Earth's Oceans Filling Up With Plastic

Posted on August 7, 2006

Niall Ferguson has written an opinion piece for the Telegraph that highlights recent information that should be of grave concern to everyone. Plastic refuge is on the rise and according to the United Nations Environment Programme there are "46,000 pieces of plastic floating on every square mile of the world's oceans."

According to the Marine Conservation Society's latest annual survey, which covers more than a hundred miles of British coastline, there has been a 90 per cent increase in the density of litter over the past decade. More than a third of the rubbish found in the latest survey consisted of fragments of plastic, food wrappers, bottle lids and cotton buds.
And it's not just Britain. The plastic plague is a global epidemic. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, there are approximately 46,000 pieces of plastic floating on every square mile of the world's oceans.
The problem is more than merely aesthetic. Last week the Los Angeles Times carried a shocking report from Midway Atoll, which is about as isolated a spot as the world has to offer, 2,800 miles west of California and 2,200 miles east of Japan.
Hardly anyone lives there, so the number of crisp packets chucked in the sea can't be large. And yet birdlife on Midway is being devastated as albatrosses inadvertently feed their chicks lethal fragments of plastic picked up from what's known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, a virtual island of trash formed by the currents of the North Pacific subtropical gyre.
The Patch is not so much a city in the sea as a municipal dump on the sea.

The island of garbage and ocean full of plastic are not pleasant things to think about. Just because the ocean currents sometimes take garbage away where we can't see it doesn't mean we shouldn't be very concerned by these alarming statistics. Pollution is also a big concern for Earth's future. It isn't just global warming gases we have to worry about.

EARTH
POLLUTION