It's long been evident to beachcombers after rainstorms, but now it's official: Marine debris is getting worse.

A panel of scientists took a hard look at the issue and came to the conclusion that the tonnage of plastic and other debris swirling in the sea is likely to increase throughout this century. Its key recommendation: The United States needs to take a leadership role in cleaning up its own act and coaxing other nations to follow.

"Despite all the regulations and limitations over the last 20 years, there are still large quantities of waste and litter in the oceans," said Keith R. Criddle, a marine policy professor at University of Alaska in Juneau. He was the chairman of a National Research Council committee asked by Congress to assess how well national and international laws are doing to halt the profusion of trash in the oceans.

The answer: not very well.

The committee's 224-page report breaks down the issue and focuses mostly on how to reduce the trash that is dumped intentionally or inadvertently into the ocean from ships and boats. Although this accounts for roughly one-fifth of plastic debris in the ocean, it's the easiest problem to solve. The rest of the oceanic trash comes from land, blown by the wind or washed off city streets into streams and rivers, then to the sea. The way to halt this steady flow of garbage involves either weaning society's addiction to the convenience of products made of plastic -- which can take decades or centuries to decompose -- or changing human behavior on a massive scale.

So the committee largely focused at solutions at sea, such as tightening up the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL), which went into force in 1988 to ban plastic being jettisoned. But the convention still allows many other types of garbage dumping. The report recommends a zero solid-waste discharge goal, as is practiced by some of the more conscientious shipping companies.

The panel's report also makes a number of recommendations to decrease the amount of "ghost nets" and other plastic fishing gear that is lost or dumped at sea and continues to do its job: entangle animals.

The problem is that it's not just fish, but whales, seals, turtles, birds and other marine life continually snared by this debris that rides the currents and collects along the shoreline of islands and continents.

A key solution is giving commercial fishing boats easy access to port trash bins headed for the landfill and incentives to use them. As it stands now, ports charge fishermen top dollar per pound to dispose of trash, including heavy lines and nets. So for some fishermen, it's easier and more economical to simply dump them overboard -- when no one is looking. This is particularly true among Asian countries, as is evident by the debris that washes up on the Northwest Hawaiian islands. Some experts in the cleanup business believe it would be more economical to pay fishermen a bounty to dispose of their own nets and lines properly than pay crews to cut them off coral reefs or from around the bodies of suffering marine mammals.

The report also delves into the idea of a "no fault" policy to encourage reporting of lost fishing gear and make it politically feasible to mark floats, gill nets, long lines and other gear with owner's identification -- meaning fishermen in the United States and other countries. Scientists say it's feasible to embed chemical markers in nets and lines so that each one can be traced to when and where it was sold.

Fishermen don't want to lose valuable gear, which is expensive to replace. The report said it is difficult, if not impossible to tell the difference between willful abandonment and unpreventable loss in the risky fishing industry. To make fishermen strictly liable for their derelict gear and the damage it causes, the report said, "would be problematic and could lead fishermen to underreport losses or obscure the location of gear losses."

-- Kenneth R. Weiss

Photo of trash collected at the mouth of the Los Angeles River after a rainstorm. Credit: Kenneth R. Weiss/Los Angeles Times

Photo of seal with a necklace of netting in Alaska. Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration



