Plastic - Impact on Oceans and Beaches

"The success of the plastic bag has meant a dramatic increase in the amount of sacks found floating in the oceans where they choke, strangle, and starve wildlife and raft alien species around the world.

Plastic bags have gone "from being rare in the late 80s and early 90s to being almost everywhere from Spitsbergen 78° North [latitude] to Falklands 51° South [latitude], but they will probably be washing up in Antarctica within the decade."

Furthermore:

• Plastic bags are among the 12 items of debris found most often in coastal cleanups, according to the Center for Marine Conservation
• Plastic bags wrap around living corals quickly "suffocating" and killing them according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The very thing that makes plastic items useful to consumers, their durability and stability, also makes them a problem in marine environments. Around 100 million tonnes of plastic are produced each year of which about 10 percent ends up in the sea. About 20 percent of this is from ships and platforms, the rest from land.

Take a walk along any beach anywhere in the world and washed ashore will be many polythene plastic bags, bottles and containers, plastic drums, expanded polystyrene packing, polyurethane foam pieces, pieces of polypropylene fishing net and discarded lengths of rope. Together with traffic cones, disposable lighters, vehicle tyres and toothbrushes, these items have been casually thrown away on land and at sea and have been carried ashore by wind and tide.

These larger items are the visible signs of a much larger problem. These big items do not degrade like natural materials. At sea and on shore under the influence of sunlight, wave action and mechanical abrasion they simply break down slowly into ever smaller particles.

A single one litre drinks bottle could break down into enough small fragments to put one on every mile of beach in the entire world. These smaller particles are joined by the small pellets of plastic which are the form in which many new plastics are marketed and which can be lost at sea by the drum load or even a whole container load. These modern day “marine tumbleweeds” have been thrown into sharp focus, not only by the huge quantities removed from beaches by dedicated volunteers, but by the fact that they have been found to accumulate in sea areas where winds and currents are weak.

Bags and small plastic pieces can entangle marine animals causing them to drown. They can also be swallowed by marine animals like whales and turtles, causing them to starve….

Wildlife in the oceans is increasingly falling victim to human waste, with virtually all dead sea-birds found to have eaten litter carried in the water, according to a new study.

Scientists measuring the amount of waste found in fulmars discovered that 96 per cent of the birds had fragments of plastic in their stomachs. The figure was almost double the amount discovered in the early 1980s

The issue of plastic debris is one that needs to be urgently addressed. At the personal level we can all contribute by avoiding plastics in the things we buy and by disposing of our waste responsibly. Obviously though, there is a need to make ship owners and operators, offshore platforms and fishing boat operators more aware of the consequences of irresponsible disposal of plastic items.