Progress Made, Progress to ComeĬountries, as well as corporations, around the world are already taking steps to achieve this goal. If we are to create sustainable solutions for the future, we need to not only mitigate our generation of plastic waste, we need to reduce or end our consumption of plastics altogether. They perpetuate the linear movement of mass consumption of plastics to the mass production of plastic waste. Beach clean-ups have proven to be effective, bringing communities together around a common cause to save our planet. Last year in June, the UN World Environmental Day focused on solving the plastic pollution problem, inspiring beach cleanups around the world.īut if we are to truly create long-term solutions to solving the world’s plastic waste problem, we need to change how we think about our plastic waste footprint. The project was spearheaded by local organizers and volunteers and saw the community come together to return the beach to its previous pristine condition.
According to CNN, the UN called the restoration of Versova beach in Mumbai the “‘world’s largest beach clean-up project,’” collecting nearly 11.7 million pounds of trash from a roughly 1.5 mile long stretch of beach. How can we stop plastics from entering our oceans? Massive river and beach cleanup initiatives have been started around the world. Rethinking Solutions to the Ocean Plastics Problem When we consume fish or crustaceans, we are unknowingly ingesting the very plastics we pollute the oceans with. The bioaccumulation of microplastics not only occurs within the oceanic food chain, it also affects humans. The buildup of these plastics in sea turtles, sharks, whales and fish has been directly linked to endocrine disruption, inhibition of hatching, and decreased growth rates. These microplastics are then consumed at the lower levels of the food chain by plankton and larvae, as well as by fish and crustaceans, and move their way up the food chain. Over time, plastic waste breaks down via photodegradation into microplastics, pieces of plastic less than 5 millimeters in size. When plastic enters our ocean, they pose a great threat to marine life because they can take over 400 years to decompose. These plastics are from municipal sewage sludge applied to agricultural land as fertilizer the microplastics from our sewage thus impact all parts of a river system and then flows into our oceans. Microplastics are also found upstream of treatment plants due to agricultural runoff. Microplastics and fibers are too small for many water municipalities to detect and capture, which means that they get passed through treatment centers and are leaked directly into oceans, rivers, and lakes. Today many of our products from the microbeads in our toothpastes to the synthetic fibers in our clothes get washed down the drain.
Wastewater from municipalities flush microplastics and fibers into the ecosystem. Garbage enters these systems due to the lack of formal waste management systems in these areas or the direct/indirect dumping of waste into water bodies. Eight of them are in Asia: the Yangtze Indus Yellow Hai He Ganges Pearl Amur Mekong and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger. In fact scientists have analyzed the path of our garbage from river to open ocean and found that just 10 river systems carry 90% of the plastics that end up in the ocean. Direct Littering or Dumping into the OceanĪcross the globe, dumping garbage and littering into oceans, riverbeds, and beaches is still a very common practice. Check out the journey of a plastic bag from street litter to sea-bound.
Once they hit water however, they are easily sunken due to their large surface area. Plastics such a LDPE, like plastic bags, are light, buoyant and can easily be picked up by the wind. Plastics flooding our landfills get blown away by wind and enter nearby water bodies or exit through storm drains. There three main ways how plastics enter our oceans: 1. On the higher end, scientists estimate 12.8 million metric tons of plastic are floating in our oceans currently. The plastic straws, bottles, and cups that we see littering our beaches everyday are just the tip of the iceberg: they make up a small fraction of what actually enters our oceans each year. But how do our plastics enter our oceans? We often see harrowing images circulating throughout the media: a picture of a beached whale whose stomach is filled with plastic bags, or of sea turtles whose necks are wrapped in plastic rings of soda cans.
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