Sea shame: 155mn tons of plastic trash in world oceans by 2025, study finds
Up to 8 million tons of trash – plastic bags, bottles and toys, just to name a few items – ends up in the world’s oceans each year. The astounding figure, much higher than previous estimates, could increase tenfold in the next decade, researchers warn.
Along with colleagues from the US and Australia, Jenna Jambeck from the University of Georgia studied the sources of ocean-bound plastic and developed models to estimate their annual contributions worldwide.
Jambeck says their estimate of 8 million metric tons going into the oceans in 2010 is equivalent to “five grocery bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline in the world.”
Given that this annual input goes up each year, the estimate for 2015 is “about 9.1 million metric tons,” she says. These findings are published in the journal Science.
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