The plastic we use unthinkingly every day is killing our planet – and slowly but surely killing us

As researchers, we have been shocked to find the most remote depths of the Pacific Ocean polluted by our plastic. And it will outlive us all. Another bottle. Yet another one. We are 200km from land, in the middle of the South Pacific, and this is the third bottle we’ve found already this morning. Every-where is plastic. The plastic we use unthinkingly every single day, the plastic we throw away without a moment’s thought, it lives on, and on. Out here. Where it is killing our planet, killing our sea life, and, slowly but surely, killing us.

I am here as part of a team of researchers from the University of the South Pacific collecting seawater samples far removed from any human habitation. My goal is to compare offshore concentrations of microplastics with those closer to shore. My hope is to put in place another piece in the Pacific puzzle. We have a fair idea as to the scale of the problem along more populous coastlines. Yet we know very little here. A knowledge gap that spans half the surface of the planet.

The work is the brainchild of the late Dr Marta Ferreira and to date we have found microplastics in seawater, freshwater, in fish, crabs, molluscs and birds, in sediment from all over Fiji. Every place we visit, be it a metropolitan city, or a far distant, remote island, we find what we are looking for. Two out of three fish collected from the greater Suva inshore environment were found to contain micro-plastics. One fish was found to contain an astounding 68 particles. The degree of ingestion by these common inshore species is of the same order of magnitude as those found in China. Cognisant that in the South Pacific, fish constitutes more than double the global average of animal protein consumption, this is alarming. Levels of microplastics in seawater from around Suva were comparable to parts of the Mediterranean.

Coastal sediments are swamped with microplastics to the same degree as those reported along the shores of Singapore and Portugal. We are discovering that the very plastics we use to preserve our food are the same ones that are contaminating it. Polyethylene. The most widely used plastic on land is everywhere in the water too. In 2017 alone, Fiji imported more than 2,000 tonnes of polyethylene....
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/16/the-plastic-we-use-unthinkingly-every-day-is-killing-our-planet-and-slowly-but-surely-killing-us

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