300 billion fragments of plastic from Europe and US pollute Arctic

‘Dead end for plastic pollution’

HUNDREDS of billions of pieces of plastic are polluting the once-pristine waters of the Arctic, a study has found.

Rubbish from Europe and the US is being swept north by ocean currents, the scientists said.

They gave a ‘mid-range’ estimate of 300 billion pieces of plastic floating in the Arctic, weighing up to 1,200 tons. And large amounts could already have sunk to the ocean floor.

The team warned the pollution could harm fragile Arctic wildlife, as animals can mistake plastic for food and choke. Northern fulmar birds on the Arctic Svalbard islands north of Norway, for instance, have been found with high levels of plastic in their stomachs.

The international team of scientists said the north-eastern section of the Arctic Ocean ‘appeared as a dead end for the transport of plastic pollution’. Hundreds of thousands of bits of plastic were found per square mile in that part of the ocean in the survey by the Tara Oceans polar expedition, which trawled 42 Arctic sites with nets in 2013.

Lead author Andres Cozar, of the University of Cadiz in Spain, said ‘99 per cent of the floating plastic in the Arctic was confined in the Greenland and Barents seas’ and that ‘plastic pollution in the rest of the Arctic Circle was low or absent’.

However, global warming could open up the Arctic to more pollution, partly as sea ice shrinks, the team warned.

The study, in the journal Science Advances, added that high levels of plastic pollution elsewhere in the Arctic ‘may become prevalent in future’.

The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, which was not involved in the study, is examining wider pollution risks from plastics.