![]() Lying halfway between Asia and North America, north of the Hawaiian archipelago, and surrounded by water for thousands of miles on all sides, the Midway Atoll is about as remote as a place can get. So the cumulative input for 2025 would be nearly 20 times the 8 million metric tons estimate – 100 bags of plastic per foot of coastline in the world! In 2025, the annual input is estimated to be about twice greater, or 10 bags full of plastic per foot of coastline. It’s equivalent to five grocery bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline in the world. The results: every year, 8 million metric tons of plastic end up in our oceans. Published in the journal Science in February 2015, a study conducted by a scientific working group at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), quantified the input of plastic waste from land into the ocean. Tons of plastic debris (which by definition are waste that can vary in size from large containers, fishing nets to microscopic plastic pellets or even particles) is discarded every year, everywhere, polluting lands, rivers, coasts, beaches, and oceans. All over the world the statistics are ever growing, staggeringly. Photo © SAF - Coastal CareĪ simple walk on any beach, anywhere, and the plastic waste spectacle is present. 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.Īlthough inhabited and remote, South Sentinel island is covered with plastic! Plastic pollution and marine debris, South Sentinel Island, Bay of Bengal. ![]() 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. Those are the attractive qualities that lead us, around the world, to such a voracious appetite and over-consumption of plastic goods. Plastic is versatile, lightweight, flexible, moisture resistant, strong, and relatively inexpensive. In 2008, our global plastic consumption worldwide has been estimated at 260 million tons, and, according to a 2012 report by Global Industry Analysts, plastic consumption is to reach 297.5 million tons by the end of 2015. (See: Worldwatch Institute – January 2015). An estimated 299 million tons of plastics were produced in 2013, representing a 4 percent increase over 2012, and confirming and upward trend over the past years. Washed out on our coasts in obvious and clearly visible form, the plastic pollution spectacle blatantly unveiling on our beaches is only the prelude of the greater story that unfolded further away in the world’s oceans, yet mostly originating from where we stand: the land.įor more than 50 years, global production and consumption of plastics have continued to rise. The world population is living, working, vacationing, increasingly conglomerating along the coasts, and standing on the front row of the greatest, most unprecedented, plastic waste tide ever faced.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |