From the moment your feet hit the floor in the morning to the time you tuck yourself into bed at night, there’s little doubt that many of the material objects you use throughout the day are made of plastic. Your toothbrush, the take-out container your lunch came in and the bag you used to carry it back to the office, components in your car, the disposable glasses at the office birthday party, your toilet seat and parts of your TV are all likely made from the biggest hits of the plastics industry — polyethylene or polypropylene.
But have you ever thought about where all that plastic ends up after you throw it away?
Turns out, a lot of it ends up in the ocean. The ocean is downstream of everything.
‘Like a Walmart Set Afloat”
Now, scientists writing in the journal PLOS One have revealed just how much plastic waste is churning around way out in some of the most distant parts of the ocean. It turns out there’s a lot of it — about 269,000 tons, to be exact.
— PLOS ONE (@PLOSONE) December 10, 2014
“It’s everything you can imagine made of plastic,” said Marcus Eriksen, one of the authors of the study. “It’s like Walmart or Target set afloat. There’s much more plastic pollution out there than recent estimates suggest.”
Information for the study was gathered during 24 expeditions by ship to remote ocean regions over the course of six years. A lot of the plastic that ends up in the ocean ultimately gets stuck in what are called subtropical gyres — huge regions of spinning ocean currents in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Because these currents are circular and hundreds of miles wide, the plastic waste circulates in these regions for long periods of time. The wave action breaks up big chunks of sunlight-degraded plastic into tiny little pieces — known as microplastic, which makes up 92% of the free-floating waste in the big ocean gyres.
The researchers say plastic objects enter the oceans from rivers and coastal areas with big populations where waste is not always disposed of properly.
— Planet Green (@PlanetGreen) December 11, 2014
Microplastic, Macro-harm
Because microplastic doesn’t degrade, it’s especially dangerous for marine life. Experts say that these little bits are killing huge numbers of seabirds and marine mammals. The plastic fragments lodge in their throats and digestive systems. YouTube is awash with clips showing marine organisms with stomachs clogged with plastic waste. The study concludes an astonishing 5.25 trillion particles of plastic litter clog the oceans, from massive objects to microparticles the size of a grain of sand.
Poison
So what if a bunch of plastic is floating around somewhere deep in the ocean? It surely won’t affect our day-to-day lives.
Well, not so fast. These plastic bits are capable of absorbing very toxic chemicals like PCBs and DDT. When marine animals consume them, they become increasingly concentrated in the tissues of animals like fish. This poses serious concerns when those fish end up on the dinner table.
