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Solid Waste

Oceans choke as plastic waste pours in at 8m tonnes a year

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

The Daily Mail By AFP

People dump 8 million metric tons of waste into ocean

PUBLISHED: 17:32 EST, 12 February 2015 | UPDATED: 17:33 EST, 12 February 2015

Shoddy waste management and littering across the globe likely added eight million metric tons (17.6 billion pounds) of plastic to the ocean in 2010, posing significant dangers to marine life, scientists said Thursday.

The five worst offenders listed in the study published in the journal Science were China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Sri Lanka. The United States ranked 20th.

The study is the first of its kind to measure the amount going in from 192 countries with a coastline in 2010, instead of the amount currently in the ocean, which previous studies have examined.

Shoddy waste management and littering across the globe likely added eight million metric tons of plastic to the ocean in 2010, scientists said

Shoddy waste management and littering across the globe likely added eight million metric tons of plastic to the ocean in 2010, scientists said ©Sebastien Bozon (AFP/File)

The method for determining that amount was a mathematical model that was based on the per-person waste generation for 192 countries with a coastline.

One percent of the waste was presumed to be plastic, and another one percent was presumed to be mismanaged, meaning litter or waste was dumped on land and not properly contained.

'It can get worse. If we assume a business as usual projection -- with growing populations, increasing plastic consumption and increased waste generation -- by 2025 this number doubles,' Jenna Jambeck, a researcher from the University of Georgia told reporters at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, California.

Middle income countries with rapidly developing economies tended to be the biggest contributors of plastic trash in the ocean because they were least likely to have developed adequate waste management systems to keep pace with growth, Jambeck said.

The United States was the only wealthy nation in the top 20, and its ranking was due to the high rate of waste generation by its citizens, coupled with the nation's large amount of coastline. - Plastic outflow -

'Using the average density of uncompacted plastic waste, 8 million metric tons -- the midpoint of our estimate -- would cover an area 34 times the size of Manhattan ankle-deep in plastic waste,' said co-author Roland Geyer, an associate professor at University of California Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science and Management.

'Eight million metric tons is a vast amount of material by any measure. It is how much plastic was produced worldwide in 1961.'

Co-author Kara Lavender Law, a research professor at the Massachusetts-based Sea Education Association, said the team's study 'is the equivalent of measuring what is coming out of the faucet rather than what is already in the bathtub.'

The amount going in is 20-2,000 times larger than the existing estimates of plastic floating in the ocean, she said.

It remains unclear what happens to all that plastic in the ocean -- though certainly some floats, some is suspended in the water and some falls to the ocean floor -- and scientists are concerned about the effect of such pollution of fragile fish and marine life that consume plastic fragments.

Solutions for the world's plastic problem include improving waste management and cutting down on plastic consumption, the researchers said.

Since the top 20 countries accounted for 83 percent of mismanaged plastic waste, such efforts should be concentrated on keeping plastic out of the ocean, not trying to clean it up after the fact.

'We need to prevent plastic from entering oceans in the first place,' said Geyer.

'Helping every nation develop a sound solid waste management infrastructure is a top priority,' said Geyer.

Increasing the plastic re-use and recycle rates 'is equally important,' he added.

Plastic bags and other rubbish are collected from the waters of Manila Bay on July 3, 2014 ©Jay Directo (AFP/File)

The Financial Times

Oceans choke as plastic waste pours in at 8m tonnes a year

A staggering 8m tonnes of plastic waste are entering the world’s oceans every year, or the equivalent to five grocery bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline in the world, according to the first scientific assessment of the problem.

The joint US-Australian study, released at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Jose, analysed waste production data from 192 countries to conclude that between 4.8m and 12.7m tonnes of “mismanaged plastic” entered the oceans in 2010; 8m tonnes is the central estimate.

Plastic in the oceans is becoming a serious ecological problem for marine life, as well as an ugly pollutant washed up on beaches and floating on the open seas.

Large pieces such as intact plastic bags are a hazard for animals from turtles to dolphins, which can become entangled or swallow them with fatal results. More insidious is the weathering of plastic debris into tiny particles that can be ingested even by microscopic invertebrates.

The study, which also appears in the journal Science, lists the world’s 20 biggest national sources of mismanaged plastic waste. The top 19 are all middle and low income countries, with the US in 20th position.

The worst offenders are in Asia, with China responsible for 28 per cent of all mismanaged waste, followed by Indonesia with 10 per cent.

The amount of plastic going into the oceans is increasing fast, keeping pace with global plastic production, said the study leader Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia.

“In 2025 the annual input would be about twice the 2010 input or 10 bags full per foot of coastline,” she said. “The cumulative input in 2025 would be nearly 20 times our 2010 estimate: 100 bags of plastic per foot of coastline in the world.”

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Developed nations have the infrastructure to dispose properly of the vast majority of their plastic or recycle it. Poorer countries do not. Altogether about 3 per cent of the world’s total plastic waste ends up in the oceans through littering or dumping.

A huge investment will be needed to save the oceans and their inhabitants from choking on human plastic debris.

“Solutions will require a combination of local and global efforts,” said Prof Jambeck. “A shift in how we manage waste could provide jobs and opportunities for economic innovation — and it could improve the living conditions and health of millions of people.”