Five Trillion Pieces of Microplastic Ocean Garbage Estimated In Latest Study

According to the recent paper published in the journal PLOS One, an estimated of more than five trillion pieces of garbage weighing nearly 269,000 tonnes, are floating in the world’s oceans.

Using a data collected by scientists from the US, France, Chile, Australia and New Zealand, and taken from 24 expeditions over a six-year period to 2013, the results showed that the Northern Hemisphere ocean regions contain 55.6% of particles and 56.8% of plastic mass compared to the Southern Hemisphere, with the North Pacific containing 37.9% and 35.8% by particle count and mass, respectively. In the Southern Hemisphere the Indian Ocean appears to have a greater particle count and weight than the South Atlantic and South Pacific oceans combined.

The vast majority of these plastics were small fragments, aka microplastics (~0.33 mm). Most small microplastics were fragments resulting from the breakdown of larger plastic items.

Plastic pollution is moved throughout the world’s oceans by the prevailing winds and surface currents.

The study notes that the estimates are highly conservative, and may be considered minimum estimates. The estimates of macroplastic are based on a limited inventory of ocean observations, and would be vastly improved with standardization of methods and more observations. They also do not account for the potentially massive amount of plastic present on shorelines, on the seabed, suspended in the water column, and within organisms. In fact, the larger weight of macroplastic relative to meso- and microplastic, and the global estimate of floating plastic weight relative to the weight of plastic produced annually, indicates that the sea surface is likely not the ultimate sink for plastic pollution.

Though significant proportions of meso- and macroplastics may be stranding on coastlines (where some of it could be recovered), removal of microplastics, colonized by biota or mixed with organic debris, becomes economically and ecologically prohibitive, if not completely impractical to recover. This leaves sequestration in sediment the likely resting place for plastic pollution after a myriad of biological impacts along the way, thus reinforcing the need for pre-consumer and post-consumer waste stream solutions to reverse this growing environmental problem.

Reference Citation: Eriksen M, Lebreton LCM, Carson HS, Thiel M, Moore CJ, et al. (2014) Plastic Pollution in the World’s Oceans: More than 5 Trillion Plastic Pieces Weighing over 250,000 Tons Afloat at Sea. PLoS ONE 9(12): e111913. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0111913