How The Oceans Became Choked With Plastic

Imagine an area 34 times the size of Manhattan. Now imagine it covered ankle-deep in plastic waste — piles of soda bottles and plastic bags, takeout containers by the mile, drinking straws as far as the eye can see. That’s a total of about 19 billion pounds of garbage. And according to one of the best estimates available, that’s how much plastic waste ends up in our oceans every year. “We’re being overwhelmed by our waste,” said Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer who led the 2015 study that determined this staggering number. According to Jambeck’s research, this figure is on track to double by 2025 unless something is done, swiftly and at a global scale, to stem the tide of garbage. Plastic ― a versatile, durable and inexpensive material ― has in many ways been a boon to humanity, used in everything from medical equipment to parts of airplanes. But some of the very traits that have made plastics so popular (they’re cheap, and therefore easy to throw away) have also made them a growing problem in our landfills and oceans. Today, plastics are the No. 1 type of trash found in the sea. Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit that organizes an annual coastal cleanup event in more than 150 countries worldwide, said plastic debris makes up around 85 percent of all the trash collected from beaches, waterways and oceans ― and that’s just the stuff we can see. There are also untold numbers of extremely small plastic fragments i...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news