer simulations. The data culled from the Nike spill alone has resulted in some of the most thorough and dependable information available on the subject. Researchers depend heavily on groups like Beachcombers’ Alert! and their corps of volunteers who comb beaches in Alaska in search of rubber duckies, Nikes, and other data rich flotsam.
While the thought of yellow ducks slowly bobbing their way across the globe is certainly heartwarming, the darker side of plastic flotsam is hardly a child’s plaything. Hohn quotes statistics from the California Coastal Commission which estimates “46,000 pieces of visible plastic floating in every square mile of ocean.” Equally as disturbing, is the estimate that the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre contains “six pounds of plastic for every pound of zooplankton.”
Not all of this is from rubber duckies and cargo spills. Our planet produces 200 million tons of plastics every year and much of what is found in the ocean is simply trash washed into it from the mainland. Unfortunately, synthetic polymers like plastic do not deteriorate in the ocean; indeed, every plastic item that has been manufactured since the process was invented in the mid-20th century, and then cast into the ocean, is still there unless it has washed ashore. As Hohn mentions in his article, “no one knows exactly how long a synthetic polymer will persist at sea. Five hundred years is a reasonable guess.”
And so it can be assumed that the little yellow duckies which washed overboard in 1992 will still be cruising the ocean currents for a very long time. Or, as Hohn so eloquently states it, “Long after my own organic chemistry has fertilized leaves of grass, the pulverized, photo-degraded remains of that hollow duck of mine will, chemically speaking, live on, traveling through the food chain, scattering toxins in their wake.”
Whoa! That’s hardly something for Ernie to be singing so gleefully about.