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Plastic in the oceans: garbage chutes don’t save the oceans

Hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic endanger the fauna and flora in the oceans. Floating garbage catchers are supposed to fish the waste. Bremen researchers published a study on this. The results are sobering.

According to a scientific study, floating barriers that collect plastic can only make a small contribution to cleaning the oceans. “Technologies as proposed by the Ocean Cleanup project will not help us to solve the plastic problem,” said Agostino Merico from the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research in Bremen.

“We urgently need to rethink how we produce, consume and dispose of plastic and how we can promote sustainable alternatives,” said the co-author of a study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

“Environmental initiatives don’t solve the problem”

Plastic in the sea threatens the ecosystem. Sea creatures eat or swallow the plastic parts and often die from it. If the plastic decomposes, toxic substances can get into the sea and ultimately be ingested by humans.

Several private initiatives are committed to fishing trash out of the oceans. For example, the Dutch non-profit organization “The Ocean Cleanup” collects plastic in the Pacific with a catcher. According to the study, such initiatives are admirable and useful, but they do not solve the big problem.

The scientists estimate that 399,000 tons of plastic are currently floating on the surface of the oceans. It could more than double by 2052, they believe. So they used mathematical models to study the productivity of 200 floating barriers that collect plastic to later recycle or incinerate on land.

Garbage from the ocean is difficult to recycle

According to the scenario, the devices could extract a little more than five percent of the estimated global total from the seas over a period of 130 years. “In view of the huge amounts of plastic waste, that is a rather small contribution,” says Sönke Hohn from the “Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research” in Bremen and co-author of the study.

Scientists also fear that technologies such as floating garbage chutes could justify further pollution of the environment.

They point out that the garbage collected in the sea is difficult to recycle because it is diverse and often overgrown with microorganisms. The effort for sorting is therefore very high. Burning or burying is impractical for ecological reasons, as this could contaminate the soil or release CO2 into the atmosphere.

Deutschlandfunk Kultur reported on this topic on July 2nd, 2020 at 7:15 p.m.




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