Find out how from the Ocean Conservancy. In the Florida Keys refuges, marine debris poses other cleanup challenges. Key deer, birds and other wildlife wander the shorelines. On a daily basis they get entangled in the trash and accidentally ingest it too. Attempts to flee Cuba — 90 miles away — produce another kind of litter at Key West National Wildlife Refuge , a breeding ground for colonial nesting birds and sea turtles and a designated wilderness.
They also take away from the wilderness character of the refuge. Action: Follow your state or county guidelines for safe disposal of fuel, paint and other hazardous waste. In Maryland, for example, the Department of Natural Resources offers these tips on safe disposal.
Every Friday volunteer members of the Monofilament Crew paddle refuge waters in kayaks to remove fishing line from the estuary. In , crew members collected hooks, lead sinkers, lures, bobbers and enough fishing line to fill a five-gallon bucket — the equivalent of 1. Action: Carry reusable water bottles for a day at the beach, the ballpark and other places. Kenai Refuge in Alaska enlists anglers in keeping refuge waters clean.
Anglers deposit their old fishing line in special containers installed throughout the Kenai River watershed. Volunteers install and empty the containers.
Action: Join with others to provide fishing line containers for anglers in your area. Persuade your community to ban disposable plastic bags and other single-use plastics. People have found other novel ways to call attention to marine debris and the threat it poses to wildlife. She did it after hearing how turtles sometimes mistake the Mylar scraps for food and choke on them, and seabirds get strangled by balloon strings.
Marine debris fouls shores in Alaska, too — even in the most remote areas. Plastic water bottles are everywhere. And though scientists know a great deal about the damage to marine life caused by large pieces of plastic, the potential harm caused by microplastics is less clear. What effect do they have on fish that consume them? The most recent counts add significantly to the knowledge base, yet even those big numbers are a fraction of the plastic that flows into the oceans every year.
Where's the rest of it? It's another mystery. We are dealing with pieces from hundreds of meters down to microns in size," Thompson says. Ocean trash is counted in three ways: through beach surveys, computer models based on samples collected at sea, and estimates of the amount of trash entering the oceans. The most recent counts involved computer modeling based on samples taken at sea. The models may not account for all of the trash, scientists say; nonetheless, the new numbers are helping address some of the questions.
The process of collecting and counting is meticulous , time-consuming work. It took Marcus Eriksen, co-founder of the 5 Gyres Institute, a nonprofit ocean advocacy group, more than four years, using samples gathered from 24 survey trips, to come up with his estimate that 5. In the course of his expeditions, Eriksen collected everything from plastic candy wrappers to giant balls of fish netting.
One massive ball of netting, found midway across the Pacific, contained 89 different kinds of net and line, all wrapped around a tiny, two-inch-high teddy bear wearing a sorcerer's cap at the center. He says his research has helped fill in the outlines of the life cycle of ocean plastic. It tends to collect in the world's five large gyres, which are large systems of spiraling currents.
Then, as the plastic degrades into fragments, it falls into deeper water, where currents carry it to remote parts of the globe. Their estimates are strikingly similar. That gives us confidence we're in the right ballpark. Another way of coming up with the numbers is to make crude guesses based on manufacturing statistics.
Says Jenna Jambeck, a University of Georgia environmental engineer who is completing a worldwide calculation of garbage collected in coastal countries: "If you have million tons produced every year, researchers will arbitrarily estimate that 10 percent goes into the oceans. It's not too difficult to surmise why so much plastic ends up in the ocean.
The Plastic Disclosure Project, a project run by Hong Kong-based advocacy group Ocean Recovery Alliance, estimates that 33 percent of plastic manufactured worldwide is used once, then discarded. To compound matters, 85 percent of the world's plastic is not recycled. Despite the magnitude of the numbers, Peter Ryan, a zoologist at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, who is writing a book tracing the evolution of marine debris research, says the problem can be solved.
Ryan began tracking debris 30 years ago, after a colleague suggested he should study seabirds that were eating floating plastic pellets, then commonly used in manufacturing and found in harbors and other waterways.
Improvements to shipping reduced pellet spillage. The water bottle could be from Los Angeles, the food container from Manila, the plastic bags from Shanghai. The amount of trash floating in the ocean is just too much for it to bear. The marine ecosystem is now severely polluted by plastic garbage, which comes from different countries, most of which are from Asia.
Its location does not help much, too, being a giant urban expanse where spaces are limited to contain their trash. NYC relies on a complex waste management ecosystem encompassing two city agencies and three modes of transport trucks, trains, and barges. Including 1, city collection trucks, an additional private waste hauling companies, and a diverse network of temporary and permanent facilities extending halfway around the world, they try to make it work. Their population density adds to the burden of the problem.
Although it may sound unfair to put all the blame to New York City, one could not help but look at it as the center of the problem. Way back , when New York was still called New Amsterdam, inhabitants used to throw their rubbish, filth, ashes, and even dead animals into the public streets to the great inconvenience of the community. According to some studies, the US stopped dumping garbage in the ocean since This was in response to what was called the Ocean Dumping Ban Act.
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