by Lilia Anderson, Nina Gbor
Somewhere in the remote North Pacific Ocean sits the largest accumulation of plastic waste in the world. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as it has come to be known, spans 1.6 million square kilometres. It is twice the size of Texas, three times the size of France, and 17 times the size of Tasmania. There are four other areas of the world’s oceans where our plastic waste accumulates, including in the South Pacific. They might be smaller in comparison to the one in the North Pacific, but each one is enormous in its own right. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of an estimated total of 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic waste. This is equivalent to 250 pieces of plastic for every human on the planet. One study found that between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric tonnes of plastic waste generated on land entered the ocean in 2010, and estimated that this would increase by an order of magnitude by 2025. It is now thought that, by weight, there could be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050.
Globally, 32% of plastic packaging escapes collection systems and ends up in the environment. Plastic can be found even in the deepest parts of the ocean, where it represents up to 80% of marine litter, often in the form of microplastics. This has a very serious adverse impact on marine life and exacerbates other stresses on ocean health. Plastic pollution kills an estimated one million seabirds and 100,000 sea mammals eachyear. While some ocean plastic originates from the sea-based shipping and fisheries industries, most of it comes from land-based sources and is transported via rivers. Once in the ocean, microplastics can act as vectors for toxic chemicals to enter the ecosystem through marine life. For the nearly one million volunteers for Clean Up Australia Day, the impact of plastic waste on the environment is clear. Of all rubbish collected in 2022, 63% was plastic waste, which was up 17% from the previous year. The newer items picked up by volunteers — face masks, vapes and RAT tests — reflect how our use of plastic has increased, but the older items — soft plastics, beverage bottles, coffee cups, takeaway food containers, and single-use cutlery and plates — remind us of how persistent plastics waste is.
When plastic degrades, it dissolves into imperceptible smaller fragments called microplastics, which filter into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Microplastics have been found in 94% of oysters globally, and in the gastrointestinal tracts of 62% of fish in Australia. A study of microplastics in the Great Australian Bight concluded that about 14 million tonnes of microplastics reside on the ocean floor. There are serious questions about the effect our heavy use of plastics is having on our health. Plastics have been linked to diseases ranging from cancer to lung disease, birth defects and endocrine toxicity. From extraction through to manufacturing, use and disposal, plastic impacts our health. Plastics have been termed a “cocktail of contaminants”, due to the fact that they are commonly found along with heavy metals, pesticides and other organic pollutants, as well as a range of other chemicals that are designed to give them colour, flexibility, stability and resistance to UV light. Many of these additives and contaminants are carcinogenic or neurotoxic, or associated with diseases like obesity and diabetes. An estimated 400,000 to 1 million people die each year from diseases related to mismanaged waste including plastic, primarily in the global South. Conservative estimates show that humans ingest between 0.1 grams and 5 grams – which is equivalent to an entire credit card’s wroth – of microplastics every week. Plastic has now even been found in the placentas of newborn babies, as well as in human blood and tissues; a fact that has led to many calling this era of human history ‘The Plasticene'
Read More: Plastic Waste in Australia and the recycling greenwash
