Ocean Plastic Estimated at 5.25 Trillion Pieces — But Where’s the Rest? – Our World.
The deluge of plastic detritus — from the large to the microscopic — swirling about in our oceans weighs in at 269,000 metric tons, according to the most comprehensive research on marine plastic hot off the press yesterday. One of the researchers, Dr. Marcus Erikson, visualizes it like this: “Two liter plastic bottles stacked end-to-end forming a column to the moon and back TWICE.” That’s roughly 6 billion bottles afloat on the high seas.
But as devastating as these numbers are, Erikson says they’re way too conservative. Given that we produce 300 million tons of plastic every year and the National Academy of Sciences estimates 0.1 percent of it ends up in the ocean, he says he knows there’s more. Way more.
So exactly where is the rest?
Especially the most toxic and chemically laden fragments — microplastics — which numbered 100 times less than expected.
There are two mechanisms accelerating the marine plastic phenomenon: gyres, which pulverize plastic, and ocean currents transporting it to the ends of the earth.
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