Global data on ocean surface level pollution suggests there are now 2.3 million tonnes of microplastic pollution floating in the world’s seas, with concentrations surging since 2005
at the the 5 Gyres Institute in Santa Monica, California, and their colleagues looked at data on plastic pollution at the ocean surface that had been collected between 1979 and 2019. That data came from more than 11,000 collection stations covering most major ocean regions.Patchy data made it impossible to identify any clear trends on plastic concentrations between 1979 and 1990, while between 1990 and 2004 plastic concentrations showed fluctuations with no clear trend.
But the team found that in the past 18 years, ocean plastic concentrations have risen sharply, to more than 10 times their 2005 levels.Get a dose of climate optimism delivered straight to your inbox every month.“We've found an alarming trend of exponential growth of microplastics in the global ocean since the millennium, reaching over 170 trillion plastic particles,” Eriksen said in a press release.
The sharp uptick in concentrations since 2005 may be due to a boom in plastic production around this time, says Erdle. Global plastic production almost doubled between 2005 and 2019, from 263 million tonnes to 460 million tonnes,It could also be the result of a failure to introduce mandatory measures to reduce pollution, Erdle says, even as waste accumulates as new plastic enters the oceans and older pieces break down into microplastics.
The study, which Erdle says is unique in its geographical breadth and four-decade time span, only looked at data up to 2019. This was in part because the researchers needed to set a “clear cut-off point” for analysis, Erdle says. Since then, some countries, including the UK, have introduced laws to tackle microplastic pollution, such as banning the use of plastic straws and curtailing demand for single-use carrier bags.
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