There Might Be Less Plastic in the Sea Than We Thought. But Read On.
By: Holly Lawson News article: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GEg4GR4fcxvONFa5EjMj8WQ2DEJ_9shK/view?usp=sharing Journal article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01216-0 Background: In the early 1970s, the first reports of plastic pollution in marine environments appeared. Yet, for the next four decades, estimations of the total amount of plastic in the oceans remained unknown. In 1975, an estimation of the net annual flux of all materials in the ocean was found to be 5.8 million metric tons (MT), but this only focused on discharges from oceanic vessels, military operations, and ship casualties (1). Since then, ocean dumping has become largely regulated, and as a result, it is now widely reported that 80% of marine plastics originate from land (2). Efforts to estimate the "mass budget" of marine plastics - the total amount entering and remaining in the ocean - have revealed significant discrepancies. Specifically, there is a mismatch between the volume of...