Plastic is messy.

On our way from Manzanillo down to Zihuatanejo we encountered plastic debris in the ocean. Floating on the surface, we found exactly one Size 8 navy blue Croc, left foot, with the strap missing. We brought it aboard for a picture before releasing it back into the wild unharmed. We saw no other plastic in an otherwise pristine ocean.

We did however encounter between 80 and 100 sea turtles. We brought none aboard for pictures.

So the ratio of plastic to sea creatures was 1 to 100. Except we all know that is a Croc. There were a lot of other sea creatures we couldn't see. There was also likely a whole lot of other plastic.

The messy part about the plastic is we have a lot of beliefs that are unfortunately not necessarily based on reality.

For example, we are often reminded of the islands of plastic that are out in the oceans. The "Great Pacific Garbage" patch is purported to be an island of plastic twice the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The problem is that it doesn't exist. At least not in any form we would recognize as a plastic island.

There is a higher density of plastic debris in the gyres including microplastics that are measured by dragging fine nets behind boats and then counting the number of particles per cubic meter of water. These "islands" are not visible by satellite, conventional photography, or human eye. They are a construct in our imagination that can only be observed one widely spaced floating net or microparticle at a time. The plastic is there. It's just not an island in any sense that we imagine an island to be.

But if we call them "Plastic Islands" then we need accompanying visuals, so any news story or article will inevitably use some footage of a seriously polluted bay in Indonesia or the Philippines where plastic has collected. It is nowhere near the location of the "2 times Texas-sized plastic island" that we all hope to see. Google "plastic island" you will see land in the background in many of the images. It is a small lie that we hope helps people understand how serious the problem is.

Unfortunately, this conflation of two ideas (the higher density of plastics in the gyres with the localized trash island) undermines the credibility of the whole message. People take it literally and start inventing solutions to fix the problem based on images they see of things that don't exist in the form that they think they do. We see giant booms (made of plastic) that are deployed in the ocean being broken up by seas and not actually working. Any solution is unlikely to discriminate well between sea life (whales, plankton) and plastic. If a turtle can't tell the difference between a plastic bag and a jellyfish, what is the giant boom going to do? It's either not going to catch the plastic, or it's going to take a lot of sea life with it.

Other organizations have much more active efforts. One group promises to scoop a pound of plastic from the ocean in exchange for your purchase of a plastic bracelet. Oh good, we solve the problem of plastic in the ocean with the distribution of more useless plastic. Once you read the details of their efforts with a 100 foot plus ship with a 48,000-gallon fuel capacity, it is actually difficult to figure out if you sent them $20 would you be improving the world or making it a little bit worse. Seriously I don't know and there is not nearly enough data shared to make a decent assessment.

The biggest problem with giant ocean plastic scooping solutions is that we humans will put our undying faith in technology into them. There is no need to change human behaviour if some do-good organization is going to fix the problem. If you know that some machine is going to scoop the plastic out of the river are you more or less likely to toss your water bottle off the bridge?

Or worse, we have some misdirected notion of what is important. A turtle in Costa Rica got a plastic straw stuck in his nose and became a viral internet sensation. Governments introduce laws banning plastic straws. New fortunes are made in stainless steel straws. I have had no fewer than 4 different types of organic biodegradable straws delivered to me in restaurants.

They all came in plastic wrappers.

There are what? One or two turtles in the world with straws stuck up their noses? Maybe a hundred? There are thousands upon thousands of turtles that are consuming jellyfish-mimicking clear plastic. We kind of missed the point on the whole straw thing. The turtles might actually be better served with a plastic straw in a paper wrapper, but we are all happy we are doing our part.

Many of us can't imagine deliberately throwing our plastic into the environment. Not everyone thinks this way. Our dingy ride into the dock on the day the cruise ship was here in Zihua involved stopping no less than 3 times to pick up plastic bottles and Styrofoam cups. And we could see dozens of others in all directions. People do throw their stuff in the oceans. Or places near the ocean.

On our way to see the sea turtle release yesterday, we rode in the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of school kids who were on their way to Barra de Potosi. One boy was having some flavoured milk that he picked up from Cremería la Vaquita right where the truck picked us up beside the highway. The milk was served in a plastic bag with a plastic straw. As we drove along, the warm moist air was condensing onto his bag and then blowing droplets back into my face. And then as he slurped the last of his milk, he artfully slipped his hand down over the cab of the truck and released his bag and straw into the wild so they would be free to blow around the Guerrero seaside. No more droplets spattered my face. He knew enough to be very discrete so that nobody would notice he threw his plastic into the environment, but he didn't feel it was intrinsically bad enough behaviour that he ought to hold onto the bag until he got to town.

For all the plastic in the oceans, it is hard to imagine solutions that are going to clean it all up without causing more problems. And even if they do, it is likely to be a human-happy surface- level cosmetic solution that does nothing about the vast quantities of plastic deeper in the water column and on the seafloor that scientists believe are really the vast bulk of the problem.

So if all this sounds a little depressing, it may be. There is no techno-fix that is going to undo this problem. We might just have to stop buying so much plastic and throwing it into our environment. A beach cleanup is good idea, but please don't post any more pictures of plastic islands and tell people it's the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That makes it somebody else's problem begging for a technical solution.

Stop worrying about straws. Don't throw your bag out of the truck. Teach a kid about turtles.

Plastic is messy.