Every day millions of plastic bottles are thrown away without a thought and many end up in our oceans. And now scientists say it could be getting into our bodies.
Research seen exclusively by Sky News suggests people who eat seafood are absorbing tiny pieces of plastic into their bloodstream with unknown effects on their health.
Sky News has launched an Ocean Rescue campaign with an
excellent 45-minute film that puts the serious plastic problem into
perspective.
“The ocean where life on Earth began is
being turned into a synthetic soup.”
With these words, Sky News science
correspondent Thomas Moore embarks on a journey to explore the immense
problem of plastic pollution.
The result is a 45-minute documentary film
called “A Plastic Tide,” released January 25 as part of Sky News’ Ocean Rescue campaign.
Moore
starts in Mumbai, India, where a city beach once used for swimming and
playing is now completely covered in plastic garbage.
Surprisingly, it’s
not from direct littering, but from the ocean tide; every day brings a
fresh layer of garbage, which could come from anywhere on the planet.
From
there, Moore heads to London to visit the city sewer system, where
plastic waste such as syringes, cotton buds, sanitary products, and the
omnipresent wet wipes cause serious blockages and are flushed out into
the Thames River.
(People think ‘flushable’ wet wipes will dissolve, but
they’re made of plastic and will last for years.) Volunteers haul 500
tons of trash out of the Thames each year, most of it plastic. It’s sobering to think that no beach or shoreline is unaffected by this pollution.
Graphic: Conrad Walters. Source: NCEAS
Due to the ocean currents and waterways that flow into those oceans,
plastic waste that’s tossed in Australia or Japan could easily end up in
Scotland.
This is the tragic case of Arrochar, a small harbour town at
the end of Scotland’s sea lochs that receives endless amounts of garbage
on its beaches.
Tourists, whose numbers are shrinking as a result,
wonder why the locals live in such filth, assuming that the
plastic-strewn beach is the result of littering, when it’s really a
matter of currents.
There was a time in the mid-nineteenth century
when scientists thought plastic would bring tremendous benefits – and
it did, in some ways.
But the problem is not with the plastics that make
our lives better, such as medical supplies and hygiene.
The problem
lies with single-use plastics, or those which are thrown out within a year of production. Approximately
320 million tons of plastic are manufactured annually, but 40 percent
of this is single-use items. Only 5 percent of plastics are effectively
recycled, which means that the remaining 95 percent – almost all the
plastic ever made – remains on the planet.
Much of it
ends up the oceans and breaks down, over decades of sunlight and
pounding waves, into microplastics that measure 5 millimeters or less.
These are ingested by shrimp, plankton, fish, birds, turtles, and other
sea animals, creating an insidious cycle of contamination that we’re
only just starting to understand.
Plastic beach
Profession Colin Janssen from the University of Ghent in Belgium
estimates that the average Belgian, who enjoys mussels and other
seafood, eats up to 11,000 pieces of microplastic per year.
Our children could eat even more, with estimates as high as 750,000 microparticles per year by the end of this century.
Janssen’s
studies of mussels have found that microplastics do not always stay in
the stomach.
They can be absorbed into the bloodstream, which could have
frightening repercussions for human health.
Janssen told The Telegraph:
“Where
do [microplastics] go? Are they encapsulated by tissue and forgotten
about by the body, or are they causing inflammation or doing other
things? Are chemicals leaching out of these plastics and then causing
toxicity? We don’t know and actually we do need to know.”
Moore
pays a visit to Dr. Jan Van Fragenen in the Netherlands, who performs
post-mortems on seabirds who have died from plastic ingestion.
The
thought of countless birds dying from startvation, caused by an
artificial sense of satiety brought on by plastic lodged in their
stomachs, is awful; and the quantity of plastic in their bodies is
horrifying.
Moore watches Fragenen remove 18 pieces of plastic
from one fulmar’s stomach weighing just over 0.5 gram.
Scaled to a
human, this would be the equivalent of a lunchbox of trash.
The bigger
the bird, the bigger the pieces are.
Fragenen showed an albatross whose
stomach contained a toothbrush, a fishing line floater, and a golf ball,
among other things.
The film does an excellent job of depicting
the severity of the problem and of providing various viewpoints from all
around the globe, emphasizing our interconnectedness and shared
dependence on the health of our oceans.
It ends on a hopeful note,
depicting beach cleanup activist Afroz Shah hard at work in Mumbai.
After 62 weeks of cleaning with a team of volunteers, the beach that
Moore initially visited has reappeared from beneath its layer of trash.
The report projects the oceans will contain at least 937 million tons of plastic and 895 million tons of fish by 2050.
Part of the reason is that plastic use has increased 20-fold in the last 50 years, and it's continuing to rise. But we also don't reuse nearly as many plastics as we could, causing them to go into landfills that can then pollute the oceans. The report helps quantify just how much plastic this is: It's "equivalent to dumping the contents of one garbage truck into the ocean every minute." But we could prevent this much plastic from ever entering the ocean. For example, only 14% of plastic packaging is recycled, and it's the biggest source of plastic pollution in the oceans, according to the report.
“Cleaning up rubbish is addictive,”
Shah says with a grin, and his volunteers nod enthusiastically.
The
group insists that the mindset is gradually changing as they educate
people and set an example.
“It may take a generation before we’re used
to not throwing plastic away,” but Shah is certain that day will come.
It cannot come soon enough.
French skipper Francis Joyon smashed the record for the fastest sail around the world by more than four days when he won the Jules Verne Trophy today.
Joyon and teammates Clement Surtel, Alex Pella, Bernard Stamm, Gwenole
Gahinet, and Sebastien Audigane (including shore navigator & 5 times
Volvo Ocean Racer Marcel van Triest) crossed the finish line off the
French island of Ouessant just before 9 a.m. local time, in their maxi
trimaran Idec Sport.
They took 40 days, 23 hours, 30 minutes, 30 seconds.
IDEC Sport training
The veteran navigator beat by more than four days the record set in January 2012 by fellow Frenchman Loick Peyron.
With a crew of 13, Peyron set a time of 45 days, 13 hours, 42 minutes and 53 seconds when they won the Jules Verne Trophy on a 40 metres craft.
Joyon averaged 26.85 knots, the equivalent of almost 50 kph, over 26,412 miles.
Relief was his first thought at the finish.
He said in a radio message they spent the final night in rough sea conditions.
"It's the result of long years of work," Joyon said.
"The sea was very tough, the boat was being banged around, we could not rest at all. The night was very hectic."
Sailing at 40 knots on the 1st of January
The Jules Verne Trophy, which is named after the writer's famous novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, is open to any type of boats without restriction and takes skippers around the Cape of Good Hope, Cape Leeuwin and Cape Horn.
Underwater robots developed by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego offer scientists an extraordinary new tool to study ocean currents and the tiny creatures they transport.
Swarms of these underwater robots helped answer some basic questions about the most abundant life forms in the ocean—plankton.
Underwater robots developed by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego offer scientists an extraordinary new tool to study ocean currents and the tiny creatures they transport.
Swarms of these underwater robots helped answer some basic questions about the most abundant life forms in the ocean—plankton.
Scripps research oceanographer Jules Jaffe designed and built the miniature autonomous underwater explorers, or M-AUEs, to study small-scale environmental processes taking place in the ocean.
The ocean-probing instruments are equipped with temperature and other sensors to measure the surrounding ocean conditions while the robots “swim” up and down to maintain a constant depth by adjusting their buoyancy.
The M-AUEs could potentially be deployed in swarms of hundreds to thousands to capture a three-dimensional view of the interactions between ocean currents and marine life.
A group shot of the M-AUEs in Jaffe’s lab, awaiting deployment. Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography
In a new study published in the Jan. 24 issue of the journal Nature Communications, Jaffe and Scripps biological oceanographer Peter Franks deployed a swarm of 16 grapefruit-sized underwater robots programmed to mimic the underwater swimming behavior of plankton, the microscopic organisms that drift with the ocean currents.
The research study was designed to test theories about how plankton form dense patches under the ocean surface, which often later reveal themselves at the surface as red tides.
“These patches might work like planktonic singles bars,” said Franks, who has long suspected that the dense aggregations could aid feeding, reproduction, and protection from predators.
Two decades ago Franks published a mathematical theory predicting that swimming plankton would form dense patches when pushed around by internal waves—giant, slow-moving waves below the ocean surface.
Testing his theory would require tracking the movements of individual plankton—each smaller than a grain of rice—as they swam in the ocean, which is not possible using available technology.
Miniature autonomous underwater explorers A video of the deployment of the M-AUE drifters at sea.
Jaffe instead invented “robotic plankton” that drift with the ocean currents, but are programmed to move up and down by adjusting their buoyancy, imitating the movements of plankton.
A swarm of these robotic plankton was the ideal tool to finally put Franks’ mathematical theory to the test.
“The big engineering breakthroughs were to make the M-AUEs small, inexpensive, and able to be tracked continuously underwater,” said Jaffe.
The low cost allowed Jaffe and his team to build a small army of the robots that could be deployed in a swarm.
Tracking the individual M-AUEs was a challenge, as GPS does not work underwater.
A key component of the project was the development by researchers at UC San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute and Department of Computer Science and Engineering of mathematical techniques to use acoustic signals to track the M-AUE vehicles while they were submerged.
A graphic representation of the underwater explorers off the coast of Del Mar.
Credit: Jaffe Lab for Underwater Imaging/Scripps Oceanography
During a five-hour experiment, the Scripps researchers along with UC San Diego colleagues deployed a 300-meter (984-foot) diameter swarm of 16 M-AUEs programmed to stay 10-meters (33-feet) deep in the ocean off the coast of Torrey Pines, near La Jolla, Calif.
The M-AUEs constantly adjusted their buoyancy to move vertically against the currents created by the internal waves.
The three-dimensional location information collected every 12 seconds revealed where this robotic swarm moved below the ocean surface.
A video that illustrates the trajectories of the M-AUE vehicles over the 5 hour experiment that was performed offshore of Torrey Pines, San Diego, on Oct 1, 2013.
The results of the study were nearly identical to what Franks predicted.
The surrounding ocean temperatures fluctuated as the internal waves passed through the M-AUE swarm.
And, as predicted by Franks, the M-AUE location data showed that the swarm formed a tightly packed patch in the warm waters of the internal wave troughs, but dispersed over the wave crests.
“This is the first time such a mechanism has been tested underwater,” said Franks.
The experiment helped the researchers confirm that free-floating plankton can use the physical dynamics of the ocean—in this case internal waves—to increase their concentrations to congregate into swarms to fulfill their fundamental life needs.
“This swarm-sensing approach opens up a whole new realm of ocean exploration,” said Jaffe.
Augmenting the M-AUEs with cameras would allow the photographic mapping of coral habitats, or “plankton selfies,” according to Jaffe.
An animation of the high-frequency internal wave temperature anomalies moving through the M-AUE swarm during a deployment offshore of Torrey Pines, San Diego, on Oct 1, 2013.
The animation shows a plan view following the center of mass of the swarm.
The numbers show the locations of the individual M-AUEs.
The research team has hopes to build hundreds more of the miniature robots to study the movement of larvae between marine protected areas, monitor harmful red tide blooms, and to help track oil spills.
The onboard hydrophones that help track the M-AUEs underwater could also allow the swarm to act like a giant “ear” in the ocean, listening to and localizing ambient sounds in the ocean.
Jaffe, Franks, and their colleagues were awarded nearly $1 million from the National Science Foundation in 2009 to develop and test the new breed of ocean-probing instruments.
