Plastic to outweigh fish in the ‘oceans’

‘Shockingly widespread’

LONDON, June 8, (RTRS): Fresh from a gruelling sea journey of more than seven hours negotiating 24 miles (38.6 km) of the world’s busiest shipping lanes on a paddle board, Lizzie Carr is on a mission.

She recently became the first woman to cross the English Channel solo on the flimsy stand-up craft, to draw attention to the “global plastic crisis”.

From fishing lines to flip flops, there are more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the world’s oceans, according to a 2014 study published in a Public Library of Science journal.

Plastic degrades over time into tiny particles known as microplastics which can be ingested by marine life, together with plastic microbeads used in toiletries and other household products, harming the food chain and environment.

“When you hear... about microplastics and microbeads, there’s still a lot of confusion around what that means, and how we’ve contributed to that,” Carr told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Every four miles along the trip from England to northern France, she collected water samples for microplastics analysis by Plymouth University.

Carr has also launched #PlasticPatrol campaigns, combining free paddle-board lessons with clean-up operations of waterways, canals and harbours across Britain, to encourage local communities to get onboard.

She is now developing a phone app and a crowd-sourced map to encourage the public to photograph plastic pollution to identify trends and hot spots. “It’s about putting the power into the hands of the people,” she said.

Plastic debris has been found littering the oceans from the North to the South Poles and around remote Pacific islands. But only 1 percent is thought to be floating on the sea surface - the remaining 99 percent is scattered along coast lines, buried deep in sea-beds or hidden in the guts of marine creatures, said Erik van Sebille, oceanographer and associate professor at Utrecht University.

Marine experts fear there could be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050, measured by weight, according to a factsheet from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a UK-based charity working to end waste in the economy.

“(Plastic) is shockingly widespread - it literally is almost everywhere in the ocean, it’s omnipresent,” said van Sebille, who studies how ocean currents move plastic around.

Internationally, significant efforts are being made to remove plastic from the world’s water bodies.

Meanwhile, customers must pay for plastic shopping bags in some countries like Britain and Ireland, while France has banned them outright, adding disposable plastic cups and plates from 2020.

Kenya is also bringing in a complete ban on household and commercial plastic packaging after a successful grassroots social media campaign.

Carr