Plastic pollution in the planet’s oceans is bad, which is hardly news. Yet it is far worse than commonly assumed, say scientists at the National Oceanography Centre in the United Kingdom.
The researchers, who have published their findings in a new study, say that there is up to 21 million tons of tiny plastic particles of the three most common types of plastics near the water’s surface across the Atlantic ocean.
“The combined mass of just the three most-littered plastics (polyethylene, polypropylene, and polystyrene) of 32–651 µm size-class suspended in the top 200 m of the Atlantic Ocean is 11.6–21.1 Million Tonnes,” the scientists explain. “Considering that plastics of other sizes and polymer types will be found in the deeper ocean and in the sediments, our results indicate that both inputs and stocks of ocean plastics are much higher than determined previously,” they stress.
In all, the amount of plastic particles in the Atlantic ocean as a whole is estimated to be at least 200 million tons, which is 10 times more than previous estimates had it, based on the calculations of plastic waste floating around in waters in coastal areas. Read more…
