To hear the proponents of the plastic bag ban in town tell it, the ocean is awash in garbage. Specifically, plastic. That may well be, but whether any of what’s floating out there is Davis garbage remains an open question.

Now, I don’t know about you, but there’s no such thing as a “single-use” plastic grocery bag in our household.

What we use to haul home our Yolo County grown pineapples, papayas, bananas and mangos from the grocery store is generally used again five or six times before we throw it into the ocean.

There are those who argue that Davis’ waterways are somehow connected to the mighty Pacific and there are those who argue that they’re not. So I did a series of experiments with one of those aforementioned “single-use” plastic grocery bags with handles.

First, I put it in a sink full of Davis water. Then I pulled the plug. Rather than pollute the Pacific, all I did was succeed in plugging up the drain. The plumber advised me not to try this little experiment again.

So I took another plastic grocery bag with handles, placed it on the front porch and waited for Mother Nature to run her course. I marked it with a secret code known only to my team of spotters up and down the Pacific coast from San Diego to British Columbia. Two weeks later the bag was still on my front porch and I told my spotters to abandon their posts.

In the midst of this experimenting, I tripped across a bit of research put out by Dr. Angelicque White, a professor of oceanography at my favorite place on Earth, Oregon State University.

The story out of Corvallis, produced by the Oregon State College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, noted that “There is a lot of plastic trash floating in the Pacific Ocean, but claims that the ‘Great Garbage Patch’ between California and Japan is twice the size of Texas are grossly exaggerated.”

The study was also unable to substantiate claims that any part of the Great Garbage Patch was made up of plastic grocery bags with handles carelessly discarded by inconsiderate Davisites.

“Further claims that the oceans are filled with more plastic than plankton, and that the patch has been growing tenfold each decade since the 1950s are equally misleading,” according to Professor White.

“There is no doubt that the amount of plastic in the world’s oceans in troubling,” the good professor noted, “but this kind of exaggeration undermines the credibility of scientists. We have data that allow us to make reasonable estimates; we don’t need the hyperbole. Given the observed concentration of plastic in the North Pacific, it is simply inaccurate to state that plastic outweighs plankton, or that we have observed an exponential increase in plastic.”

If Professor White would like to testify before the Davis City Council, I suggest we give her more than the customary two minutes.

White, who has participated in one of the few expeditions solely aimed at understanding the amount of plastic in the ocean, said that the size of this supposed “cohesive” plastic patch, rather than being twice the size of Texas, is actually less than 1 percent the size of Texas.

That’s still too much, obviously, but hardly the amount the bag banners claim it is.

Noted White: “If we were to filter the surface area of the ocean equivalent to a football field in waters having the highest concentration (of plastic) ever recorded, the amount of plastic recovered would not even extend to the 1-inch line.”

The football analogy is apt in Corvallis, partly because the Oregon State football team sometimes has trouble scoring from the 1-inch line.

Don’t get me wrong. White stresses that keeping plastic out of the ocean is a reasonable priority, especially because of the prohibitive cost of trying to remove that plastic.

And if her continuing research uncovers any Davis-produced plastic grocery bags in that less-than-Texas-sized plastic patch in the North Pacific, I’m sure we’ll be the first to know.

— Reach Bob Dunning at [email protected]

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