Researchers working around the world have come up with the most comprehensive estimate to date of the amount of plastic clogging the oceans, and it’s bad, bad news.
The grand total? They tallied 5.25 trillion individual pieces of plastic, weighing a collective 269,000 tons.
The study, which was spearheaded by Marcus Eriksen of the nonprofit 5 Gyres Institute and published in the journal PLoS One, found that most of the pollution consisted of microplastics, those tiny particles that remain when larger pieces of plastic break down — plastic being non-biodegradable, they never disappear completely.
“We saw turtles that ate plastic bags and fish that ingested fishing lines,” Julia Reisser, a researcher based at the University of Western Australia, told the Guardian. And the team identified less visible threats as well — plastic particles, they note, can soak up pollutants, potentially introducing toxic chemicals into the food chain. “Bigger fish eat the little fish and then they end up on our plates,” Reisser explained. “It’s hard to tell how much pollution is being ingested but certainly plastics are providing some of it.” - http://www.salon.com/2014/12/10/over_5_trillion_pieces_of_plastic_are_floating_in_the_worlds_oceans/
We are eating plastic.
Even when I was child I heard the stories of how much we are damaging the oceans with our plastic. Plastic takes many decades to degrade and in that process it turns into micro-plastic particles. These particles get consumed by the fish and various ocean life. We humans then eat the fish.
We are eating more plastic.
The ocean has become humanities favorite dumping area. Its Huge, the ocean takes up most of the earth’s surface area and we humans can’t really do anything with it in term of living space. We need land. So what can we do with all that space? We have detonated a total of 2053 Nuclear bombs in the ocean. Yes – two thousand and fifty three nuclear detonations. Bound to be consequences there. Also we have dumped tons and tons of nuclear waste barrels. Apparently over 100,000 tons worth. Metal tends to rust - these barrels are leaking.
We are eating plutonium.
we need to stop seeing the earth as this huge infinite place where the thing we do have no consequences. Sure we do not see the effects right away or they do not affect us directly, but we are all on this ship called earth. Anything affecting the earth affects us all directly in a way. Our individual actions have consequences and its time we realize this. If we do not change our ways...we cannot live on plastic and plutonium.
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