National Geographic explorer and grantee Gregg Treinish wants everyone
to know about the hidden toxic cost of synthetic fabrics.
Tiny,
invisible microplastics are entering our waterways straight from our
washing machines.
About 2,000 synthetic particles are released from
washing a single polyester fleece jacket.
All clothing items—including
cotton and wool—shed micro-fibers when washed, but the natural fibers
biodegrade.
Synthetic particles don't degrade and can absorb toxins
while traveling through the waterways.
If they're eaten by small
organisms, such as fish, they can bioaccumulate and end up on our dinner
plates.
From Washington Post by Sarah Kaplan
There is a lot of plastic in the world’s oceans.
It coagulates into great floating “
garbage patches” that cover large swaths of the Pacific.
It washes up on urban beaches and
remote islands,
tossed about in the waves and transported across incredible distances
before arriving, unwanted, back on land.
It has wound up in the stomachs
of more than half the world’s
sea turtles and nearly all of its
marine birds, studies say.
And if it was
bagged up and arranged across all of the world’s shorelines, we could build a veritable plastic barricade between ourselves and the sea.
But
that quantity pales in comparison with the amount that the World
Economic Forum expects will be floating into the oceans by the middle of
the century.
If we keep producing (and failing to properly
dispose of) plastics at predicted rates, plastics in the ocean will
outweigh fish pound for pound in 2050, the nonprofit foundation said in a
report Tuesday.
According
to the report, worldwide use of plastic has increased 20-fold in the
past 50 years, and it is expected to double again in the next 20 years.
By 2050, we’ll be making more than three times as much plastic stuff as
we did in 2014.
Trajectories of reported and reconstructed marine fisheries catches 1950–2010
Contrast between the world’s marine fisheries catches, assembled by FAO from voluntary submissions of its member countries (‘reported’) and that of the catch ‘reconstructed’ to include all fisheries known to exist.
Caption and image via Pauly and Zeller 2016. (Nature)
Meanwhile,
humans do a terrible job of making sure those products are reused or
otherwise disposed of: About a third of all plastics produced escape
collection systems, only to wind up floating in the sea or the stomach
of some unsuspecting bird.
That amounts to about 8 million metric tons a
year — or, as Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia put it to
The Washington Post in February, “Five bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline in the world.”
The
report came a day before the start of the glitzy annual meeting
arranged by the World Economic Forum to discuss the global economy.
This
year’s meeting in Davos, Switzerland, is centered on what the WEF terms
“the fourth industrial revolution” — the boom in high-tech areas like
robotics and biotechnology — and its effect on the widening gulf between
the wealthy and the world’s poor.
But the
plastic situation — fairly low-tech and more than a century old at this
point — is a reminder that we still haven’t quite gotten the better of
some of the problems left over from the first few “industrial
revolutions.”
source : World Economic Forum
According
to the report, more than 70 percent of the plastic we produce is either
put in a landfill or lost to the world’s waterways and other
infrastructure.
Plastic production accounts for 6 percent of global oil
consumption (a number that will hit 20 percent in 2050) and 1 percent of
the global carbon budget (the maximum amount of emissions the world can
produce to prevent global temperatures from rising more than
2 degrees Celsius).
In 2050, the report says, we’ll be spending 15 percent of our carbon
budget on soda bottles, plastic grocery bags and the like.
Once
it gets washed into waterways, the damage caused by plastics’ presence
costs about $13 billion annually in losses for the tourism, shipping and
fishing industries.
It disrupts marine ecosystems and threatens food
security for people who depend on subsistence fishing.
Besides which, all that plastic in the water isn’t too great for the animals trying to live there.
The
data in the report comes from interviews with more than 180 experts and
analysis of some 200 studies on “the plastic economy.”
Plastic will outweigh fish in oceans by 2050
photo : Getty images
The report was published on the same day that a study came out in the journal
Nature Communications asserting
that the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization is drastically
underestimating the overfishing of the oceans.
The study,
from researchers
Daniel Pauly and
Dirk Zeller
of the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us project, found
that global catches between 1950 and 2010 were probably 50 percent
higher than previously thought — meaning that damage to the world’s fish
stocks was also much worse.
Overall, it was not a good news day for anyone with fins.
A scavenger collects plastic for recycling in a river covered with rubbish in Jakarta, Indonesia, April 20, 2009.
In a recent report, Ocean Conservancy claims that China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are spewing out as much as 60 percent of the plastic waste that enters the world’s seas.
But both reports gave some signs for optimism. Pauly and Zeller told
The Washington Post that
the underestimation of how much humans were fishing means the U.N. also
underestimated how much fish the oceans can provide.
“If we
rebuild stocks, we can rebuild to more than we thought before,” Pauly
said. “Basically, the oceans are more productive than we thought
before.”
And the World Economic Forum report, though not quite so
sunny, suggests that there are ways to offset all this plastic we’re
making and discarding.
Countries can implement incentives to collect
waste and recycle it, use more efficient or reusable packaging and
improve infrastructure so that less trash slips through the system and
into the seas.
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