Plastic found to be accumulating in world oceans at alarming rate

Our oceans and beaches are drowning in plastic says a new sobering study, which estimates a whopping 8 million metric tons of the stuff wound up in our oceans, in 2010 alone.

“This is equal to five retail size bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline across the globe,” said co-author Jenna Jambeck, an Environmental Engineering Professor at the University of Georgia, in an interview with Yahoo Canada News.

Jambeck and her team discovered close to 275 million tons of plastic waste generated by 192 coastal countries in 2010, of which somewhere between 4.8 and 12.7 million tons made its way into the oceans. They estimate about 9.1 million metric tons will also end up in the oceans in 2015, with the top offenders being China and the United States.

The new findings published today in the journal Science points out that if the current pollution trends continue, things will get a lot worse in the not-so-distant future.

“If we move forward with business as usual, the annual input will double to 17.5 million metric tons in 2025,” she said.

“So the cumulative input by 2025 would equal 155 million metric tons.”

Researchers are saying that this should be a wake-up call about the pollution of our oceans: We are finding plastic in every corner of the globe, says Jambeck, floating on the ocean, on the ocean floor, in sediments, and in sea ice. It’s not surprising, then, that this much plastic has measurable effects on sea life such as whales, turtles and birds, either from ingestion or entanglement. But there are hidden dangers, too.

“When large plastic items enter the ocean they fragment into smaller and smaller particles called microplastic, only to become available to the bottom of our food chain. And we don’t understand the impacts of that yet.” Jambeck said.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however, because there are tangible ways of solving the problem if major changes are made.

In countries where there are good waste management systems, we can examine production to see how we can reduce our inputs, while in other parts of the world with growing economies, we can put in place improvements to the systems that help the well-being of millions of people.

In places like North America, people can reduce plastic waste by bringing their own mugs, bottles and bags, explains Jambeck. Where systems need improvement, we can collect, capture and contain the waste.

“We know how to create protective waste management systems, but waste management is not just engineering. It is also social and cultural, so a solution in one part of the world may not look like another,” explained Jambeck.

‘But I also think that the issue needs global participation from various stakeholders.”

The science community however don’t have any illusion, they realize that there are obstacles to cleaning our oceans.

“It is very difficult and costly to clean up the plastic already in the ocean,” Jambeck said, “but we want people to know that we can improve things by helping to make sure it doesn’t get there in the first place.”