Plastic far from fantastic and issue now becoming drastic

The world produces 300 million tonnes of plastic every year and that global output is soaring. A lot of plastic waste ends up in landfills, but huge amounts wash into or are blown out to sea.

There it can persist for years, floating on or below the surface, even littering the floors of the deepest ocean trenches.

Colossal amounts of plastic waste are drawn into five huge whirlpools (otherwise known as ‘‘gyres’’) in the world’s oceans.

There are two in the Atlantic Ocean, two in the Pacific Ocean and one in the centre of the Indian Ocean.

Scientists trying to put numbers on the extent of floating debris in our oceans find that it’s a hard job, expensive and time consuming.

Nevertheless, the 5 Gyres institute in Santa Monica, California, reckons more than five trillion pieces of plastic float on the sea surface.

Small particles make up most of the count but large pieces account for the greatest weight.

About 640,000 tonnes of lost or discarded fishing equipment make up 10 per cent of the world’s marine plastic waste – a mix of buoys, lines, ropes and fishing nets, one weighing in at 11.5 tonnes.

These ghost nets continue to trap and kill fish, turtles, seals and birds long after being lost or discarded at sea.

Plastic bags, buckets and jandals pollute the seas, along with 500 billion plastic drink bottles.

Smaller ‘‘microparticles’’ on or below the surface do a lot of damage. A recent survey revealed that 90 per cent of seabirds (fulmars) washed ashore in the North Sea had plastic particles in their guts and experiments show these tiny fragments reduce oyster reproduction.

Kamilo beach is on the tip of Hawaii’s Big Island.

Ocean currents and eddies carpet its beaches with enough plastic waste to make it one of the dirtiest beaches in the world. Plastic bottles, jandals, toothbrushes and other junk amount to 30 per cent of the weight of the beach.

Eventually the plastic will become buried in the sand to be fossilised in the sandstone.

It will mark the beginnings of a new geological era so that, a thousand or a million years hence, geologists will date the rock by its plastic inclusions.

A friend of mine suggests we call this new period the ‘‘Plasticine Era’’.

Can anything be done to reduce the problem?

Experts say the scale of the problem is so vast and pervasive it’s too late to do anything about the material already in the sea.

They suggest all we can do is stop using supermarket plastic bags, stop drinking bottled water and drinking coffee from plastic cups.

Optimistically, an organisation known as The Ocean Cleanup hopes to deploy a 100km floating barrier to clean up the North Pacific gyre in 14 years’ time. A prototype is now being tested.

❚ I must correct an error in last week’s column about the autistic.

Over the past 30 years, the incidence of the condition in the United States has increased to one in 68 children from one in 130 (not one in 30 as I said).