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Earth Science

More Than 14m Tonnes of Plastic Believed To Be at the Bottom of the Ocean (theguardian.com) 76

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
At least 14m tonnes of plastic pieces less than 5mm wide are likely sitting at the bottom of the world's oceans, according to an estimate based on new research. From a report: Analysis of ocean sediments from as deep as 3km suggests there could be more than 30 times as much plastic at the bottom of the world's ocean than there is floating at the surface. Australia's government science agency, CSIRO, gathered and analysed cores of the ocean floor taken at six remote sites about 300km off the country's southern coast in the Great Australian Bight. Researchers looked at 51 samples and found that after excluding the weight of the water, each gram of sediment contained an average of 1.26 microplastic pieces. Microplastics are 5mm or less in diameter and are mostly the result of larger plastic items breaking apart into ever smaller pieces. Stemming the tide of plastic entering the world's waterways and ocean has emerged as a major international challenge. Dr Denise Hardesty, a principal research scientist at CSIRO and a co-author of the research published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, told the Guardian that finding microplastic in such a remote location and at such depths "points to the ubiquity of plastics, no matter where you are in the world."
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More Than 14m Tonnes of Plastic Believed To Be at the Bottom of the Ocean More

More Than 14m Tonnes of Plastic Believed To Be at the Bottom of the Ocean

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  • so... should we stop making it? (Score:3)

    by fish_in_the_c ( 577259 ) on Monday October 05, 2020 @04:32PM (#60575336)

    I'd think we could at least make laws preventing the use of disposable plastic. ( aka paper straws, wax paper instead of plastic wrap, glass bottles).
    However, not even those efforts would come without cost.
    How many people ( millions or would it be billions ) will starve to death if we stop making plastics?
    What kind of bad effects is it having? What is the cost of doing little or nothing?

    • How many people ( millions or would it be billions ) will starve to death if we stop making plastics?

      Unknown. The only option seems to be reducing dependency on plastics over time, a task which is meeting even more resistance now that oil companies are realizing that the era of gasoline is coming to a close.

      What kind of bad effects is it having? What is the cost of doing little or nothing?

      Unknown, but environmental changes like this are historically negative and the problem created will remain for decades.

    • so... should we stop making it?

      An extreme first measure, I think a better thing to do would be to prohibit the shipping of garbage/recyclables overseas. This particular "solution" has resulted in people making a quick buck by simply dumping the whole load directly into the ocean.

      I'd think we could at least make laws preventing the use of disposable plastic. ( aka paper straws, wax paper instead of plastic wrap, glass bottles).

      Instead of prohibiting disposable plastic items, you could simply mandate that they biodegrade within a reasonable amount of time. Bioplastic is a very real thing.

      The only reason these have not been implemented is because doing so costs more money, not lots, ju

    • Re:so... should we stop making it? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Presence Eternal ( 56763 ) on Monday October 05, 2020 @04:54PM (#60575408)

      I read some articles stating that the majority of all ocean plastic came from a small handful of rivers that were being dumped in, and had almost nothing to do with things like people throwing plastic straws into the sea for unknown reasons. Then someone told me the articles were misreporting because the study was solely talking about plastics coming from rivers, not all possible sources. But that in turn raises the question how much plastic that goes in your trash can somehow gets dumped into the sea. At this point I have no idea which way the truth is being bent.

      https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]

      https://factcheck.afp.com/wide... [afp.com]

      • Then someone told me the articles were misreporting because the study was solely talking about plastics coming from rivers, not all possible sources.

        The vast majority of the plastic in the oceans comes from rivers because it needs the outflow of water to push the plastic out to sea. If you dump plastic elsewhere along the beach, the wave action tends to just push it back onto land. Which you've probably seen with flotsam and jetsam washed up near the high-tide mark at the beach.

        So plastic dumped in riv

      • The truth isn't bent, someone missed a critical word when misreporting scientific studies and the media ran with it. There are still general realities that are very much true:
        a) A lot of plastic gets dumped in rivers in the 3rd world.
        b) A lot of plastic from those rivers are due to overuse of single use plastic in that 3rd world.
        c) A lot of plastic in those rivers is due to the west exporting our problems to the 3rd world.

        It's easy to criticise the 3rd world right until you get to point 3. But it's not like

        • Yes, the plastic mainly comes from 3rd world. Western countries have had successful anti-litter campaigns decades ago and there is very, very little litter these days.

          So my state Queensland banning plastic utensils is a feel-good measure that is likely to have zero impact.

          The waste does NOT come from "the west exporting our problems". The third world countries willingly use their disposable plastic, often made domestically.

          Recycling plastic does not end up in the rivers -- or it should not. It makes perf

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by quenda ( 644621 )

          people in the west are shouting "damn Asians" as they throw their Styrofoam boxes and plastic straws straight out of the car window.

          Seriously? Who does that? (where do you live?) We have not even used styrofoam junk-food containers for decades here.

          In China in the 1990s, I remember food in trains sold in those styrofoam clam-shells, and *everybody* thew the boxes and bones out of the window.
          The rural train-lines would have been visible from high altitude as a double-white-line, as they were just left to accumulate.

          Nowadays, even China has sealed windows and rubbish bins on the trains. Not sure about cars.

          • Seriously? Who does that? (where do you live?) We have not even used styrofoam junk-food containers for decades here.

            I see it rarely enough, but there's still enough of it around. Point was people (as in the human race) are feral polluting arsehats. Mostly it's food wrappers and plastic bags, though recently the most littered products are disposable masks.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by quenda ( 644621 )

              Point was people (as in the human race) are feral polluting arsehats.

              An odd perspective. You are bothered because of a social contract that says we should not dump our rubbish. This is unique to humans.
              No other species has such social contracts, except on a very small scale.
              When the cyanobacteria filled the atmosphere with their waste, and killed most life, nobody cared. Only we care.
              We are capable of building societies that protect the commons. No other species has the means to temper individual or tribal selfishness.

        • Meanwhile a lot of people in the west are shouting "damn Asians" as they throw their Styrofoam boxes and plastic straws straight out of the car window.

          Where do you get a styrofoam box these days? I'll bet that doesn't happen.

          • Where do you get a styrofoam box these days? I'll bet that doesn't happen.

            Many takeaway shops still offer them. I don't know why. I hate the damn things. But they aren't the most littered object. Right now that is masks, followed by plastic bags, followed by food wrappers.

    • Paper straws do not last long enough in many drinks to finish the drink.
      Paper straws do not work well nor last long enough for thicker drinks.

      • That's true, you'll need 2 to 3 paper straws to get through an American Large drink (40 oz. or 1.2L).

        Why can't they make straws out of the same waxed paper as the cups?

        • >Why can't they make straws out of the same waxed paper as the cups?

          That's not wax - it's a layer of plastic. Paper cups aren't recyclable for that very reason.
          What you're asking is essentially to go back to plastic straws.

          Source: My last job was at a paper cup manufacturer.

        • ... and you think that the straws are the problem here?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

        I used to use them when I was a kid. I never had any problems with them. I think they had a wax associated with the paper. I ran across them when I was cleaning out my parents place in the 1980s. That and some 1960s Strawberry Quick and 1960s Valium LOL. I remember when they switched to plastic straws. Add that to not recycling glass bottles... and so many other things we used to do.

    • How many people ( millions or would it be billions ) will starve to death if we stop making plastics?

      None?

    • "How many people ( millions or would it be billions ) will starve to death if we stop making plastics?"

      If millions of people are eating plastic, they're going to starve to death anyway. Someone should tell them it has no nutritional value.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      The "we" in industrialised countries are not (directly) dumping plastic in the ocean.

      But what we can do, is stop exporting shiploads of our garbage to third world countries for "processing".
      This is already happening as China, India and other countries have banned the import of garbage.
      We need to do our own recycling, or at least disposal, such as burning the plastic for electrical power.

      The majority of the plastic waste in oceans is from domestic sources in third world countries, so this is just a start.

  • Good. Leave it there for the next species when they through all of this techno bullshit. They'll need it since we'll have burned up all the oil, coal and natural gas long ago.
    • I'm sorry, but why exactly would trump want this? That makes no sense.
    • We are just returning it to where we found it. Letâ(TM)s wait for sedimentation to bury it deep enough and then drill for it again.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dr. Tom ( 23206 )
      Future archaeologists will call this era the plasticene, not the anthropocene.

      Like the K-T boundary that shows the debris left over from the asteroid collision that killed the dinosaurs, the plasticene sedimentary layers will be a marker for the human extinction.

  • How about checking where from? (Score:5, Informative)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Monday October 05, 2020 @05:02PM (#60575434) Journal
    So far, something like 60-70% of the blights in ALL of the oceans have been traced to 2 nations: China and Vietnam. Hopefully, we can get these 2 to stop it, but we really need ALL nations to stop.

    • China stopped accepting the west's "recycling". Vietnam's PM is on a war against plastic, banning straws and looking at all single use plastic next. But while the "culprits" may be select countries, the "enablers" are certainly the west. We in the west could do wonders to convince the likes of Nestle and Coca Cola to stop actually using plastic bottles too, and then leading by example is a thing.

      Simply blaming will get you nothing other than criticism as you look like a rich nation once again shitting on th

      • Accepting the west plastic had nothing to do with. The plastic samples were hauled out and examined for where they were manufactured/sold at. Some 60-70% of the plastic was made in china/vietnam, and sold in their nations.

        As such trying to pass off blame like you lefties love to do will go nowhere.

        • Researchers looked at 51 samples and found that after excluding the weight of the water, each gram of sediment contained an average of 1.26 microplastic pieces. Microplastics are 5mm or less in diameter and are mostly the result of larger plastic items breaking apart into ever smaller pieces.

          Lucky those 5mm pieces still had the place of manufacture QR codes on them WindBourne.

  • How much is a "meter tonne"?
    Unless they mean megatonne.
    How much is that in metric?
    14 teragrams?
    1.4e13 grams?
    Hows come no one speaks metric anymore.

    • I'm sure they mean meter-tonne. It's a unit of torque, backwards as most Americans record torque; they recorded the slow down of the earth's rotation, and calculated the requisite torque.

      Yes, I'm almost certain this is correct.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nyet ( 19118 )

      I can't figure out who is more incompetent; the Guardian, or mssmash for blindly copy/pasting it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      Lower-case 'm' prefix means 'milli'. "14m tonnes" is a wayof making 14kg sound bigger. Just like those "2000 mAh" batteries are the same as 2Ah.

      If they mean 14 million tons, that is an average of 40kg per square km of ocean, or 40 milli-grams per square metre.
      So if spread evenly, it would be a layer of 40 nano-metres thick.

      For comparison, the oceans are estimated to contain 4 billion tons of uranium. So 14Mt is not much.

  • At last, some good news about plastic waste (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Monday October 05, 2020 @05:14PM (#60575480)

    The bottom of the ocean, at abyssal depths, is the best place for it to end up, ready to become coal again.

    When we get around to seeding the oceans with nutrients to promote the growth of carbon-eating algae, we want to find a species that forms a surface mat before it runs out of nutrient and then dies off and sinks. If we scatter our algae food in gyres where floating plastic collects, the alga mat could take a lot of the plastic to the bottom with it. If we really do this right, it could also take out a lot of the fish which have been eating microplastics.

    • Coal is not formed at abyssal depths.

      Now back to the show!

    • Theres no such thing as a free lunch. Not all the plastic ends up down there much of it remains floating around just like dumping mercury into the ocean isnt free.

      • So let's just do nothing, then.

        • No lets be honest and stop using plastic. Pretending that plastic is recycled is a big fat lie and prevent the real solution which is banning or imposing a tax to make it uneconomical to use.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by laxguy ( 1179231 )

            and exactly *HOW* are we going to eliminate plastic? you do realize like 99% of everything is made from plastic right?

            .. or imposing a tax to make it uneconomical to use.

            oh right, lets empower the rich again

            • > > or imposing a tax to make it uneconomical to use. > oh right, lets empower the rich again No you dont get it, the reason plastic rubbish is everywher eis because its too cheap which results in people and companies putting no value in recycling etc. People dont throw out gold because its expensive, put a value on something and it wont be wasted to the same extent as something with minimal or no value. > and exactly *HOW* are we going to eliminate plastic? you do realize like 99% of everyt

  • Seriously, what does that even mean?

    (German here.)

    • At first i thought it was meter, then realized it's probably metric tonnes, but that number seems small. So I guess it is 14 million (metric) tonnes.

      But since no one can imagine that mass in their mind, we need it in hogsheads, football stadiums, Olympic swimming pools, or something we can visualize.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nyet ( 19118 )

      It means both msmash and the Guardian are totally science illiterate.

  • That's just humanity, marking it's territory.

  • 14 Million Tonnes??

    That does not sound like enough by a long margin!
    • Indeed you are on to something. 14M tons spread across the oceans that cover more than 3/4 of the planet is a smidgen. About 2 decades ago a university in Spain had a researcher conduct a study of plastic in the ocean, he used merchant fleets to take water samples during their journeys around the seas and send them in. I recall his paper estimated only a few tens of thousands of tons of plastic floating in the water, almost all of it nearly microscopic particles. There wasn't any large gyre(s) of visible pl

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nyet ( 19118 )

      14 meter tonnes is even less.

  • And then I read closely and realized that it said 14 milli-tons. Thats only about 28 lbs (14 kg). We are doing a better job at protecting the environment than I thought.
  • A very important matter and require an urgent call to action plan as well, lets see how far it goes. Also have a look at Karachi Beach and get to know about the real happening on the shores. https://poetryquotesandcoffee.... [blogspot.com]

  • Build some submersible robots to mine the stuff and recycle it.

  • Reduce population slowly.
    Paper.
    Glass.

    That is all! Enough plastic junk, OK? Plastic clothes are terrible, perhaps the worst use of plastic.

  • And 95% Oceans floor is still UNEXPLORED

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