Plastic’s Journey: From Street to Sea

What begins as a carelessly discarded plastic bottle can travel thousands of kilometres across the oceans.

As described in my article last week, Meir and Advay decided to trace the journey of a plastic bottle and a polythene bag that someone had carelessly thrown away. Curious to see where such discarded items eventually end up, the boys began keeping a close eye on them.

Soon, something unexpected happened. While a group of boys nearby were playing football, one of them accidentally kicked the plastic bottle. It flew through the air and landed in an open gutter, carrying sewage and dirty water. At almost the same moment, a gust of wind lifted the polythene bag off the ground. After fluttering briefly in the air, it too dropped into the same gutter.

The gutter was full of debris—bits of plastic, household waste and other rubbish—but the water was still flowing steadily. Determined to continue their observation, Meir and Advay began walking alongside it, carefully tracking their “targets”.

After some distance, the gutter opened into a river, emptying its polluted contents into the flowing water. Once the bottle and the bag were carried away by the current, the boys could no longer follow them physically. The river would almost certainly carry the waste much farther downstream.

But their curiosity only grew stronger.

Instead of giving up, Meir and Advay decided to utilise modern technology to determine where such plastic waste ultimately ends up. They came up with the idea of geotagging. Over the next few days, they managed to arrange small tracking devices that could be fitted inside plastic bottles.

Once everything was ready, they collected a few discarded bottles from nearby waste and fitted tiny microchips inside them. The chips had a long tracking range and could send signals to a handheld electronic tracking device.

They then dropped the tagged bottles into the same gutter and began tracking their movement.

The signals showed that the bottles first travelled through the gutter into a larger drain carrying sewage from thousands of households. This drain then emptied into a river. After flowing several kilometres, the river joined a creek, which carried the bottles even farther away.

Meir and Advay watched the signals on their tracker with growing excitement, eager to see how far the journey would go.

Soon, to their amazement, the tracker showed that the bottles had entered a vast expanse of water—the Arabian Sea. The boys assumed that this might be the end of the journey.

But it was not.

Months later, the tracking signals were still being received. To their shock, the boys discovered that the bottles had travelled thousands of kilometres across oceans. Eventually, the signals showed that they had reached the Pacific Ocean and settled in a massive floating mass of rubbish—often described as an “island of plastic waste".

Dear readers, this story may sound exaggerated or far removed from reality. But it is not. This is exactly how the plastic waste we casually discard in open spaces often ends up in our seas and oceans.

During storms, heavy rains or flooding, plastic litter lying on streets, in drains or in open areas is washed away. Rainwater carries this waste into gutters, drains and streams. From there, it enters rivers, which act like arteries connecting the land to the sea.

Not every piece of plastic that enters a river reaches the ocean. Many objects sink to the riverbed or get trapped among rocks, vegetation or other debris along the banks. Some remain stuck within the river system for years.

Yet a large amount continues travelling downstream. The closer plastic waste is to a river—and the closer that river is to the sea—the greater the chance that it will eventually reach the ocean.

Once plastic enters the ocean, its journey can continue for thousands of kilometres, carried by powerful currents across vast stretches of water.

The trail will continue… So please wait until next weekend to find out more.

Have a nice weekend.

(The writer is an environmentalist. Views personal.)