Study Finds 269,000 Tons Of Toxic Plastic Garbage In World's Oceans

Our planet's oceans are slowly but surely being choked to death by plastic garbage, a new study revealed on Wednesday.

In the first-ever scientific estimate of the amount of plastic trash in our oceans, researchers disclosed that more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic debris, weighting 269,000 tons are either floating or underneath all the waters of the world.

Marcus Eriksen, research director for the Los Angeles-based 5 Gyres Institute, said they obtained the data based on 24 ship expeditions around the globe for more than six years.

He said plastic shopping bags, bottles, toys, action figures, bottle caps, pacifiers, tooth brushes, boots, buckets, deodorant roller balls, umbrella handles, fishing gear, toilet seats and so much more plastic materials can be found anywhere in the Earth's oceans.

"There's much more plastic pollution out there than recent estimates suggest," Eriksen said. "It's everything you can imagine made of plastic. It's like Walmart or Target set afloat."

Many larger plastic objects can be found near coastlines which are then carried by waves into the world's five subtropical gyres or big regions of spinning currents in the North and South Pacific, North and South Atlantic and Indian Ocean.

In the middle of these gyres, Eriksen said, the plastic garbage has accumulated into huge "garbage patches" that act as "giant blenders -- shredders that eviscerate plastic from large pieces to microplastics."

But the enormous volume of visible plastic trash in the sea is actually not as frightening as the the ones that are too small to be seen and measured. These are the microplastics or those that have been broken down by the sun and waves, bitten by fish and otherwise torn apart into pieces smaller than 5 millimeters.

In a paper published in July in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study found only 35,000 tons of these small plastic particles, while the researchers had expected to find millions of tons.

What happened? No, the ocean waves didn't obliterate them. Scientists said the only plausible explanation is that they have been eaten by fish, turtles and other animals that mistake the particles for food.

Another explanation is that many of these particles have sunk below the surface of the ocean or settled to the bottom of the sea where they can be eaten by snails and other bottom feeders.

Scientists said this is worrisome since when fish and other sea animals consume plastic, they also consume all the toxins used to create plastic, like BPA, along with all the pollutants in the water that plastics absorb while they float in the ocean.

These pollutants are carried up in the food chain eventually leading to people eating contaminated seafood.

Moreover, bigger pieces of garbage, like plastic bags, also endanger seals, sea turtles, birds and other animals that ingest them.

For many years now, experts have been warning that plastic pollution is killing huge numbers of seabirds, marine mammals and other creatures while marring the ocean ecosystems.

They pointed out that plastic objects like discarded fishing nets kill by entangling dolphins, sea turtles and other animals. Bits of plastic also lodge in the throats and digestive tracts of marine animals.

This problem is bound to get worse as almost 300 million tons of plastic are produced every year, with only 5 percent of them recycled.

Scientists said the volume of plastic debris in the oceans is bound to increase due to rising production of throwaway plastic, and the consumers' insatiable desire for cheap and convenient plastic goods.

While marine animals are the primary victims, this escalating problem is bound to eventually boomerang back to humankind, they warned.