World’s oceans contain 270,000 tonnes of plastic, study reveals
PUBLISHED : Thursday, 11 December, 2014, 10:20pm
UPDATED : Thursday, 11 December, 2014, 10:23pm
World’s oceans contain 270,000 tonnes of plastic, study reveals
The world's oceans are now clogged with enough plastic to fill more than 38,500 garbage trucks, a new study reveals. Researchers estimate almost 270,000 tonnes of plastic broken up into more than five trillion pieces are floating in the seas.
The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, is the latest in a nascent field where scientists hope to identify the true impact of plastic on the environment - and the food chain.
"Am I being poisoned by eating the fish on my plate?" asked Kara Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association, who wasn't involved in the study.
"We have very little knowledge of the chain of events that could lead to that. But it's a plausible scenario that plastic ingested at lower levels of the food web could have consequences at higher levels of the food chain."
To gather data, researchers dragged a fine mesh net along the sea surface to gather small plastic pieces while observers on boats counted larger items. They also used computer models to calculate estimates for tracts of ocean not surveyed.
The study only measured plastic floating on the surface, with plastic on the ocean floor not included.
