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Trashing Our Oceans
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Reuters, 11.5.06
There is a vast vortex of plastic trash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, threatening sea creatures that get tangled in it, eat it or ride on it, a new report says.
The report, "Plastic Debris in the World's Oceans," by international environmental group Greenpeace, said at least 267 species are known to have suffered from entanglement or ingestion of marine debris. Because plastic doesn't break down the way organic material does, ocean currents and tides have carried it thousands of miles to an area between Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast, according to the study.
The new report comes days after the journal Science projected that Earth's stocks of fish and seafood would collapse by 2048 if trends in overfishing and pollution continue.
Reuters article
East Anglian Daily Times - Suffolk,England,UK, 3.28.06
A RISING tide of plastic bags is littering East Anglia's beaches and endangering wildlife, according to a report published today.
The report, by the Marine Conservation Society, is based on surveys carried out in September last year and suggests that more litter was dropped on the region's beaches than in 2004.
Andrea Crump, the society's litter projects co-ordinator, said: “It is disappointing but the situation in East Anglia and the rest of the South-East of England is considerably better than the South-West where much more litter is dropped.”
East Anglia is included in the regional results for the South East which show that an average of 1,847 items of litter were found along every kilometre of the 87 beaches surveyed.
http://www.eadt.co.uk/content/eadt/news/story.aspx?brand=EADOnlin
The Scotsman, 3.28.06
THE number of plastic bags littering Scotland's beaches - potentially lethal to wildlife - increased by 41 per cent last year, against a national increase of 17 per cent.
Thousands of Marine Conservation Society (MCS) volunteers on a check-and-clean exercise last September also found 66 cigarette stubs for every kilometre of Scottish beach, a 273 per cent increase on the year. They were among the 330,000 items found on more than 170km of Britain's coastline by 3,980 volunteers - on average a plastic bag, lollipop stick, cigarette butt, cotton bud, fish box or burger carton every half-metre.
That total was a modest 4 per cent increase on the year. But in a decade, the count has almost doubled...
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=478272006
Yorkshire Post Today, 3.27.06
...Plastic bags also continued their relentless invasion of the shoreline and the density of plastic bags found went up by 17 per cent from Beachwatch 2004...
http://www.yorkshiretoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?sectionid=55&ar
Sydney Morning Herald, 3.5.06
DISCARDED slippery dips and unwanted underwear were on the inventory after yesterday's Clean Up Australia Day, at which volunteers in NSW alone filled the equivalent of 730 skips.
More than 300,000 people took part in the collective clean-up throughout the state, part of a national army of 700,000 for what has become the country's biggest annual community event.
The day netted 9000 tonnes of rubbish, said the chairman and founder, Ian Kiernan.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/03/05/1141493548892.html
U.S. Newswire (press release) - Washington,DC,USA, 8.15.05
YARMOUTH PORT, Mass., Aug. 15 /U.S. Newswire/ -- On June 17 a sailing vessel carrying a cargo of mattresses and more than two tons of plastic bags drifted into reefs and mangroves and sunk off the shore of Watamu, Kenya -- endangering a pristine marine environment and sea turtle habitat in the process.
The area is home to several species of endangered turtles including the Green, Hawksbill and olive Ridley. Sea turtles will eat plastic bags floating in the water because they resemble their favorite food, jellyfish.
"Plastic bags in a marine habitat are dangerous to sea turtles when they accidentally ingest them," says Anand Ramanathan, International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) Emergency Relief's operations manager. "These plastic bags are usually not biodegradable and when ingested can cause suffocation and reduced gastric motility and death."
As the debris drifted inland, IFAW partnered with the Watamu Turtle Watch project (WTW) to protect the sea turtle nesting habitat. Bags were littered over a 2 km area of the Kenyan beach. It was estimated that it would take several months to clean up the debris.
Instead, it took several weeks. WTW mobilized more than 4,000 student volunteers to help with the clean up. Local businesses and residents also pitched in offering food for the volunteers and refuse sacks for the plastic bags. Now the beach is, amazingly, almost back to its original condition.
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=51698
BBC News, 3.22.05
Litter on Welsh beaches reached a record high in 2004, according to a major seaside cleanliness survey. Wales had the highest density of beach litter recorded in the Marine Conservation Society's Beachwatch initiative. The society has been monitoring beaches for 14 years. It said litter had more than doubled in UK in the past decade. It is campaigning for new laws to control the growth in beach pollution, particularly discarded plastic…
Bags and small plastic pieces can entangle marine animals causing them to drown. They can also be swallowed by marine animals like whales and turtles, causing them to starve….
The society has called on the UK Government to introduce new laws placing a tax on plastic bags…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/4369709.stm
Sunday Herald, 12.18.04
Shocking study supports demands for charges on disposable carrier bags: Almost every seabird in the world has waste plastic inside it. The stomachs of fulmars in the North Sea, storm petrels in the Antarctic and albatrosses in Hawaii have all been found to contain plastic discarded by consumers or industry.
http://www.sundayherald.com/46765
INQ7.net, Phillippines, 10.12.04
THE SIGHT of a plastic bag floating in the waters was a prize catch for me. I swam towards it and bagged the trash in my mesh bag... Most of the trash we gathered underwater were plastic bags. Some of them were already stuck to the corals, which posed a problem.
http://news.inq7.net/lifestyle/index.php?index=1&story_id=14755
The Herald (U.K.), 4.13.04
PLASTIC bags may have been to blame for the death of a whale washed up on a Hebridean coast earlier this year. Wildlife watchers are waiting for the results of a post-mortem examination to find out exactly what killed the Cuvier's beaked whale found on Mull in February, but yesterday they revealed its stomach was filled with polythene bags.
Cuvier's beaked whales are rare visitors to the west of Scotland. They had only been seen alive twice in the past 25 years before the Mull incident.
Sorry! Article no longer available.
The Scotsman (U.K.), 4.13.04
WILDLIFE in the North Sea is increasingly falling victim to human waste, with virtually all dead sea-birds found to have eaten litter carried in the water, according to a new study.
Scientists measuring the amount of waste found in fulmars discovered that 96 per cent of the birds had fragments of plastic in their stomachs.
The figure was almost double the amount discovered in the early 1980s, the researchers said. Environmental groups - which are backing an MSP’s bid to introduce a levy on plastic bags in shops in Scotland - branded the figures "truly shocking".
http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=412272004
World Resources Institute, 3.5.04
In late September last year, thousands of people from more than a hundred countries throughout the world spent a Saturday at the beach. Instead of building sandcastles and playing in the ocean, however, these people were cleaning up trash and working to protect the coasts.
Combing more than 12,400 miles of shoreline, volunteers in 2002 collected 8.22 million pounds of trash, about the weight of 37 blue whales. The 100,000 participants from the Philippines, Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Palau and Papua New Guinea picked up over 1.3 million pounds of debris from the coastline and underwater.
Number one on the top ten list of debris items collected was cigarette filters. Volunteers gathered more than 1.6 million of the filters, 1 million plastic bags, and close to 50,000 pieces of fishing line.
Sorry! Article no longer available.
The Herald, 11.12.03
A survey and clean-up of 229 UK beaches - 43 of them in Scotland - by the Marine Conservation Society recorded a total of 241,285 items of litter in a two-day clean-up.
The society said the case for statutory recognition of beach litter as a serious form of pollution now was unanswerable and called for local authorities to be properly funded to take responsibility for ...
Sorry! Article no longer available.
Globalgreening.com, 2.27.03
Skaife Launches Anti Litter Campaign - Plastic bags in streams targeted.
Melbourne - 27 February 2003 - Champion Australian racing driver Mark Skaife and senior Federal Liberal MP Bruce Billson have joined forces to launch the "Clean the Stream" anti-litter program in the lead-up to the Foster's Australian Grand Prix to be held next week in Melbourne's picturesque Albert Park.
Skaife, the reigning Australian V8 Supercar champion, won last year's Bathurst 1000 touring car race in his Holden Racing Team Commodore despite an overheating engine caused by plastic bag litter blocking his car's radiator cooling intakes.
He has since been critical of the effects on the environment and wildlife of litter of all types, including plastic bags.
http://www.medialaunch.com.au/159/
Algalita Marine Research Foundation, 11.12.02
Plastic in the ocean may be one of the most alarming of today's environmental stories. Plastic, like diamonds, are forever! Because plastics do NOT biodegrade, no naturally occurring organisms can break these polymers down. Instead, plastic goes through a process called photodegredation, where sunlight breaks down plastic into smaller and smaller pieces until there is only plastic dust. But always plastic remains a polymer. When plastic debris meets the sea it can remain for centuries causing untold havoc in ecosystems.
http://www.algalita.org/pelagic_plastic.html
U.S. News & World Report, 11.4.02
An armada of plastic rides the waves, and sea creatures are suffering. One brilliant summer morning in 2000, the small private research vessel Alguita discovered a 10-mile-wide flotilla of the disposable sacks, an estimated 6 million of them destined for Taco Bells around the country, bobbing more than 1,000 miles west of the Ventura store. “We were out in the middle of the Pacific, where you would think the ocean would be pristine,” recalls the Alguita’s captain, Charles Moore. “And instead, we get the Exxon Valdez of plastic-bag spills.”
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Trashing-Oceans-Plastic4no
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