{"id":3001,"date":"2014-12-14T12:38:18","date_gmt":"2014-12-14T17:38:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=3001"},"modified":"2014-12-14T12:38:18","modified_gmt":"2014-12-14T17:38:18","slug":"ocean-plastic-estimated-at-5-25-trillion-pieces-but-wheres-the-rest-our-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=3001","title":{"rendered":"Ocean Plastic Estimated at 5.25 Trillion Pieces \u2014 But Where’s the Rest? – Our World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ocean Plastic Estimated at 5.25 Trillion Pieces \u2014 But Where’s the Rest? – Our World<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The deluge of plastic detritus \u2014 from the large to the microscopic \u2014 swirling about in our oceans weighs in at 269,000 metric tons, according to the most comprehensive research on marine plastic\u00a0hot off the press yesterday<\/a>. One of the researchers, Dr. Marcus Erikson, visualizes it like this: \u201cTwo liter plastic bottles stacked end-to-end forming a column to the moon and back TWICE.\u201d That\u2019s roughly 6 billion bottles afloat on the high seas.<\/p>\n

But as devastating as these numbers are, Erikson says they\u2019re way too conservative. Given that we produce 300 million tons of plastic every year and the National Academy of Sciences estimates\u00a00.1 percent of it ends up in the ocean<\/a>, he says he knows there\u2019s more.\u00a0Way<\/em>\u00a0more.<\/p>\n

So exactly where is the rest?<\/p>\n

Especially the most toxic and chemically laden fragments \u2014 microplastics \u2014 which numbered 100 times less than expected.<\/p>\n

There are two mechanisms accelerating the marine plastic phenomenon: gyres, which pulverize plastic, and ocean currents transporting it to the ends of the earth.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ocean Plastic Estimated at 5.25 Trillion Pieces \u2014 But Where’s the Rest? – Our World. The deluge of plastic detritus \u2014 from the large to the microscopic \u2014 swirling about in our oceans weighs in at 269,000 metric tons, according to the most comprehensive research on marine plastic\u00a0hot off the press yesterday. One of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[271,1790,630,1215],"class_list":["post-3001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-environment-2","tag-oceans","tag-plastic","tag-toxins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3001"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3002,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3001\/revisions\/3002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}