Arctic research reports record levels of microplastics

[Ewan]

https://www.theguardian.com/environm...arctic-sea-ice



Scientists have found a record amount of plastic trapped in Arctic sea ice, raising concern about the impact on marine life and human health.

Up to 12,000 pieces of microplastic particles were found per litre of sea ice in core samples taken from five regions on trips to the Arctic Ocean – as many as three times higher than levels in previous studies.

Researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) found fragments of packaging, paints, nylon, polyester and cellulose acetate which is commonly used in making cigarette filters in every sample they took in 2014 and 2015.

The findings come amid growing concern about the scale of plastic pollution which experts have warned risks the near-permanent contamination of the planet.

Previous research estimated that at least 1tn pieces of plastic had been frozen into the Arctic ice over past decades, making it a major global sink for plastic pollution, many times more concentrated than the well-known great Pacific garbage patch.

But Dr Gunnar Gerdts, whose laboratory made the measurements, said his studies showed the problem was even more severe, with some of the particles only 11 micrometres across.

“That’s roughly one-sixth the diameter of a human hair, and also explains why we found concentrations of more than 12,000 particles per litre of sea ice – which is two to three times higher than what we’d found in past measurements.”

The study was able to identify not only a record amount of plastic but also its potential source – from degraded fishing equipment to plastic pollution that has travelled thousands of miles on ocean currents.

One of the study’s authors, Dr Ilka Peeken said: “The high microplastic concentrations in the sea ice can not only be attributed to sources outside the Arctic Ocean. Instead they point to local pollution in the Arctic.”

The scientists warned that the implications of this level of plastic pollution – for marine life and human health – were unknown.

Peeken said: “No one can say for certain how harmful these tiny plastic particles are for marine life, or ultimately also for human beings.”

Marine plastic pollution is a huge problem, with an estimated 5tn pieces of plastic now floating in the world’s oceans. The plastic is frequently mistaken for food by fish and birds, causing damage to life throughout the seas and entering the human food chain.

Today’s study found record levels of polyethylene in one area thought to come from the massive “garbage patch” in the Pacific Ocean. In another it found high levels of paint and nylon particles pointing to increased shipping and fishing.

The study also found that so much plastic is now stored in Arctic sea ice, which then moves and melts, that it has become a significant system for transporting plastic particles around the region.

Dr Jeremy Wilkinson, sea ice physicist at the British Antarctic Survey, described it as a “benchmark study”.

“Microplastic particles were found throughout all cores sampled ... It suggests that microplastics are now ubiquitous within the surface waters of the world’s ocean. Nowhere is immune.”

========================================================

The original Nature article can be found here

[Cidersomerset]

I saw the article earlier and it reminded me of a report I read recently about a
natural bacteria discovered that could combat the plastic problem, I cannot find the
one I saw but there are other recent ones. Though it is worrying how much waste
there is on/in the oceans and a switch back to glass and proper shopping bags may
help , until a permanent solution is found and where there's a will there's a way.

Plastic-eating enzyme could fight pollution

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4l-T_nwGnrU

Published on 17 Apr 2018
A plastic-eating enzyme created by scientists in Britain and the United States
could help in the fight against pollution. The enzyme is able to digest polyethylene
terephthalate, or PET, which is used in millions of tonnes of plastic bottles. PET
plastics can persist for hundreds of years in the environment and currently pollute
large areas of land and sea worldwide.

A Mutant Plastic-Eating Enzyme Could Help Solve The World’s Waste Problem
| Mach | NBC News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zugMmi7PJ10
Published on 18 Apr 2018
Scientists in Britain and the United States say they have engineered a plastic-eating
enzyme. The enzyme is able to digest a form of plastic called PET or polyethylene
terephthalate, that's found in most plastic bottles.

====================================================

Scientists discover plastic eating bacteria that could save the environment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CM-fg40fGI
Published on 11 Mar 2016
A team of Japanese scientists say they have found bacteria that can break down
and consume polyethylene terephthalate (PET), one of the world’s most damaging
and wasteful plastics. RT’s Manila Chan investigates the science behind the
discovery and what it could mean for protecting the environment.

==================================================
==================================================




Record concentration of microplastics found in Arctic

By Helen Briggs
BBC News
24 April 2018


Plastic particles end up in sea ice floating in the Arctic
read more..http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-43879389
============================================



Giant plastic 'berg blocks Indonesian river

David Shukman
Science editor
19 April 2018


Like other developing countries, Indonesia is wrestling with an acute plastic waste problem

A crisis of plastic waste in Indonesia has become so acute that the army has been called in to help.
Rivers and canals are clogged with dense masses of bottles, bags and other plastic packaging.
Officials say they are engaged in a "battle" against waste that accumulates as quickly as they clear it.
The commander of a military unit in the city of Bandung described it as "our biggest enemy".

read more...http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-43823883

[Cidersomerset]

Lionel regularly goes on David Knight Real News for a amusing take on recent news
items and today waste plastic is brought up with some interesting comments on
how its grown and how fisherman, tsunami's and some Asian countries over
dumping in the Pacific , waste from North America and ocean liners add to it.

Climate Change Conspiracies & Cuomo's Plastic Bag Fetish
— Lionel on "Real News With David Knight"

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=M7WbOXujE_Q

Published on 25 Apr 2018

========================================

There are five major gyres areas where currents meet that collect waste in the
oceans which is probably good news because if world bodies start to focus
on some sort of collection or bacterial solution at least its already concentrated
in specific areas.

Not sure about the micro particles spread around the oceans and Antarctica though ?






http://www.bluebird-electric.net/oce...ific_ocean.htm

===================================================


What is gyre in geography?

https://www.quora.com/What-is-gyre-in-geography

What is a gyre?
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/gyre.html

[earthdreamer]

Plastic pollution is one of my biggest worries for our planet. Recycling can't possibly keep up with such massive output. Manufacturers have profited for decades off cheap plastic. Just like hazardous waste sites needing designated superfund clean-up, we need a global superfund to address and combat this crisis of runaway plastic waste. The modern world must turn to biodegradable production and packaging. I wonder if plastics made of organic compounds like hemp seeds rather than petroleum oil would be less toxic to the environment? An apocalypse of plastic snowstorms blizzarding the planet is a nightmare we don't want to imagine possible.
Some news report I saw also found plastic micro-particles in our bodies from such mundane sources like fleece clothing.
We sign so many petitions to corporations and politicians to address this slow-boil horror. The awareness of the problems of plastic pollution seems to be reaching a critical mass where solutions will be forthcoming. If only life were more valuable than monetary profit. (sigh)

[Ewan]

Which reminds me of this story from August last year.

Ocean plastic cleanup: A 23-year-old’s mission to take rubbish out of our seas.



In 1998 Charles Moore, an oceanographer, was sailing across the North Pacific when he made an unwelcome discovery.
“As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic,” Moore wrote in Natural History magazine.
It seemed unbelievable but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere – bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.”

What he stumbled on became known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or “Pacific trash vortex”. It is thought to be anywhere between the size of Texas (270,000 sq miles) to several times that size.
The difficulty of measuring such a large area of ocean means exact data is hard to come by but the latest research suggests the vortex has a 386,000 sq mile “heart”, surrounded by a 1.4 million-sq-mile outer periphery of trash. The extent and range of contaminants in the gyre is also little understood but scientists estimate the high-density core now has an alarming one million pieces of plastic per sq km.

Most of the plastic waste that ends up in the oceans is thought to become part of these “garbage patches” of rubbish, but it’s not a doughnut of clearly visible surface rubbish as has often been envisaged.
Some of this plastic matter is found hovering at the waterline but most of it is floating in the upper-water column over thousands of sq miles in the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

By some estimates, the ratio of plastic to small animal matter (known as zooplankton) in these gyres is around 6:1 by weight. At the core of the vortex, this can be as high as 48:1. Zooplankton is an important component of the ocean ecosystem, providing nourishment for the smallest fish to the biggest whales, meaning much of the microplastic matter ends up being ingested. Perhaps most alarmingly for people who eat fish on a regular basis, scientists have recently found microplastics in the bodies of fish, not just in their stomachs. Last month, a group of Malaysian and French scientists found 36 pieces of potentially harmful microplastics in a study of 120 mackerel, mullets, anchovies and croakers.

Described as a “ticking time bomb” by marine scientists, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is believed to have grown by five times in the past 10 years and will become a greater risk to life as the plastic degrades further.
It’s a problem that caught the imagination of a then 16-year-old schoolboy from the Netherlands, Boyan Slat. Slat was on holiday in Greece when a diving trip brought him face-to-face with the problem of ocean plastics.
“I could see more plastic bags than fish on that scuba dive,” he says.
I had to do a high-school science project that year and I decided to really dedicate myself to this issue. Everybody told me it would be impossible to clean up, the main problem being that the plastic is extremely dispersed... over a wide area.”

He dropped out of a degree in Aeronautical Engineering in order to pursue the idea, but the initial reception was not positive. Slat contacted 300 companies looking for support but only one replied, telling him it was “a terrible idea”.
A hugely popular TED Talk saw the teenage Boyan gain worldwide fame, and funding for his designs soon followed, some of it crowd-funded, and some of it from high-profile investors such as PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff.
“Being an outsider and not having worked on this for many years allowed me at least to consider clean-up as an idea that would work. When I started there was this consensus that you could never clean this up, that the problem is way too big, the ocean is way too rough, the issue of bycatch – ‘plastic is too big, plastic is too small’...”

The key idea that makes Slat’s concept different to other schemes is the principle of “letting the sea do the work” by having ocean currents run into V-shaped screens that filter out small plastics. When the system is fully operational, the plastics can then be loaded onto small vessels and taken back to land for recycling.

Today the Ocean Clean Up Foundation employs more than 70 people and has around $30m (£23m) in funding. But the task confronting Slat and his team will require a great deal more than this.
Although it’s hard to gain accurate data, today’s estimates suggest roughly five trillion tonnes of plastics are now floating in our oceans. Seven million tonnes are dumped into the sea each year.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that the volume of plastic waste in our oceans will outweigh the total mass of fish in the sea by 2050.

The Ocean Cleanup’s trials in the North Sea with a prototype (officially named “Boomy McBoomFace” after the boom that supports the plastic filtering screens), were promising enough for the team to press ahead with a plan to pilot system in the Pacific gyre next year.

“We suffered some damage but that was the whole point, to find weak spots in the design. We developed a new anchor concept off the back of what we learnt”.
The “drifting array” will now be held down by large sea anchors, ensuring it moves slower than the surrounding currents.
“The deeper you go in the ocean, the slower the currents get. At the surface it can move quite rapidly [16-17 centimetres per second] and only a few hundred metres deeper, it’s more like three or four centimetres per second. So it’s a dramatic difference”.
To exploit this difference, Boyan and his team developed a sea anchor suspended in the water column, consisting of about 100 sq metres of material, enough to slow down the drifting area by 20 per cent.

Having tested a prototype model of its system in the North Sea last year, Th Ocean Cleanup announced in May that it plans to conduct a trial in the Pacific later this year, and start a full cleanup operation there next spring.
“We’re starting with the North Pacific gyre simply because it is the largest accumulation of plastic. A third of all ocean plastic can be found in that area.”
“It will still be an experimental system, operating for one year. We’ll gather data and improve the system continuously”.
The goal then is to move onto the other four ocean gyres and replicate the process, albeit with slightly less rubbish to deal with in each vortex.

“We expect to be ready for a scale-up in late 2019, so in 2019-2020 we expect to get a fleet of around 50 systems in that one patch, which are able to cleanup around 13 per cent of the patch every year. So that means 50 per cent in five years and we would get to 90 per cent in about 20 years.”

I ask Slat what has troubled him the most about the situation facing our oceans.

“Definitely the degradation,” he says. “Plastic doesn’t really go away by itself.”
The concentration of plastic is rapidly increasing in the gyres. Even if you were to close off the tap, and no more plastic entered the ocean, that plastic would stay there, probably for hundreds of years”.
Not only a threat to sea life, the degradation of ocean plastics leads to the release of chemicals that are known to be harmful to humans when they enter the food chain. Significant debris can cause damage to shipping, foul up tourist sites and encourage invasive species.

Much of our older marine waste is now breaking down into more toxic and hard-to-remove substances, and reaching parts of the sea previously thought to be relatively pristine. Even the deepest chasm on the earth’s surface – the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific ocean – has been found to contain “extraordinary” levels of pollution at depths of 10 kilometres below sea level, although not all of this is attributed to plastic waste.
It is now thought that around four billion plastic microfibres lie on the sea floor.
“Today 95 per cent of the plastic is large stuff and only five per cent is small dangerous microplastics,” says Slat. “What is going to happen over several decades is that microplastic matter may increase twentyfold, which would be quite a big issue.”
Among the other solutions to dealing with ocean plastics is the “waste to wear” initiative run by the NGO Healthy Seas. This project reworks the nylon found in abandoned fishing nets into textiles for use in clothing.

Singer Pharrell Williams and fashion brand G-Star recently collaborated to create a line of clothing called “Raw for the Oceans” which also uses recycled ocean waste.
Picking up litter off a beach may seem like a peripheral activity, but during the 2015 International Coastal Cleanup, around 800,000 volunteers picked up an estimated 18 million pounds of plastic that would otherwise have ended up in the oceans.
Boyan Slat has other plans as to how the foundation can help solve this problem.
“We might work on ways to prevent plastic getting into the ocean in the first place
We published a study in Nature back in June, showing that 86 per cent of the plastic is coming from Asia, and coming from a relatively small number of rivers in those areas. So, in the future, we could do something there within those river mouths.
To me that seems like a logical future expansion of what we are doing.”

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=du5d5PUrH0I

[Ewan]

As I read that back I recalled all the 'warnings' from (alleged) ET's about how we are destroying the planet.

If we had a functioning media, (well, it functions now but in a negative kind of way), stories like this should be on the TV all the time until the hue and cry from the general public was so loud things would change at a greatly accelerated pace. I'd bet if I stood on the high street of any town and asked people what they knew about plastics in the oceans, or specifically, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch I would be met with a large majority of negatives.

With the microplastics (OP) getting into the foodchain we may, frighteningly, be very close to the point of no return already.

[Ewan]

Plastic Pollution in the Oceans- Documentary HD

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=txH30r0NRf0

Recycling Technologies turns problem plastic into fantastic fuel in depots

https://www.express.co.uk/finance/ci...s-plastic-fuel

[DeDukshyn]

I was just thinking the other day how Big Oil has almost single-handedly destroyed the entire planet. How quickly we forget that plastic is a product of Big Oil, not to mention the pollution in the atmosphere from billions of autos, all the pipeline and tanker spills, the constant destruction of forest (rainforests and otherwise) to access oil, the mess Big Oil leaves behind after abandoning dry wells, The BP oil spill and the like ... all product of the business of big oil, and we generally stand back smile, and fill our cars at prices where we know we are being gouged to death, and do nothing about it.

I live in Alberta (oil country) and I am never ceased to be amazed at the oil worship here - it is almost not even believable it is so extreme. In fact our province has stopped import of BC (british columbia) wine, and has drafted legislation to allow itself the ability to stop the flow of all oil to BC -- because BC doesn't want to build another pipeline through their province (its a twinning, not a new pipeline). The whole province of Alberta can't seem to pry their lips from around big oils big pipe ... line.

[Ewan]

Around the World in 80, erm, plastics...


CHINA


THAILAND



INDIA


Sth AMERICA


---------------------------------------------------------

My nephew is getting married in August, they plan to honeymoon in The Maldives.

http://cleanbodiesofwater.org/plasti...otos-maldives/

The Maldives, one of the top honeymoon destinations in the Indian Ocean, is famous for its pristine beaches, beautiful turquoise waters and top class resorts.

But what many tourists are not aware of is the fact that these dream holiday islands dump around 300 to 400 tonnes of rubbish a day on an artificial island called Thilafushi. This island is situated approximately 7 kilometres from Malé, the capital of the Maldives and is used for the sole purpose of disposing rubbish, such as plastic pollution waste.

Since 1992 the Maldives have been dumping their trash on Thalifushi, also known as Trash Island, but nowadays the plastic pollution literally extends this island of waste.

[Foxie Loxie]

Good Grief!!!

[ExomatrixTV]

• The Effect of Microplastics on Our Health