Pacific plastic trash 'bigger' than France, Germany

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A new report has found that the build-up of plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean is up to 16 times greater than previous studies.

It is now bigger than France, Germany and Spain combined, the study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports said.

Using a fleet of boats and aircraft, researchers based in the Netherlands found that pollution in the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) is almost exclusively plastic and is “increasing exponentially.”

"We found about 80,000 tonnes of buoyant plastic currently in the GPGP," Laurent Lebreton, lead author of the study published in the journal Scientific Reports, told AFP.

That's around the weight of 500 jumbo jets.

The concentration of plastic waste in the area of the Pacific Ocean between the US and Hawaii /AFP Photo

But what really shocked the team was the amount of plastic pieces that have built upon the marine gyre between Hawaii and California in recent years.

They found that the dump now contains around 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, posing a dual threat to marine life.

Microplastics, tiny fragments of plastic smaller than 50mm in size that makes up the vast majority of items in the GPGP, can enter the food chain when swallowed by fish.

The pollutants they contain become more concentrated as they work their way up through the food web, all the way to top-level predators such as sharks, seals and polar bears.

"The other environmental impact comes from the larger debris, especially the fishing nets," said Lebreton.

The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, which released this photo, hopes to scoop up debris in the Pacific Ocean. /AFP Photo

These net fragments kill marine life by trapping fish and animals such as turtles in a process known as "ghost fishing."

The research team from the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a Dutch start-up aiming to scoop up half the debris in the GPGP within five years, were surprised in particular in the build-up of larger plastic items, which accounted for more than 90 percent of the GPGP's mass.

This might offer a glimmer of hope, as larger plastics are far easier to find and fish out than microplastics.

'Single-use, throwaway society'

Global plastics production hit 322 million tonnes in 2015, according to the International Organization for Standardization.

The Ocean Cleanup project, which carried out the study, says eight million tonnes of plastics enter the oceans every year, much of which has accumulated in five giant garbage patches around the planet.

The authors of the new report say global action is needed to reduce plastic waste. /AFP Photo

To increase their ability to identify plastic pieces, researchers used 30 vessels and two aircraft including a C-130 Hercules fitted with advanced sensors that produced 3D scans of the GPGP.

They found that it now stretches 1.6 million square kilometers and, they warn, it's growing.

"The inflow of plastic to the patch continues to exceed the outflow," Lebreton said.

What's more, the scale of the largest plastic dump on the planet literally only scratches the surface of the problem.

"Levels of plastic pollution in deep water layers and seafloor below the GPGP remain unknown," the study warned.

The foundation's team of 75 researchers and engineers plan to construct dozens of floating barriers to drift on the winds and currents and hoover up half the plastic in the patch within five years.

But Lebreton is keen to stress that the global damage wrought by plastic waste can only be mitigated by coordinated action.

A photo released by the Ocean Cleanup Foundation shows crew pulling a ghost net from the Pacific Ocean in 2015. /AFP Photo

"People look at the quantity of fishing gear (in the patch), and point a finger at the fishing industry, but then again they're eating the fish too. It's not so much this or that sector or region, it's the way we consume and live – single-use plastics, throwaway society," he said.

"We need to take some serious action on that front. We'll solve this problem on a global scale."

The Ocean Cleanup was founded by 18-year-old Dutchman Boyan Slat in 2013.

Source(s): AFP