“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 Photo: © SAF — Coastal Care
Excerpts;
A sprawling mass of garbage located in waters between California and Hawaii — and known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” or GPGP — is rapidly collecting more plastic, according to research published Thursday in Scientific Reports.
Researchers estimate that at least 79,000 tons of ocean plastic are floating in an area spanning 1.6 million square kilometers, or about 618,000 square miles — “four to sixteen times higher than previously reported,” the study says…
Read Full Article; CBS News (03-22-2018)
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Isn’t What You Think it Is, The National Geographic (03-22-2018)
It’s not all bottles and straws—the patch is mostly abandoned fishing gear…
Great Pacific garbage patch far bigger than imagined, aerial survey shows; Guardian UK (10-04-2016)
The vast patch of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean is far worse than previously thought, with an aerial survey finding a much larger mass of fishing nets, plastic containers and other discarded items than imagined…
Plastic garbage patch bigger than Mexico found in Pacific; National Geographic (07-25-2017)
Yet another floating mass of microscopic plastic has been discovered in the ocean, and it is mind-blowingly vast…
Here’s How Much Plastic Ends Up In the World’s Oceans,The Time (02-13-2015)
Every year, 8 million metric tons of plastic end up in our oceans, it’s equivalent to five grocery bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline…
The Ocean Is Contaminated by Trillions More Pieces of Plastic Than Thought, IOP Science (12-08-2015)
This new study suggests there are 15 to 51 trillion micro plastic particles (those less than 200 millimeters in size) in the world’s oceans, weighing between 93 and 236,000 metric tons. This is about seven times more than scientists had previously estimated…
More plastic than fish in the sea by 2050, Guardian UK (01-19-2016)
One refuse truck’s-worth of plastic is dumped into the sea every minute, and the situation is getting worse, according to a new report launched at the World Economic Forum today. New plastics will consume 20% of all oil production within 35 years, up from an estimated 5% today…
Plastic pollution: When The Mermaids Cry: The Great Plastic Tide, Coastal Care
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…
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…
Collecting plastic waste near coasts ‘is most effective clean-up method’, Guardian UK (01-19-2016)
Loving the Ocean Starts at Home, National Geographic (09-08-2016)
