Although inhabited and remote, South Sentinel island is covered with plastic! South Sentinel, Andaman Islands, Bay of Bengal. Captions and Photo: © SAF — Coastal Care
Excerpts;
Boyan Slat’s ambitious plan to rid the world’s oceans of plastic has taken another step towards reality with its first prototype to be tested at sea. The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, founded by the 21-year-old Slat, has deployed a 100-meter clean-up boom today in the North Sea in The Netherlands…
Garbage in, garbage out: marine plastic, The Economist
An ocean of plastic: Magnitude of plastic waste going into the ocean calculated, UCSB Current
Plastic Pollution: “When The Mermaids Cry: The Great Plastic Tide,” Coastal Care
LEARN MORE ABOUT: The Ocean Cleanup And Boyan Slat
For more than 50 years, global production and consumption of plastics have continued to rise. An estimated 300 million tons of plastics were produced in 2015, confirming and upward trend over the past years, according to a new report by the World Economics Forum, released at Davos in January 2016.
Plastic is versatile, lightweight, flexible, moisture resistant, strong, and relatively inexpensive. Those are the attractive qualities that lead us, around the world, to such a voracious appetite and over-consumption of plastic goods. However, durable and very slow to degrade, plastic materials that are used in the production of so many products all, ultimately, become waste with staying power. Our tremendous attraction to plastic, coupled with an undeniable behavioral propensity of increasingly over-consuming, discarding, littering and thus polluting, has become a combination of lethal nature… Captions and Photograph: © SAF — Coastal Care
