{"id":68972,"date":"2016-01-25T12:00:27","date_gmt":"2016-01-25T12:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=68972"},"modified":"2016-01-22T16:31:36","modified_gmt":"2016-01-22T16:31:36","slug":"by-2050-there-will-be-more-plastic-than-fish-in-the-worlds-oceans-study-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/01\/by-2050-there-will-be-more-plastic-than-fish-in-the-worlds-oceans-study-says\/","title":{"rendered":"By 2050, There Will Be More Plastic than Fish in the World\u2019s Oceans, Study Says"},"content":{"rendered":"

20 Jan 2016 – <\/em>There is a lot of plastic\u00a0in the\u00a0world\u2019s oceans.<\/p>\n

It coagulates into great floating \u201cgarbage patches<\/a>\u201d that cover large swaths of the Pacific. It washes up on urban beaches and remote islands<\/a>, tossed\u00a0about in the waves and transported across incredible distances before arriving, unwanted, back on land.\u00a0It has wound up in the stomachs of more than half the world\u2019s sea turtles<\/a> and nearly all of its marine birds<\/a>, studies say. And if it was bagged up<\/a> and arranged\u00a0across all of the world\u2019s shorelines, we could build a veritable plastic barricade between ourselves and the sea.<\/p>\n

\"<\/a>

A September 2008 photo released by the Ocean Conservancy on March 10, 2009, shows a trash-covered beach in Manilla, Philippines. (Tamara Thoreson Pierce\/Ocean Conservancy\/AP)<\/p><\/div>\n

But that quantity pales in comparison with\u00a0the amount that the World Economic Forum expects will be floating into the oceans by\u00a0the middle of the century.<\/p>\n

If we keep producing (and failing to properly dispose of) plastics at predicted rates, plastics in the ocean will outweigh\u00a0fish pound for pound in\u00a02050, the nonprofit foundation said in a report<\/a>\u00a0Tuesday.<\/p>\n

According to the report, worldwide\u00a0use of plastic has increased 20-fold in the past 50 years, and it is expected to\u00a0double again in the next 20 years. By 2050, we\u2019ll be making\u00a0more than three times as much plastic stuff as we did in 2014.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, humans do a terrible job of making sure those products are reused or otherwise disposed of: About a third of all plastics produced escape collection systems, only to wind up floating in the sea\u00a0or the stomach of some unsuspecting bird. That amounts to about 8 million metric tons a year \u2014 or, as\u00a0Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia put it to The Washington Post<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0February, \u201cFive bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report came a day before the start of the glitzy annual meeting arranged by the World Economic Forum to discuss the global economy. This year\u2019s meeting in Davos, Switzerland, is centered on\u00a0what the WEF\u00a0terms \u201cthe fourth industrial revolution\u201d \u2014 the boom in high-tech areas like robotics and biotechnology \u2014 and its effect\u00a0on the widening gulf between the wealthy and the world\u2019s poor.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0the plastic situation \u2014 fairly\u00a0low-tech and more than a century old at this point \u2014 is a reminder\u00a0that we still haven\u2019t quite gotten the better of some of the problems left over from the first few \u201cindustrial revolutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the report, more than 70 percent of the plastic we produce is either put in a landfill or lost to the world\u2019s waterways and other infrastructure. Plastic production\u00a0accounts for\u00a06\u00a0percent of global oil consumption (a number that will hit 20 percent in 2050) and 1 percent of the global carbon budget (the maximum amount of emissions the world can produce to\u00a0prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius<\/a>). In 2050, the report says, we\u2019ll be spending 15 percent of our carbon budget on soda bottles, plastic\u00a0grocery bags and the like.<\/p>\n

Once it gets washed into waterways, the\u00a0damage caused by plastics\u2019 presence costs about $13 billion annually in losses for the\u00a0tourism, shipping and fishing industries. It disrupts\u00a0marine ecosystems and threatens food security for people who depend on subsistence fishing.<\/p>\n

Besides which, all that plastic in the water isn\u2019t too great for the animals trying to live there.<\/p>\n

The data in the report comes from interviews with more than 180\u00a0experts and analysis of some 200 studies on \u201cthe plastic economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The plastic-laden stomachs of Midway Island\u2019s albatrosses<\/p>\n

\"ocean<\/a><\/p>\n

Artist Chris Jordan has been documenting the impact of pollution on the albatrosses of Midway Island. He learned of this while researching a photo series about the intersection of mass consumption and mass culture. The discovery prompted Jordan to head off to the remote island in September 2009 to photograph the birds.<\/p>\n

The report was published on the same day that a study came out in the journal Nature Communications<\/a>\u00a0asserting that the U.N.\u2019s Food and Agriculture Organization is drastically underestimating the overfishing of the oceans. The study, from\u00a0researchers Daniel Pauly<\/a> and Dirk Zeller<\/a> of the University of British Columbia\u2019s Sea Around Us project, found that global catches between 1950 and 2010 were probably\u00a050 percent higher than previously thought \u2014 meaning that damage to the world\u2019s fish stocks was also much worse.<\/p>\n

Overall, it was not a good news day for anyone\u00a0with fins.<\/p>\n

But both reports gave some signs for optimism. Pauly and Zeller told The Washington Post<\/a>\u00a0that the underestimation of how much humans were fishing means the U.N. also underestimated how much fish the oceans can provide.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we rebuild stocks, we can rebuild to more than we thought before,\u201d Pauly said. \u201cBasically, the oceans are more productive than we thought before.\u201d<\/p>\n

And the World Economic Forum report, though not quite so sunny, suggests\u00a0that there are ways to offset\u00a0all this plastic we\u2019re making and discarding. Countries can implement incentives to collect waste and recycle it, use more efficient or reusable packaging and improve infrastructure so that less trash slips through the system and into\u00a0the seas.<\/p>\n

___________________________________<\/p>\n

[Nearly all of the world\u2019s seabirds have eaten plastic, study estimates]<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

[\u2018Microbeads\u2019 soon will be banned from toothpaste and soaps]<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Sarah Kaplan is a reporter for Morning Mix.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 washingtonpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About a third of all plastics produced escape collection systems, only to wind up in the stomach of some unsuspecting bird. That amounts to about 8 million metric tons a year \u2014 or, as Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia put it to The Washington Post, \u201cFive bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68972\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}