When Tabrizi starts to do serious research for the film, he discovers that consumer plastics are far from the main culprit in wildlife degradation. On the contrary, plastic straws make up only 0.025 percent of the ocean’s plastic. (And though Tabrizi doesn’t mention it, banning them can be harmful to people with disabilities.)
The real motherlode of plastic junk isn’t from personal use; it’s from commercial fishing. About 46 percent of the 79,000 tons of garbage in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of fishing nets. Fishing tackle and gear were the main component of the garbage in the bellies of Tabrizi’s beached whales, too.
But as bad as fishing waste is, it’s only a small part of the ecological nightmare that is commercial fishing. Fishing vessels use thirty-mile lines with thousands of baited hooks. Forty percent of their catch consists of species that aren’t commercial; those are just “bycatch” to be thrown back, dead, into the sea. With so much waste, fish populations have cratered; there has been a 71 percent decrease in oceanic sharks since 1970, as just one example.
Some leading environmental organizations downplay the environmental impact of commercial fishing, in part perhaps because they receive funding from the same fishing conglomerates that are creating the pollution. In particular, Tabrizi points out that the Marine Stewardship Council’s sustainable fishery label, appended to tuna and other seafood, is worthless.
The label is supposed to guarantee that catching these fish did not result in harm to any sea mammals or other marine wildlife. But given the number of fishing boats and the opacity of supply chains, there’s no way to really be sure of how the fish were caught.
Worse, the Marine Stewardship Council makes most of its money from licensing its sustainability label. In other words, the fishing industry pays the council to say its products are sustainable, a huge conflict of interest.
