While investigators spend another day looking for Malaysian Flight 370, environmentalist and conservation groups worldwide say the almost month long search has turned up one thing: the world’s oceans are gravely polluted.
Take last week’s false report of plane debris in the Indian Ocean. There’s speculation mounting that it was a shipping container lost at sea. No actual records are kept but estimates of how many containers go overboard range from about 700 to as many as 10,000 of the roughly 100 million that the World Shipping Council says are shipped every year.
One group sounding the environmental alarm is Conservation International, a nonprofit organization who’s senior scientist says discarded plastic bags breakdown in saltwater to form a kind of “plastic soup” that marine life then eats.
M. Sanjayan says before the bags decompose, they form huge, churning garbage fields with one of them in the north Pacific estimated to be at least 270,000 square miles or the size of Texas. Not a pleasant thought for anyone who eats fish or as Sanjayan puts it, “The world does use the ocean as it’s toilet, then expects that toilet to feed it.”
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Great article and what a wakeup call to anyone still hanging on to their love for plastic bags! Here in Los Angeles County on January 1st of this year, a ban on plastic bags was enacted which hopefully will spread around the country to stop a huge source of plastic pollution. Hopefully, plastic bottles next! Thanks for shedding a bright light on an issue people need to know now! Thanks!