Plastics are Filling up Oceans & Landfills
by kathy@truthisbetter.org Last updated 2004-08-01

The news that microscopic pieces of plastic are polluting the oceans is just part of a recent tide of discomforting news about the environment that covers 71% of the Earth's surface. According to recent reports from both the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy and the Pew Oceans Commission, the world's oceans are in poor health as a result of human pressures. Water quality is falling; coastal development pressures are increasing (some 37 million people have moved to U.S. shore regions in the last 30 years); populations of whales and large fish, like sharks and marlins, have declined by 90%; only 22% of smaller fisheries are being harvested sustainably; and invasive species are causing a number of negative effects.

To combat this, both organizations have recommended a sweeping series of regulatory changes in the way the world's oceans are managed, and a dramatic increase in funding.

The researchers looked for nine different kinds of plastic that were easy to chemically identify in minute amounts, including polyester, acrylic and nylon. What they found were polymer fibers as small as 20 microns in length, fragments about 75% smaller than the smallest grains of beach sand. These fibers were embedded in sands and soils and even found inside plankton. The scientists were also able to ascertain that the flood of plastics filling the seas has been increasing for at least 40 years. Since the 1960s, merchant ships have voluntarily trailed garbage can-sized filters behind them as they plied the ocean's waters. By comparing the current contents of these filters to those of archived filters, researchers were able to show that the number of invisible plastic pieces has tripled over the course of the last generation. Further, since the study's methods couldn't measure plastic fragments smaller than 20 microns, experts said the results, in all likelihood, underreported the actual amount of plastics microscopically drifting in ocean waters.