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Sunday, March 12th, 2023

A growing plastic smog, now estimated to be over 170 trillion plastic particles afloat in the world’s oceans—Urgent solutions required

Author:     Marcus Eriksen , Win Cowger, Lisa M. Erdle , Scott Coffin, Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, Charles J. Moore, Edward J. Carpenter, Robert H. Day, Martin Thiel, and Chris Wilcox
Source:     PLOS ONE
Publication Date:     March 8, 2023
 Link: A growing plastic smog, now estimated to be over 170 trillion plastic particles afloat in the world’s oceans—Urgent solutions required
Stephan:  

For every person on earth, there are 21,000 pieces of plastic waste in the world's oceans. While the Republicans consume our politics and the media with their masturbatory cultural fantasies real issues like what to do about plastic waste infecting all life on earth go unacknowledged and ignored. 

To read the peer-reviewed published research paper itself see: A growing plastic smog, now estimated to be over 170 trillion plastic particles afloat in the world’s oceans—Urgent solutions required

Ocean plastic pollution Credit: Eloisa Lopez / Reuters

As global awareness, science, and policy interventions for plastic escalate, institutions around the world are seeking preventative strategies. Central to this is the need for precise global time series of plastic pollution with which we can assess whether implemented policies are effective, but at present we lack these data. To address this need, we used previously published and new data on floating ocean plastics (n = 11,777 stations) to create a global time-series that estimates the average counts and mass of small plastics in the ocean surface layer from 1979 to 2019. Today’s global abundance is estimated at approximately 82–358 trillion plastic particles weighing 1.1–4.9 million tonnes. We observed no clear detectable trend until 1990, a fluctuating but stagnant trend from then until 2005, and a rapid increase until the present. This observed acceleration of plastic densities in the world’s oceans, also reported for beaches around the globe, demands urgent international policy interventions.

Policy implications

The accelerating abundance of plastic in the OSL demands urgent international policy intervention to minimize ecological, […]

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