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We have to stop filling and killing the oceans with plastic
We have to stop filling and killing the oceans with plastic
Eight million tonnes. That’s how much plastic we’re tossing into the oceans every year! University of Georgia environmental engineer Jenna Jambeck says it’s enough to line up five grocery bags of trash on every foot of coastline in the world.
A study published by Jambeck and colleagues in the journal Science on February 12 examined how 192 coastal countries disposed of plastic waste in 2010. The report, “Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean”, estimates that of 275 million tonnes of plastic generated, about eight million (based on a midpoint estimate of 4.8 million to 12.7 million tonnes) ends up in the seas — blown from garbage dumps into rivers and estuaries, discarded on beaches or along coastlines and carried to the oceans.
China tops the list of 20 countries responsible for 83 per cent of “mismanaged plastic” in the oceans, sending between 1.32 and 3.53 million tonnes into the seas. The U.S., which has better waste-management systems, is number 20 on the list,responsible for 0.04 to 0.11 tonnes. Some countries in the top 20 don’t even have formal waste-management systems. The fear is that, as human populations grow, the amount of plastic going into the oceans will increase dramatically if countries don’t improve waste-management systems and practices — and reduce the amount of plastic they produce and use.
Scientists don’t know where most plastic ends up or what overall effect it’s having on marine life and food supplies. They do know that massive islands of plastic and other waste — some as large as Saskatchewan — swirl in five gyres in the north and south Pacific, north and south Atlantic and Indian oceans. But that’s only a small amount of the total.
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Sea shame: 155mn tons of plastic trash in world oceans by 2025, study finds
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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Full scale of plastic in the world’s oceans revealed for first time | Environment | The Guardian
Full scale of plastic in the world’s oceans revealed for first time | Environment | The Guardian.
More than five trillion pieces of plastic, collectively weighing nearly 269,000 tonnes, are floating in the world’s oceans, causing damage throughout the food chain, new research has found.
Data collected by scientists from the US, France, Chile, Australia and New Zealand suggests a minimum of 5.25tn plastic particles in the oceans, most of them “micro plastics” measuring less than 5mm.
The volume of plastic pieces, largely deriving from products such as food and drink packaging and clothing, was calculated from data taken from 24 expeditions over a six-year period to 2013. The research, published in the journal PLOS One, is the first study to look at plastics of all sizes in the world’s oceans.
Large pieces of plastic can strangle animals such as seals, while smaller pieces are ingested by fish and then fed up the food chain, all the way to humans.
This is problematic due to the chemicals contained within plastics, as well as the pollutants that plastic attract once they are in the marine environment.
“We saw turtles that ate plastic bags and fish that ingested fishing lines,” said Julia Reisser, a researcher based at the University of Western Australia. “But there are also chemical impacts. When plastic gets into the water it acts like a magnet for oily pollutants.
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