By 2050, more plastic than fish in the ocean
All those bags and bottles amount to $13B in losses to tourism, shipping, fishing
There is a lot of plastic in the world’s oceans.
It coagulates into great floating “garbage patches” that cover large swaths of the Pacific. It washes up by the truckful on urban beaches and remote islands, tossed about in the waves and transported across incredible distances before arriving, unwanted, back on land. It has wound up in the stomachs of more than half the world’s sea turtles and nearly all of its marine birds, studies claim. And if it were bagged up and arranged across all the world’s shorelines, we could build a veritable plastic barricade between ourselves and the sea.
But that quantity pales in comparison to the amount the World Economic Forum expects will be floating in the oceans by the middle of the century.
If we keep producing (and failing to properly dispose of ) plastics at predicted rates, plastics in the ocean will outweigh fish pound for pound in 2050, the non-profit foundation said in a report Tuesday.
According to the report, worldwide use of plastic has increased 20-fold in the past 50 years, and it is expected to double again in the next 20 years. By 2050, we’ll be making more than three times as much plastic stuff as we did in 2014.
Meanwhile, humans do a terrible job of making sure those products are reused or otherwise disposed of: About one-third of all plastics produced escape collection systems, only to wind up floating in the sea or the stomach of some unsuspecting bird. That amounts to about 8 million tonnes a year — or, as Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia put it to the Washington Post last February, “Five bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline in the world.”
The report came a day before the start of the annual meeting arranged by the World Economic Forum. The meeting in Davos, Switzerland, is centred this year on “the fourth In- dustrial Revolution” — the boom in high-tech areas like robotics and biotechnology — and its effect on the widening gulf between the world’s wealthy and poor.
But the plastic situation — fairly low-tech and more than a century old at this point — is a reminder we still haven’t quite gotten the better of some of the problems left over from the first few “industrial revolutions.”
According to the report, more than 70 per cent of the plastic we produce is either landfilled or lost into the world’s waterways and other infrastructure. Plastic production ac- counts for 6 per cent of global oil consumption (a number that will hit 20 per cent in 2050) and 1per cent of the global carbon budget (the maximum amount of emissions the world can produce to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2 C). In 2050, the report says, we’ll be spending 15 per cent of our carbon budget on soda bottles, plastic grocery bags and the like.
Once it gets washed into waterways, the damage caused by plastics’ presence costs about $13 billion (U.S.) annually in losses for the tourism, shipping and fishing industries. It disrupts marine ecosystems and threatens food security for people who depend on subsistence fishing.
The data in the report comes from interviews with more than 180 experts and analysis of some 200 studies on “the plastic economy.”
The report was published on the same day that a study came out in the journal Nature Communications asserting that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization is drastically underestimating the overfishing of the oceans. The study, from researchers Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller of the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us project, found that global catches between 1950 and 2010 were probably 50 per cent higher than previously thought, meaning that damage to the world’s fish stocks was also much worse.
Overall, it was not a good news day for anyone with fins.
But both reports gave some signs for optimism. Pauly and Zeller said the underestimation of how much humans were fishing means the UN also underestimated how much fish the oceans can provide.
“If we rebuild stocks, we can rebuild to more than we thought before,” Pauly said. “Basically, the oceans are more productive than we thought before.” And the World Economic Forum report, though not quite so sunny, suggests that there are ways to offset all this plastic we’re making and discarding. Countries can implement incentives to collect waste and recycle it, use more efficient or reusable packaging and improve infrastructure so that less trash slips through the system and ends up in the seas.