The Most Overlooked Marine Plastic Pollution

The Most Overlooked Marine Plastic Pollution

A new study speculates that about 80% of the floating plastic in the Pacific Garbage Patch comes from fishing activities, while straws account for only 0.025% of ocean plastic. The Pacific Garbage Patch has accumulated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, weighing as much as 80,000 metric tons, which is estimated to account for 30 percent of the total weight of plastic trash on the surface of the world's oceans.

In September, Wageningen University in the Netherlands, in collaboration with the environmental organization Ocean Cleanup, collected and analyzed about 6,000 pieces of floating debris weighing about 547 kilograms, and in summary of earlier research, it is speculated that 75%-86% of the plastic is abandoned and lost fishing gear, including nets, traps, and buoys, among other things. This waste comes mainly from large-scale industrial fishing vessels. There are now about 4.5 million fishing vessels globally, and an estimated 640,000 tons of fishing gear is lost each year.

According to Taiwan's Marine Conservation Department, of the 41 tons of seabed waste cleaned up in 2020, derelict fishing gear accounted for nearly 90%. Derelict fishing gear is the deadliest form of marine waste. Fishing gear is designed to catch animals, but when abandoned in the sea, it continues to kill and injure animals indiscriminately, causing them to die of starvation and suffocation. The more the animal struggles, the tighter the rope becomes. Cetaceans caught in large ghost nets can be dragged for long periods of time until they run out of energy and drown.

In Oaxaca, Mexico, three hundred conservation turtles drowned en masse in 2018 when they became entangled in ghost nets, and then again in 2021, when three hundred female turtles were killed by ghost nets. In the Gulf of Oman in the northwestern Arabian Sea, each ghost net can catch 70 kilograms of marine animals in three months.

In the Puget Sound of the United States, a single derelict fishing net can entangle two invertebrates per day, a fish every three days and a seabird every five days. Industrial-style fisheries now hunt marine animals on an unprecedented scale and at an unprecedented rate. About 30 per cent of the world's fish catch comes from trawling, which kills all marine life in a single, indiscriminate net, killing a large number of “non-target” animals at the same time.

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