Imagine this picture with triple the amount of plastic. It isn’t pretty. Photo: Jason Childs
Everywhere we turn these days, it seems news concerning the future of our oceans is bleak. Between sea level rise due to climate change, coral bleaching, plastic pollution, and more, the oceans and the life they support are alarmingly threatened. Sadly, a recent UK government report only serves to underline plastic’s devastating effects on the ocean. If human behavior continues unabated, says the report, plastic pollution is on track to triple by 2025.
“Around 70 percent of all litter in the sea is plastic, which not only accumulates on beaches and strandlines but also clogs the digestive tracks of birds and fish,” explains the report. “Across the globe, we produce more than 300 million tons of plastic per annum, and projections suggest that the amount of plastic in the sea will triple between 2015 and 2025.”
The trouble with plastic is that it doesn’t decompose, rather it breaks down into smaller pieces. For that reason, the report explains, the likely response if any at all will be to limit the amount of plastic that enters the ocean, introduce biodegradable plastic, and spread public awareness.
That’s not to say no one is considering the very complex problem of removing plastic from the ocean. Most famously, the Ocean Cleanup Project, the brainchild of the prodigious Boyan Slat, has endeavored to deploy a system that would rely on ocean currents to remove solid waste. In the scientific community, the reception to the Ocean Cleanup Project’s initiative has been mixed.
Additional details from the report are startling. For one, it highlights how the uninhabited Henderson Island, of the Pitcairn Islands chain, was recently found to have, “the highest density of man-made debris (99.8 percent of which was plastic) recorded anywhere in the world.”
The report also underscores plastic pollution’s impact on biodiversity saying, “Over the last 100 years human activities in our seas, such as plastic pollution, have intensified dramatically leading to increased pressure on marine biodiversity. It has been estimated that there has been a 49 percent decline in marine vertebrate populations between 1970 and 2012, although there is also evidence that in some areas new policy measures (e.g. better fisheries management) have led to signs of recovery for some species.”
For visual learners, the report also includes the startling image below. It depicts the average plastic found in a Fulmar stomach (left) and what that would look like scaled to the size of a human stomach (right).
Source: UK Government Office for Science Future of the Sea Report (2018)/Jan van Franeker – IMARES, in Foresight Evidence Review: Plastic Pollution (2017)
Still, Professor Ed Hill, Executive Director of the National Oceanography Centre, told CNN that the report showed more research was required to understand the effect plastic pollution is having on marine organisms. “There is still more work to be done to achieve greater knowledge of the marine environment and the impacts of climate change. This will be critical for making a success of the future that this report anticipates,” he said.
