News – That’s the question posed by Professor Alan Deidun, a resident academic within the Department of Geology’s Faculty of Science, along with a group of high-profile co-authors, within a recent study recently published in the Microplastics and Nanoplastics iris. In particular, the study looks at a wide range of marine waste monitoring survey data available for different regions of the world’s oceans, as well as shaping data, to answer this compelling question.
The study, by lead author of renowned waste researcher Dr Francois Galgani of IFREMER, concludes that despite the notable increase in the amount of plastic making its way to marine land from land, most studies show a consistent amount of waste in inshore marine life. systems a few years ago to 2019. For example, collections of marine waste with Continuous Plankton Records showed unchanged amounts seized each year in the Northeast Atlantic since the year 2000, after a steady increase since the 1950s. For some components of marine waste, such as industrial heaps, policy formulation appears to be effective as measures taken to reduce their use in industrial practices appear to have translated into smaller quantities of the waste. this part is found within the marine area.
Although a prima facie finding was remarkable, this ‘stable state’ situation could be a sign of:
- the movement of plastic waste to remote areas of the global ocean, where there are no or no human control programs, so that the same waste does not feature statistically and / or
the contamination into smaller particles (micro- and nanoplastics) of the same debris that cannot be identified due to its small size (eg fibers within microplastic nets) or because they are inside biota mara.
The published study came from Chapter 12 of the UN’s Second World Ocean Assessment, which is expected to be released by the UN in the coming months. Dr. Deidun appears as a co-author within two different chapters in such an Assessment, including those on marine alien species and benthic invertebrates. The same study concludes by calling, within the current DA Decade for Ocean Sciences, to invest greater research effort in identifying marine waste sources as well as in the pollution pathways for various components. of the same rubbish, as we have the capacity. to identify temporal trends in marine waste, it will no longer proceed.
Statistics related to marine plastic waste make for a sobering reading. For example, according to Ocean Conservation, an estimated 8 million tonnes of plastic enters the world’s oceans each year, in addition to the 150 million tonnes of plastic already shipped. movement in the same oceans. 380 million tonnes of plastic are produced each year, of which an estimated 50% is Single Use Plastic (SUP), including the 500 billion plastic bags sold worldwide the world each year and which, on average, lasts just 15 minutes.
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The full publication is available online.