Oceans Filled with Plastic Trash – Changing Marine Ecology

31/10/201231/10/2012 Stephen 1 Must Read, BIRDS, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, Global Issues and Perspectives, News, OCEAN, Pollution and Toxics, WILDLIFE Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Indian Ocean, Marine biology, Marine debris, North Pacific Gyre, Ocean gyre, Pacific Ocean, plastic, Plastic bag, Plastic bottle, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, single-use plastic, trash

Pieces of plastic debris found in the oceans are smaller than many people think. Most are measured in millimeters. Credit- Sea Education Association — Tiny bits of plastic now found throughout the world’s oceans

Ban single-use plastic: bags, bottles, cups etc, scientists say

By Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 10, 2012 (IPS)

Plastic trash is altering the very ecology of the world’s oceans. Insects called “sea skaters”, a relative of pond water striders, are now laying their eggs on the abundant fingernail-sized pieces of plastic floating in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean instead of relying on a passing seabird feather or bit of driftwood.

With an average of 10 bits of plastic per cubic metre of seawater, there are now plenty of places for sea skaters to lay eggs in a remote region known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, 1,500 kilometres west of North America. Not surprisingly, egg densities have soared, a new study has found.

“We’re seeing changes in this marine insect that can be directly attributed to the plastic,” says Miriam Goldstein, study co-author and graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

This is the first proof that plastics in the open ocean are affecting marine invertebrates (animals without a backbone), which will have consequences for the entire marine food web.

“We simply don’t have the data to know what those consequences will be. It is a very remote region of the ocean, hard to get to and expensive to conduct research,” Goldstein told IPS.

The North Pacific Gyre is one of five large systems of rotating currents in the world’s oceans. It has become better known in recent years as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”. It has at least 100 times more plastic today than it did in 1972, according to the study published this week in the journal Biology Letters.

“There were no hard surfaces before in the North Pacific Gyre other than the occasional feather and piece of wood,” says Miriam Goldstein, study co-author and a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

“The ocean looks pretty normal out there in the gyre. There is no floating island of trash as some people imagine,” Goldstein told IPS. Continue reading →

Fight Against Marine Garbage Runs Into Plastics Lobby – Cousteau “shocked” by state of oceans

31/10/201127/06/2017 Stephen 1 Must Read, Biodiversity, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, Global Issues and Perspectives, News, OCEAN, Pollution and Toxics American Chemistry Council, Hawaiian Islands, Honolulu, Jacques Cousteau, Jean-Michel Cousteau, Pacific garbage patch, Pacific gyre, plastic, Plastic bag, United Nations Environment Programme

This is my final article in the Trashing the Ocean series. It looks at the results of the first major international effort to deal with the issue in 11 years. It’s less than satisfying effort largely due to the plastics lobby. One of the unofficial solutions: buy local and create local, sustainable communities says the guy who ‘discovered’ the pacific garbage patch. — Stephen

There are three to six kilogrammes of marine trash for every kilogramme of plankton…. California nearly became the first U.S. state to ban plastic bags, but a multi-million-dollar lobby effort by industry killed the proposed legislation

By Stephen Leahy

HONOLULU, Hawaii, U.S., Mar 28, 2011 (IPS)

Every day, billions of plastic bags and bottles are discarded, and every day, millions of these become plastic pollution, fouling the oceans and endangering marine life.

No one wants this, but there is wide disagreement about how to stop it.

“Every time I stick my nose in the water, I am shocked. I see less and less fish and more and more garbage,” said Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of the legendary marine ecologist Jacques Cousteau, who has spent four decades making documentaries and educating people about the oceans.

On trips to the remote and uninhabited northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Cousteau found miles and miles of plastic bottles, cigarette lighters, television tubes, spray cans, broken toys, and thousands of other pieces of plastic on the beaches and thousands of tonnes of derelict fishing nets in the reefs.

“We are using the oceans as a universal sewer,” he told some 440 participants from the plastics manufacturing, food and beverage sectors, environmental organisations, scientists and policy-makers from over 35 countries at the Fifth International Marine Debris Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, which ended Mar. 25.

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Humanity is risking its own health and survival in treating the oceans this way, Cousteau said. The oceans are the source of life on our planet. Through evaporation, oceans are the most important source of fresh water while phytoplankton generates at least half the oxygen we breathe.

“No one is away from the ocean. We are all intimately connected by every breath we take,” he said.

Continue reading →

The New Campus Cool: Water Fountains for Drinking – Uni bans bottled water

10/09/2010 Stephen ECOLOGY, economics, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, Health bottled water, fountain, ottawa, plastic

Water tastes much better in a steel or ceramic container than plastic. And it is a hell of lot healthier. See my previous posts about various studies about plastic container – Plastic Bottles Leach Estrogen – ‘Healthy’ Mineral Water Contaminated by Plastic and Bring Back Glass – Ban BPA (bisphenol A) Plastic Containers Now

Not to mention Drowning the Oceans in Plastic Trash (Pacific Garbage Patch)

So big green thumbs up to the University of Ottawa and its student federation announcement — Stephen

No More Sales of Bottled Water

Students, faculty, staff and other members of the uOttawa community are encouraged to find alternatives to bottled water, such as filling up cups, glasses and re-usable bottles at the nearest fountain or tap on campus.

Since 2008, the University of Ottawa has invested over $100,000 to revitalize its water fountains. An additional $75,000 will be invested next year.

The improvements include gooseneck fountains for quick and easy filling of re-usable bottles, new fountains near food service outlets, upgrades to existing fountains. The fountains are wheelchair accessible, have increased waster pressure and better refrigeration.

via University of Ottawa marks the end bottled water sales on its campus | News Releases & Announcements | University of Ottawa Media Room.

Drowning the Oceans in Plastic Trash (Pacific Garbage Patch)

28/08/200908/08/2011 Stephen ENVIRONMENT, OCEAN, Pollution and Toxics, water, WILDLIFE Algalita, Garbage patch, Pacific garbage patch, Pacific gyre, plastic, World Environment Day

By Stephen Leahy

UPDATE: The “Pacific Garbage Patch” is really a “plastic soup” where the plastic is distributed throughout the water column in area more than twice the size of Texas. See here for more

[FYI: I’m an independent journalist who supports his family and the public interest writing articles about important environmental issues. ]

Wired 06.05.04

Marine trash, mainly plastic, is killing more than a million seabirds and 100,000 mammals and sea turtles each year, said U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a statement.

Plastic bags, bottle tops and polystyrene foam coffee cups are often found in the stomachs of dead sea lions, dolphins, sea turtles and others. The implications have many at the conference concerned. Last April, Dutch scientists released a report on litter in the North Sea and found that fulmars, a type of seagull, had an average of 30 pieces of plastic in their stomachs.

In the sea, big pieces of plastic look like jellyfish or squid, while small pieces look like fish eggs, says Bill Macdonald, vice president of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a Long Beach, California-based nonprofit environmental organization.

Macdonald, who is also an underwater filmmaker, said he has seen albatross parents fly huge distances to feed their young a deadly diet of plastic bottle caps, lighters and light sticks.

“The sheer volumes of plastic in oceans are staggering,” he said. In recent years Algalita researchers have sampled a huge area in the middle of the North Pacific, and found six pounds of plastic for every pound of algae.

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Continue reading →

Plastic Bottles Leach Estrogen – ‘Healthy’ Mineral Water Contaminated by Plastic

26/03/200903/05/2009 Stephen Food, Health, Pollution and Toxics estrogen, plastic

An analysis of commercially available mineral waters in Germany reveals estrogenic compounds leaching out of the plastic packaging into the water. What’s worse these chemicals are potent and affected the development of invertebrate embryos. Estrogen contamination was found in 78% of waters in plastic bottles and waters bottled in composite packaging.

“We must have identified just the tip of the iceberg in that plastic packaging may be a major source of xenohormone* contamination of many other edibles. Our findings provide an insight into the potential exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals due to unexpected sources of contamination.” — write the study authors in the journal of Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

*man-made substance that has a hormone-like effect

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