Thursday March 21, 2024
Newsweek —
When you think of plastic in the oceans, you might think of the Pacific Garbage Patch being the worst of our problems.
However, it turns out there are many more areas of pollution throughout the Pacific that contain just as much plastic and are therefore just as much of an issue, a new paper in the journal Environmental Science & Technology reveals.
There are large numbers of plastic waste and microplastics gathered across the Pacific, including in a remote marine protected area northwest of Hawaii known as Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, indicating that plastic might be more distributed in the oceans than we first thought.
“Plastics in the ocean are a serious problem. Every year, millions of tons of plastics end up in the ocean via rivers and wind as well as from shipping and fishing—and it remains there. It is still difficult to assess the consequences for the ocean ecosystem,” study author Annika Jahnke, an environmental chemistry professor at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) said in a statement.