Gazing out at the Atlantic Ocean from a wharf in the village of Deer Isle, Maine, you’ll see the quintessential rocky boulders that make up Maine’s coastline, topped with unbending pine trees reaching skyward and ringed with ragged seaweed skirts. To the naked eye, the ocean is a sunburst of hazel, deep greens, and sparkling blues where the sunlight hits the waves.
Take a cupful of that briny mix, put it under a microscope, and you will find it is not as pristine as it first appears. It looks more like the aftermath of a wild party, with tiny squiggles and beads of brightly colored plastics streaming through the water like abandoned confetti. These are microplastics: bits of plastic debris that are less than 5 millimeters in length, though some pieces may be only a nanometer or two long. Scientists estimate there could be more than 12 million tons of these tiny particles swirling around in the Atlantic Ocean, and they worry that microplastics may be leaching PFAS and PFOS, toxins known as forever chemicals, into the water and onto our plates.
Microplastics also present a threat to all kinds of sea life from turtles to oysters, and it’s estimated that as much as 20 percent of the ocean’s plastics come from lost fishing gear.
Oyster farms are part of the problem: From the time baby oysters are little pebbles of shell until they reach harvesting size, they’re shifted through a series of plastic cages. The long strings of floating plastic cages and buoys have become a common sight in Maine’s waterways, where the oyster industry is projected to grow by 50 percent over the next five years — to produce more than 5.5 million oysters. That’s a lot of plastic cages.
In response, some Maine-based oyster farmers are looking for plastic-free ways to cultivate their oysters.
Abigail Barrows, a native of Stonington, a town across a narrow causeway from Deer Isle, returned to Maine to set up her oyster farm, Deer Isle Oysters, after studying marine biology in Australia. Plastic waste was already a constant issue for the sea creatures she worked with there, but microplastics were a new challenge for her.
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She met Marina Garland, who studies ocean plastics at the nearby College of the Atlantic and who showed her just how much microplastic there was in only a few tablespoons of ocean water.
“She came to give a demonstration, and we went down to Blue Hill Bay and scooped up some water, filtered it. Then I went up and looked through the microscope and I was like — are you kidding me? It was just full of plastic. There were all these different fibers and colors.”
So Barrows began experimenting with plastic alternatives on her 3-acre ocean farm, using wood and aluminum mesh to build her oyster cages. The ocean makes moving away from plastic challenging — the relentless wear and tear of waves and salt put every grommet and hinge to the test — but there has been progress. This year, thousands of baby oysters will get their start in wooden cages and over the next few years will progress through a series of plastic-free cages until they are harvested. Barrows’s goal is to produce prototypes that are resistant to the ocean’s wear, scalable to meet the needs of the expanding oyster industry, and lightweight and functional enough to be used by every oyster farmer.
“Our goal is to make plastic-free gear with as many local materials as possible,” Barrows explains. “And to make it price competitive. That’s been the hard thing, because plastic is subsidized and mass produced. But you know, the true cost of plastic is what you do with it when [you’re done using it].”
Twelve nautical miles south of Deer Isle is North Haven, a salty, windblown island with a year-round population of about 400. One of those residents is Adam Campbell, who has been making a living on the waters off the island for 40 years. A salt water pond on the island and its gently flowing outlet to the sea is home to Campbell’s North Haven Oysters, which produces thousands of oysters for market every season.
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Campbell, whose wiry white beard mimics the spray of the sea around him, has always hustled to improve his business and thread the needle between increased production and environmental friendliness.
“I’m not a chemist or a biologist,” Campbell admits, “but nature will teach you if you look. It’s been teaching me all the time.”
As he watched the lobster industry shift from traditional wooden traps to plastic traps, he noticed that lobsters left overnight in plastic traps were more likely to die. So last year, Campbell tried out oyster cages made from cedar wood and stainless steel. Using 100 plastic cages and 100 wooden ones, he did his own controlled testing of the cages. He found the wood and steel cages resulted in higher oyster yields than the plastic ones, and he says the oysters were twice as big.
Back on Deer Isle, Barrows is putting much the same hypothesis to the test. She has begun working with Carrie Byron, a University of New England associate professor of marine and environmental programs, on studies of the effects of ocean plastics and the growth of oysters farmed in plastic-free environments.
Both North Haven Oyster Co. and Deer Isle Oysters have plastic-free goals that extend beyond cages. Barrows is trying out Mycobuoys on her farm, buoyant alternatives to plastic floats made from mycelium, the network of fungal threads from which mushrooms grow. Campbell is experimenting with buoy alternatives made from compressed sawdust. Barrows hopes that making these changes now, while the industry is growing, can help give new oyster farmers eco-friendly choices for gear and offer a step toward a healthier world.
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“As a human, if you are going to eat a dozen oysters a week,” Barrows says. “What does that look like for your body if we’re seeing alarming levels of plastics in oysters? And that, I think, could be the catalyst for really inciting widespread change.”
Kirsten Lie-Nielsen is a freelance writer focused on climate change, sustainability, modern agriculture, and rural lifestyles. She is the author of two books on homesteading and lives on a restored farm in rural Maine with her husband and many animals. More of her work can be found at hostilevalleyliving.com and instagram.com/hostilevalleyliving.