“The unprecedented plastic waste tide plaguing our oceans and shores, can become as limited as our chosen relationship with plastics, which involves a dramatic behavioral change on our part…
Captions and Photograph: © SAF — Coastal Care
Excerpts;
Plastic “continents” are not static. Based on the oceanic circulation modelling work conducted in the Pacific, researchers have recently shown that there are exit currents for these areas of the sea where these piles of waste build up.
This means that they are not caught in a never-ending whirlpool in the middle of the ocean, as had been previously thought. Although inappropriate given the actual estimated concentrations, this term highlights the awareness of the impact of human activity on the oceans…
Read Full Article, Science Daily (07-28-2016)
Plastic Waste Causes $13 Billion In Annual Damage To Marine Ecosystems, UN
Concern is growing over widespread plastic waste that is threatening marine life – with conservative yearly estimates of $13 billion in financial damage to marine ecosystems, according to two reports issued at the inaugural meeting of the United Nations Environment Assembly.
Biodegradable Plastics Are Not the Answer to Reducing Marine Litter, Says UN; UN News Center (11-23-2015)
Widespread adoption of products labelled ‘biodegradable’ will not significantly decrease the volume of plastic entering the ocean or the physical and chemical risks that plastics pose to marine environment, concluded a UN report released today…
Biodegradable Plastics Are as Persistent as Regular Plastics, Study Finds, Yale E360 (03-19-2015)
Plastics designed to degrade don’t break down any faster than their conventional counterparts, according to research published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology…
Plastic Pollution: “When The Mermaids Cry: The Great Plastic Tide,” Coastal Care
For more than 50 years, global production and consumption of plastics have continued to rise. An estimated 300 million tons of plastics were produced in 2015, confirming and upward trend over the past years, according to a new report by the World Economics Forum, released at Davos in January 2016.
Plastic is versatile, lightweight, flexible, moisture resistant, strong, and relatively inexpensive. Those are the attractive qualities that lead us, around the world, to such a voracious appetite and over-consumption of plastic goods. However, durable and very slow to degrade, plastic materials that are used in the production of so many products all, ultimately, become waste with staying power. Our tremendous attraction to plastic, coupled with an undeniable behavioral propensity of increasingly over-consuming, discarding, littering and thus polluting, has become a combination of lethal nature…
