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Researchers at the University of Vienna have discovered particles of plastic in mice's brains just two hours after the mice ingested drinking water containing plastic.

Once in the brain, "Plastic particles could increase the risk of inflammation, neurological disorders or even neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's," Lukas Kenner, one of the researchers, said in a statement, although more research is needed to determine the relationship between plastics and these brain disorders. In addition to potentially severe degenerative consequences, the researchers also believe that microplastic contamination in our brains can cause short-term health effects such as cognitive impairment, neurotoxicity and altered neurotransmitter levels, which can contribute to behavioral changes.

In the course of their research, the team gave mice water laced with particles of polystyrene - a type of plastic that's common in food packaging such as yoghurt cups and Styrofoam takeout containers.

Using computer models to track the dispersion of the plastics, researchers found that nanoplastic particles - which are under 0.001 millimeters and invisible to the naked eye - were able to travel into the mice's brains via a previously unknown biological "transport mechanism". Essentially, these tiny plastics are absorbed into cholesterol molecules on the brain membrane surface. Thus stowed away in their little lipid packages, they cross the blood-brain barrier - a wall of blood vessels and tissue that functions to protect the brain from toxins and other harmful substances.

While the Vienna study focused on the effects of plastics consumed in drinking water, that's not the only way humans ingest plastic. A 2022 Chinese study concentrated on how nasally inhaled plastics affect the brain, with researchers reporting "an obvious neurotoxicity of the nanoplastics could be observed". In basic terms, the inhaled plastics lead to reduced functioning of certain brain enzymes that also malfunction in the brains of patients with Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's.

Of course, we eat plastic, too, and new research on plastics and brain health is emerging alongside breaking studies on how the contaminants affect our gastrointestinal health. Much like the blood-brain barrier, the gastrointestinal barrier is also vulnerable to interference by nanoplastics - which can cause inflammatory and immune reactions in the gut, as well as cell death.

At this point, it's clear that plastics have infiltrated most parts of the human body, including our blood, organs, placentas, breast milk and gastrointestinal systems. While we don't yet fully understand how plastics affect different parts of our bodies, many chemicals found in various types of plastic are known carcinogens and hormone-disruptors, linked to negative health outcomes including obesity, diabetes, reproductive disorders and neurological impairments in foetuses and children.

This spring, the Boston College Global Observatory on Planetary Health led the first-ever analysis of the health hazards of plastics across their life cycle and found that "Current patterns of plastic production, use, and disposal are not sustainable and are responsible for significant harms to human health ... as well as for deep societal injustices."

None of this is encouraging news - especially in light of the fact that plastic production is still accelerating. Yet, improving our understanding of plastic's implications for human health is a crucial step towards banning plastic - a move 75% of people globally support. Encouragingly, more than 100 countries have a full or partial ban on single-use plastic bags, and policymakers in some countries are thinking about plastics more in terms of their costly externalities, including pollution and effects on health. Yet global plastics regulation is still vastly out of step with both scientific and public opinion.

In 2021, the Canadian government formally classified plastics as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. The move means that the government has more control over the manufacture and use of plastics, limiting the kinds of exposure that threaten health. In response, plastic producers including Imperial Oil, Dow Chemical and Nova Chemicals formed a coalition to try to crush these regulations.

More countries must designate plastics as toxic and increase its regulation, doubling down on the message that when plastic affects our health - even going so far as to alter our brain function - it infringes on our human rights.

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Plastic is already in blood, breast milk, and placentas. Now it may be in our brains | Adrienne Matei

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The particles could be linked to cognitive impairment and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's

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The US is the world's biggest culprit in generating plastic waste and the country urgently needs a new strategy to curb the vast amount of plastic that ends up in the oceans, a new report submitted to the federal government has found.

The advent of cheap, versatile plastics has created "a global scale deluge of plastic waste seemingly everywhere we look", the report states, with the US a leading contributor of disposable plastics that ends up entangling and choking marine life, harming ecosystems and bringing harmful pollution up through the food chain.

Plastic waste has increased sharply in the US since 1960, with the country now generating about 42m metric tons of plastic waste a year, amounting to about 130kg of waste for every person in America. This total is more than all European Union member countries combined. The overall amount of municipal waste created in the US is also two to eight times greater than comparable countries around the world, the report found.

Recycling infrastructure has failed to keep pace with the huge growth in American plastic production. Littering, dumping and inefficient waste disposal in landfills has caused up to 2.2m tons of plastic - including everything from plastic bottles and straws to packaging - to "leak" into the environment each year. The total waste may be even greater than this due to data gaps in tracking it.

Much of this plastic ends up, via rivers and streams, in the world's oceans.

Worldwide, at least 8.8m tons of plastic waste enters the marine environment each year, the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck filled with plastic into the ocean every single minute. If current trends continue, scientists have estimated this total could leap to 53m tons annually by 2030, which is roughly half of the weight of all fish caught from the oceans globally each year.

"Plastic waste is an environmental and social crisis that the US needs to affirmatively address from source to sea," said Margaret Spring, chief conservation and science officer at Monterey Bay Aquarium. Spring chaired a committee of experts who compiled the congressionally mandated report for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The proposed Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, introduced by Democratic lawmakers, would be the most ambitious regulation the US plastics industry has ever seen. Photograph: Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images

Spring added: "Plastic waste generated by the US has so many consequences, impacting inland and coastal communities, polluting our rivers, lakes, beaches, bays, and waterways, placing social and economic burdens on vulnerable populations, endangering marine habitats and wildlife and contaminating waters upon which humans depend for food and livelihoods."

The committee's report recommends that a new national strategy is required by the end of next year to stem the flow of plastics into the ocean. The strategy, the report states, should aim to slash plastic production, particularly for plastics not reusable or recyclable, help promote alternative materials that can be reused and set better standards for waste collection and capture.

Broader international and industrial trends will influence any effort to cut plastic pollution. The US, along with many other developed countries, used to outsource its waste problem by shipping plastics to China but these imports were halted by the Chinese in 2018. This has led to an increase in plastic waste sent to other countries, such as Vietnam and Thailand, as well as "recycled" plastic being burned in domestic landfills unable to cope with the sheer volume of waste.

The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, is considering a huge expansion in plastic production as it sees its primary business squeezed due to concerns over the climate crisis. Plastic polymers can be formed from a feedstock of crude oil and the industry is pinning its hopes on a glut of new plastic to flood the market and therefore waterways, beaches and oceans, in the coming years.

"There is an urgency to the issue because production is increasing, waste generation is increasing and therefore leakage impacts have the potential to increase too," said Jenna Jambeck, a member of the scientific committee behind the report.

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'Deluge of plastic waste': US is world's biggest plastic polluter

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The US is the world's biggest culprit in generating plastic waste and the country urgently needs a new strategy to curb the vast amount of plastic that ends up in the oceans, a new report submitted to the federal government has found.

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Plastic items from takeaway food and drink dominate the litter in the world's oceans, according to the most comprehensive study to date.

Single-use bags, plastic bottles, food containers and food wrappers are the four most widespread items polluting the seas, making up almost half of the human-made waste, the researchers found. Just 10 plastic products, also including plastic lids and fishing gear, accounted for three-quarters of the litter, due to their widespread use and extremely slow degradation.

The scientists said identifying the key sources of ocean plastic made it clear where action was needed to stop the stream of litter at its source. They called for bans on some common throwaway items and for producers to be made to take more responsibility.

Action on plastic straws and cotton buds in Europe was welcome, the researchers said, but risked being a distraction from tackling far more common types of litter. Their results were based on carefully combining 12m data points from 36 databases across the planet.

Plastic take-out food and drink items dominate global ocean litter

"We were not surprised about plastic being 80% of the litter, but the high proportion of takeaway items did surprise us, which will not just be McDonald's litter, but water bottles, beverage bottles like Coca-Cola, and cans," said Carmen Morales-Caselles, at the University of Cádiz, Spain, who led the new research.

"This information will make it easier for policymakers to actually take action to try to turn off the tap of marine litter flowing into the ocean, rather than just clean it up," she said.

Straws and stirrers made up 2.3% of the litter and cotton buds and lolly sticks were 0.16%. "It's good that there is action against plastic cotton buds, but if we don't add to this action the top litter items, then we are not dealing with the core of the problem - we're getting distracted," Morales-Caselles said.

Prof Richard Thompson, of the University of Plymouth in the UK, who was not part of the research team, said: "Having [this data] recorded in a proper scientific way is incredibly useful. There can be a reluctance to take action on something that seems very obvious because there isn't a published study on it."

The research, published in the journal Nature Sustainability and funded by the BBVA Foundation and Spanish science ministry, concluded: "In terms of litter origins, take-out consumer items - mainly plastic bags and wrappers, food containers and cutlery, plastic and glass bottles, and cans - made up the largest share."

The analysis included items bigger than 3cm and identifiable, excluding fragments and microplastics. It distinguished between take-out plastic items and toiletry and household product containers.

The highest concentration of litter was found on shorelines and sea floors near coasts. The scientists said wind and waves repeatedly sweep litter to the coasts, where it accumulates on the nearby seafloor. Fishing material, such as ropes and nets, were significant only in the open oceans, where they made up about half the total litter.

A second study in the same journal examined the litter entering the ocean from 42 rivers in Europe, and was one of the datasets Morales and colleagues used. It found Turkey, Italy and the UK were the top three contributors to floating marine litter.

"Mitigation measures cannot mean cleaning up at the river mouth," said Daniel González-Fernández of the University of Cádiz, who led the second study. "You have to stop the litter at the source so the plastic doesn't even enter the environment in the first place."

In May, Greenpeace revealed that UK plastic waste sent to Turkey for recycling had been burned or dumped and left to pollute the ocean. US and UK citizens produce more plastic waste per person than any other major countries, according to other recent research.

The researchers recommended bans on avoidable take-out plastic items, such as single-use bags, as the best option. For products deemed essential, they said the producers should be made to take more responsibility for the collection and safe disposal of products and they also backed deposit return schemes.

"This comprehensive study concludes that the best way to confront plastic pollution is for governments to severely restrict single-use plastic packaging," said Nina Schrank plastics campaigner at Greenpeace UK. "This seems undeniable. We will never recycle the quantity of waste plastic we're currently producing."

Thompson said: "What's going on in the sea is a symptom of the problem - the origin of the problem and the solution are back on land and that's where we've got to take action."

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Takeaway food and drink litter dominates ocean plastic, study shows

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Plastic items from takeaway food and drink dominate the litter in the world's oceans, according to the most comprehensive study to date. Single-use bags, plastic bottles, food containers and food wrappers are the four most widespread items polluting the seas, making up almost half of the human-made waste, the researchers found.

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A huge floating device designed by Dutch scientists to clean up an island of rubbish in the Pacific Ocean that is three times the size of France has successfully picked up plastic from the high seas for the first time.

Boyan Slat, the creator of the Ocean Cleanup project, tweeted that the 600 metre-long (2,000ft) free-floating boom had captured and retained debris from what is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Alongside a picture of the collected rubbish, which includes a car wheel, Slat wrote: "Our ocean cleanup system is now finally catching plastic, from one-ton ghost nets to tiny microplastics! Also, anyone missing a wheel?"

About 600,000 to 800,000 metric tonnes of fishing gear is abandoned or lost at sea each year. Another 8m tonnes of plastic waste flows in from beaches.

Ocean currents have brought a vast patch of such detritus together halfway between Hawaii and California, where it is kept in rough formation by an ocean gyre, a whirlpool of currents. It is the largest accumulation of plastic in the world's oceans.

Crew members sort through plastic onboard a support vessel in the Pacific. Photograph: AP

The vast cleaning system is designed to not only collect discarded fishing nets and large visible plastic objects, but also microplastics.

The plastic barrier floating on the surface of the sea has a three metre-deep (10ft) screen below it, which is intended to trap some of the 1.8tn pieces of plastic without disturbing the marine life below.

The device is fitted with transmitters and sensors so it can communicate its position via satellites to a vessel that will collect the gathered rubbish every few months.

Slat told a press conference in Rotterdam that the problem he was seeking to solve was the vast expense that would come with using a trawler to collect plastics.

He said: "We are now catching plastics ... After beginning this journey seven years ago, this first year of testing in the unforgivable environment of the high seas strongly indicates that our vision is attainable and that the beginning of our mission to rid the ocean of plastic garbage, which has accumulated for decades, is within our sights.

"We now have a self-contained system in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that is using the natural forces of the ocean to passively catch and concentrate plastics ... This now gives us sufficient confidence in the general concept to keep going on this project."

The plastic gathered so far will be brought to shore in December for recycling. The project believes there may be a premium market for items that have been made using plastic reclaimed from the ocean.

"I think in a few years' time when we have the full-scale fleet out there, I think it should be possible to cover the operational cost of the cleanup operation using the plastic harvested," Slat said.

The plan is to now scale up the device and make it more durable so it can retain plastic for up to a year or possibly longer before collection is necessary.

The Ocean Cleanup project's system retains plastic in front of an extended cork line. Photograph: AP

During a previous four-month trial the boom broke apart and no plastic was collected. Since then, changes have been made to the design including the addition of a "parachute anchor" to slow down the device's movement in the ocean, allowing for faster-moving plastic debris to float into the system.

The latest trial began in June when the system was launched into the sea from Vancouver. The project was started in 2013 and its design has undergone several major revisions. It is hoped the final design will be able to clean up half of the debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

This article was amended on 4 October 2019 to clarify system location details.

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Ocean cleanup device successfully collects plastic for first time

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Floating boom finally retains debris from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, creator says

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omewhere in Hilo, on Hawaii's Big Island, a team of scientists and engineers are tending to The Ocean Cleanup's 600-metre-long rubbish-herding device, after its maiden voyage to the Great Pacific garbage patch was cut short in December 2018, because it fractured into two pieces.

The project has had its fair share of problems since it was unveiled in May 2017 and has been criticised by marine scientists and environmental groups for its potential negative environmental impact. However, some still herald The Ocean Cleanup for having a positive effect on plastic pollution.

Pete Ceglinski, the Australian co-founder and chief executive of the Seabin Project - plastic-cleaning devices deployed in harbours and marinas - is one. He credits Boyan Slat, the inventor behind The Ocean Cleanup, with increasing the global awareness of the ocean plastics issue over the past six years.

But marine biologist Dr Jennifer Lavers from the University of Tasmania says that argument is also the project's downfall. "I think that's really dangerous," Lavers says. "It gives people a false sense of hope that this team of people have got [plastic pollution] covered, and that we just need to throw some money at the problem."

Plastic pollution is a devastating problem for the world's oceans and marine life. According to the UN, about 8m tonnes of plastic waste is dumped in the seas annually. It has been discovered at the deepest point of ocean, in Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, and in Australia, CSIRO scientists found microplastics in the sediment of the Great Australian Bight. Last year Guardian Australia reported that scientists now believe "plastic is literally everywhere."

So the idea of attempting to "clean up" the ocean is a quixotic one. Can these projects really make a difference?

The answer is yes, but not as expected.

Smaller technical solutions can make an impact in a localised area. Two rubbish-sucking Seabins were recently installed in Sydney's Darling Harbour. The devices suck in water, trapping rubbish in a mesh bag, and recirculate the water back into the environment. There are 450 Seabins in 26 countries around the world, in 60 harbours throughout the US, Europe, and now the Asia-Pacific, collecting on average around 4kg of marine litter a day - or about 1.4 tonnes a year, according to Ceglinski.

Another local installation, known as Mr Trash Wheel, is making a difference in Baltimore's Inner Harbour, on the US's north-east coast. As the wheel turns, it collects litter from the harbour and stores it in a barge for later removal. "It's such a great idea," says Lavers. "If we could get something like that in major cities that have suitable harbours, it would be transformational."

Lavers, who has been studying ocean plastics for the past 15 years, says these are good examples of small-scale cleanups that can have a local impact.

However, she warns that can't be extrapolated to the open ocean or the global plastic crisis. "We can't technology our way out of this," she says. "What we really need is policy change, and behavioural change, and that's just starting to happen."

"Things have changed rapidly in the last 12 to 18 months, it's been really encouraging. We have the EU announcing enormous bans on single use plastics and microplastics - that's the bold, meaningful change we need."

Hobart city council recently announced it would ban single use plastics by 2020, while Launceston city council has pledged to do the same. The South Australian government is considering how to tackle single-use plastics and sought public comment on the issue earlier this year.

The Department of the Environment and Energy recently conducted an assessment of the voluntary phase-out of microbeads - and found it to be on track. Its Threat Abatement Plan for the impacts of marine debris on the vertebrate wildlife of Australia's coasts and oceans was also updated. And while Woolworths and Coles were banning single-use plastic bags nationwide, fast-food giants McDonald's committed to phasing out plastic straws in their Australian stores.

What those cleanup projects such as The Ocean Clean Up, Seabins and the Baltimore Water Wheel are good at is increasing awareness of the plastic problem. Says Ceglinski:"The real goal is to stop plastics from entering the water in the first place. And we can do that using the Seabin as a powerful communication tool.

He adds: "We don't want people to be okay with throwing plastic in the water because the Seabin will pick it up for them. This was one of the main reasons we set out to attack it from an educational point of view - because it all boils back down to education."

So, like Seabins quietly sucking away in harbours, community and individual cleanup action plays a role too. When you add up the numbers, at least in Australia - the potential impact of picking up rubbish on beaches is huge. "There's around 50,000 volunteers across Australia who participate regularly in beach cleanups", says Lavers.

"One single plastic bottle removed from a beach prevents it from making its way back into the ocean where it will eventually fragment into tens of thousands of micro- and nano-plastic particles. So there's value in getting bigger items off the beach while we still can, because once they become tiny fragments in the marine environment, we have little to no hope of ever retrieving them, at least not with current technology."

In Australia, Tangaroa Blue is one of the main groups that organises regular cleanups, along with Clean Up Australia, Seaside Scavenge, environmental conservation groups such as Sea Shepherd, while Ocean Conservancy organises global beach cleanups.

Heidi Taylor, co-founder and managing director of Tangaroa Blue Foundation, says cleanups must go hand in hand with reducing plastic consumption. "If all we do is clean up, then that's all we'll ever do. We have to stop debris and plastic ending up in the environment in the first place through source reduction."

The data collected from beach cleanups give groups such as Tangaroa Blue the power to hold industry and producers accountable for their role in the plastic problem. "The cleanup is how we collect evidence," says Taylor. "Volunteers don't just pick up and count rubbish, they also record brands and barcodes - data which can be used to target the sources."

Taylor noticed a difference in the beach cleanup data, after the single-use plastic bags ban came into force. "We're just seeing more thicker bags, and now we know where they're coming from because they're branded, whereas before they were all grey. "

On 4 March, the Australian Marine Debris Initiative (AMDI) ticked over 13 million data points - each representing an item of marine debris picked up from an Australian beach with its details logged by a volunteer.

Lavers is using the AMDI data to determine whether the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (Marpol) - which prevents the dumping of plastic and other waste from ships - has been effective since its ratification in 2013. "Asking this question is only possible because of Tangaroa Blue and other contributors to the AMDI. There's no way we can write off beach cleanups as some small, meaningless contribution to the global plastic pollution problem."

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Plastic pollution: can the ocean really be cleaned up?

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omewhere in Hilo, on Hawaii's Big Island, a team of scientists and engineers are tending to The Ocean Cleanup's 600-metre-long rubbish-herding device, after its maiden voyage to the Great Pacific garbage patch was cut short in December 2018, because it fractured into two pieces.

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Ocean dead zones with zero oxygen have quadrupled in size since 1950, scientists have warned, while the number of very low oxygen sites near coasts have multiplied tenfold. Most sea creatures cannot survive in these zones and current trends would lead to mass extinction in the long run, risking dire consequences for the hundreds of millions of people who depend on the sea.

Climate change caused by fossil fuel burning is the cause of the large-scale deoxygenation, as warmer waters hold less oxygen. The coastal dead zones result from fertiliser and sewage running off the land and into the seas.

The analysis, published in the journal Science, is the first comprehensive analysis of the areas and states: "Major extinction events in Earth's history have been associated with warm climates and oxygen-deficient oceans." Denise Breitburg, at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in the US and who led the analysis, said: "Under the current trajectory that is where we would be headed. But the consequences to humans of staying on that trajectory are so dire that it is hard to imagine we would go quite that far down that path."

"This is a problem we can solve," Breitburg said. "Halting climate change requires a global effort, but even local actions can help with nutrient-driven oxygen decline." She pointed to recoveries in Chesapeake Bay in the US and the Thames river in the UK, where better farm and sewage practices led to dead zones disappearing.

However, Prof Robert Diaz at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, who reviewed the new study, said: "Right now, the increasing expansion of coastal dead zones and decline in open ocean oxygen are not priority problems for governments around the world. Unfortunately, it will take severe and persistent mortality of fisheries for the seriousness of low oxygen to be realised."

The oceans feed more than 500 million people, especially in poorer nations, and provide jobs for 350 million people. But at least 500 dead zones have now been reported near coasts, up from fewer than 50 in 1950. Lack of monitoring in many regions means the true number may be much higher.

The open ocean has natural low oxygen areas, usually off the west coast of continents due to the way the rotation of the Earth affects ocean currents. But these dead zones have expanded dramatically, increasing by millions of square kilometres since 1950, roughly equivalent to the area of the European Union.

Furthermore, the level of oxygen in all ocean waters is falling, with 2% - 77bn tonnes - being lost since 1950. This can reduce growth, impair reproduction and increase disease, the scientists warn. One irony is that warmer waters not only hold less oxygen but also mean marine organisms have to breathe faster, using up oxygen more quickly.

There are also dangerous feedback mechanisms. Microbes that proliferate at very low oxygen levels produce lots of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

In coastal regions, fertiliser, manure and sewage pollution cause algal blooms and when the algae decompose oxygen is sucked out of the water. However, in some places, the algae can lead to more food for fish and increase catches around the dead zones. This may not be sustainable though, said Breitburg: "There is a lot of concern that we are really changing the way these systems function and that the overall resilience of these systems may be reduced."

The new analysis was produced by an international working group created in 2016 by Unesco's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. The commission's Kirsten Isensee said: "Ocean deoxygenation is taking place all over the world as a result of the human footprint, therefore we also need to address it globally."

Lucia von Reusner, campaign director of the campaign group, Mighty Earth, which recently exposed a link between the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and large scale meat production, said: "These dead zones will continue to expand unless the major meat companies that dominate our global agricultural system start cleaning up their supply chains to keep pollution out of our waters."

Diaz said the speed of ocean suffocation already seen was breathtaking: "No other variable of such ecological importance to coastal ecosystems has changed so drastically in such a short period of time from human activities as dissolved oxygen."

He said the need for urgent action is best summarised by the motto of the American Lung Association: "If you can't breathe, nothing else matters."

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Oceans suffocating as huge dead zones quadruple since 1950, scientists warn

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Ocean dead zones with zero oxygen have quadrupled in size since 1950, scientists have warned, while the number of very low oxygen sites near coasts have multiplied tenfold. Most sea creatures cannot survive in these zones and current trends would lead to mass extinction in the long run, risking dire consequences for the hundreds of millions of people who depend on the sea.

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This is the first of a three-part series that examines our growing understanding of the scope and impacts of microplastics pollution.
During a research cruise to the Sargasso Sea in fall 1971 marine biologist Ed Carpenter first noticed peculiar, white specks floating amidst the mats of brown sargassum seaweed. After some investigating he discovered they were tiny bits of plastic. He was stunned. If thousands of the broken down particles were showing up in in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, 550 miles from any mainland, he says, "I figured it's all over the place."

Carpenter, now at San Francisco State University, published his observations March 17, 1972, in Science. They were the first inkling plastic pollution is not limited to the plastic bags, soft drink bottles and other visible trash strewn along coastlines and gathering in the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vortex of currents that concentrates debris in the Pacific Ocean. Weakened by sunlight and pulverized by winds and waves, those plastic products fracture into ever-smaller pieces. Along with the tiny, so-called microfibers shed by synthetic fabrics and the beads put in products like toothpaste, these fragments are called microplastics. With 300 million metric tons of plastic produced each year-about the weight of the entire human population-trillions of degraded plastic bits may be lurking largely unseen in the environment, researchers say.

The miniscule dimensions of microplastic-under five millimeters in diameter (about that of a grain of rice)-mean it can be ingested by a broader range of species than larger pieces, from tiny ocean plankton to humans. In animals' bodies the waste can cause physical damage to organs and also, like a miniscule Trojan horse, ferry in hazardous chemicals and help them accumulate up the food chain.

An explosion of research to track microplastics is revealing a mountain of plastic hidden not only in the oceans but in the world's rivers, lakes, farm and soil as well as organisms big and small. The stuff is even floating around in the air-from dense urban areas to the remote Arctic Ocean. "It's everywhere," says Chelsea Rochman, a microplastics researcher at the University of Toronto.

To understand the impacts-and how to curb the pollution-scientists need to know how much is concentrated in which places, where it is coming from and how it is moving around. Detecting microplastics, though, is complicated by the dizzying array of tens of thousands of polymers they contain, as well as their wide size range-from the scale of that grain of rice down to a virus. "It's not like you're trying to sample a contaminant like mercury or lead," says Richard Thompson, a marine biologist at the University of Plymouth who helped coin the term microplastic. "It's not a single thing, it's many different things."

Hunting the Missing Plastic

Carpenter's work provided a glimpse of the plastic soup in oceans, so that's the first place scientists looked to try to determine how much was invading the environment. Although it took a few decades, a seminal study led by Thompson in 2004 found beach and coastal sediments off of Plymouth, England, teeming with the stuff. That's when scientists really sat up and took notice. Since then they have found microfibers and fragments thought to primarily come from single-use packaging (which makes up 40 percent of all plastic produced) drifting around every ocean basin, in the bellies of marine species and even frozen in Arctic sea ice.

The picture is improving but still incomplete. A 2015 study concluded that surveys of ocean microplastics had turned up only 1 percent of the plastic estimated to be entering the oceans in one year from municipal solid waste. That means "we don't know where 99 percent of the plastic actually is," says Melanie Bergmann, a marine ecologist with the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI).

Part of the problem is many of the studies done so far are not capturing the smallest pieces, which are thought to be the most abundant. By not relying on picking out particles by sight, as many studies have, a study Bergmann co-authored recently found 100 to 1,000 times as many microplastic particles frozen in Arctic sea ice as the first such study did. Two thirds of what the team found, using machines that read the chemical signature of plastics, was around 11 micrometers in diameter (about the size of a human red blood cell), below the previous study's detection limit. Most sampling has also been in easy-to-reach surface waters, where levels are likely to change with currents and weather conditions. Those same conditions, along with films of bacteria and other matter that stick to plastics particles, can cause many of them to sink to the seafloor or gather along coastlines. The seafloor, however, is difficult to sample, although researchers could look at existing sediment cores, says Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Mass. She also advocates better sampling of "what's sitting literally pressed up against the coastline," where much of the plastic is likely entering the ocean from rivers and beaches, especially nearly population centers, and where denser particles are likely to quickly sink.

More insight is expected soon from San Francisco Bay. With funding from environmental groups and the wastewater industry, the San Francisco Estuary Institute has collected thousands of samples from bay waters and sediments, the wastewater and stormwater released into it, and nearby marine sanctuaries to see where different types of microplastic is coming from and ending up. Sample analysis should be finished by the end of autumn. Then the information will be fed into a computer model to predict how microplastics from different sources move through the region's rivers, into the bay and out into the ocean. That is expected to reveal where the plastic is congregating and more likely to affect plant and animal life. The outcome should help researchers suggest how to target efforts to stop plastics from being emitted at the source-via policies like bag bans or technology like devices that pick up fibers in washing machines. "We're pretty hopeful that we're going to get some powerful results out of all this," says project manager Rebecca Sutton.

Closer to the Source

From the beginning scientists reasoned microplastic in the ocean was primarily coming from land via rivers. That means the material should be in freshwater systems, too. But it was not until 2013 that anyone looked and definitively identified it in a lake. Since then researchers have found the tiny debris in lakes, rivers and freshwater beaches throughout the world-even seemingly pristine, remote water bodies such as mountain lakes in Mongolia. In many of these places researchers also found it in the stomachs of various freshwater species. The Great Lakes have been a particular locus of study. Microplastic levels there are at least as high as those in trash-filled ocean gyres, which themselves contain only a portion of the estimated 15 trillion to 51 trillion plastic particles in the entire global ocean. Because rivers and lakes are closer to the original sources of plastic pollution, notably wastewater treatment plants and cities, Sherri Mason, a professor of chemistry at the State University of New York at Fredonia, had expected plastic particles to be bigger than those in the oceans because they would have had less time to degrade. That hasn't been the case, suggesting to her "there's a lot of degradation, I think, happening on land." Researchers are still trying to more firmly connect the microplastics found in lakes and streams back to their sources to confirm that, as well as chart their movement along waterways.

Sedimentary geologist Patricia Corcoran of Western University in Ontario has been doing such work by examining sediments in Ontario's Thames River, which drains into Lake Saint Clair, tucked between lakes Huron and Erie. Most of what she has found is microfibers, likely from wastewater treatment plants, followed by fragments broken down from the polymers typically used in single-use packaging. Levels are generally higher near urban areas, and can be guided to particular areas by the water's flow.

Because her initial work provided only a snapshot, Corcoran is resampling the Thames this summer. This time she is collecting smaller particles, down to 20 micrometers in diameter. She also wants to see how major spring floods affected microplastic concentrations in the sediment-a study published in March found winter flooding flushed out tens of billions of microplastic particles from river beds in England, presumably washing them out to sea. Corcoran will also be studying the Grand River, which flows into Lake Erie, to see how the two rivers compare. She hopes to continue sampling them to see how concentrations vary over time. "Things are very dynamic when it comes to accumulation of plastic," Corcoran says, so continuous monitoring is needed to get a complete picture.

Glistening Soil

The reservoirs of microplastics go beyond waterways, notably to the soil in which farmers grow food. To fertilize their fields, some farmers use treated sewage sludge that is rich in nutrients-but also contains gobs of microfibers skimmed from wastewater. Estimates from Europe and North America suggest tens to hundreds of thousands of tons of microfibers may be added to farmland in those countries every year-and they can last for years in the soil after application. "It's a mountain, basically," says Luca Nizzetto, a research scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research.

Other sources are adding to the plastic mass in the ground, including degraded plastic sheets that farmers use to retain soil moisture and stymie weeds, compost from biowaste plants and so-called mixed waste-a ground-up amalgam of food scraps and unrecyclable material. A 2014 study in China showed up to 260 kilograms of plastic debris per hectare of cropland from flimsy sheets. A farm in Australia had applied so much mixed waste "that actually the whole topsoil was glistening," says Mark Browne, an ecologist who specializes in microplastics at the University of New South Wales.

All that plastic could affect the health of the soil by changing how it holds on to moisture or concentrating other contaminants, like pesticides. If the plastics penetrate deeply enough, they could reach groundwater; if they are very small, crops could absorb them. If earthworms and other small creatures ingest the stuff, it could travel up the terrestrial food chain.

The first dedicated studies of microplastic in soils are just taking off. Aquatic biogeochemist Jill Crossman of the University of Windsor in Ontario and Nizzetto are part of an international collaboration, funded by the European Commission, that is measuring microplastic levels in agricultural fields before and after sludge application in both Canada and Spain as well as examining how much runs off into water and how deep the plastic penetrates into the ground. They aim to put that data into computer models to see how well different tactics to reduce the microplastic load, like eliminating sludge applications, might work.

Falling from the Sky

Another source of microplastics is right overhead. Microfibers picked up by winds from the ground or as it falls off clothing have long bedeviled scientists trying to limit contamination in their labs, so Rachid Dris and his colleagues at the University of Paris-Est decided to measure microplastics falling from the sky. For three months in 2014 they collected what fell into funnels on the university's roof. They found mostly fibers-the shape and lightness of which makes them more easily airborne-and in larger quantities than expected. On average they collected 118 particles per square meter per day, ranging in length from five millimeters down to 100 micrometers, or the thickness of a sheet of paper. But "we don't know exactly what it means because it's the first number that's out there," says Dris, now an ecologist at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.

Other numbers are on the way from several groups collecting samples in remote areas where the atmosphere is the only presumed source of microplastics. Julian Aherne, a pollution modeler at Trent University in Ontario, has sampled the rainwater collected at weather stations on the remote west coast of his native Ireland, where the winds blow in from the ocean. His initial results show mostly fibers in numbers in line with Dris's. This summer he is sampling the sediment of lakes in the Canadian Arctic. Other researchers are sampling the snow atop Arctic sea ice (separate from what is frozen in the ice, which comes from the ocean below). Falling snow, AWI's Bergmann says, "carries everything with it that was in the atmosphere-in this case plastic fibers."

Because atmospheric scientists already have a good handle on how other pollutants such as soot and sulfur dioxide (which causes acid rain) move around the atmosphere, Aherne thinks it will be possible to estimate how far different sizes and shapes of microplastics are likely to travel on the wind and how long they might stay aloft. As more measurements roll in, he envisions creating something like a rainfall map, identifying global hotspots of microplastic fallout.

The Next Big Question

As scientists comb for microplastics and move away from visual identification to machine sensors, they are finding the stuff at ever-smaller sizes. Most researchers think microplastics are degrading even further into what they call nanoplastics. These infinitesimal specks would be of even greater concern because if ingested, they are likelier to penetrate the gut lining to reach the bloodstream or if inhaled, lodge deep in the lungs. Such nanosize fragments have been shown to form in lab experiments, so most researchers are confident they are out in the environment. But currently, "we don't have any methods that will isolate nanoplastics" there, Thompson says. Several groups are working on developing ways to illuminate this hidden threat, including researchers at the AWI that have so far shown a way to identify known nanoplastics in samples. When such methods reach fruition, Bergmann expects "we will find that the ocean is much more polluted than we think now." The same goes for other environments.

The research community is also working to weed out methods that can under- or overestimate microplastic numbers and to standardize methods so they can compare the results of different studies. Although "there's still so much to be done, just in understanding the sources and the pathways and the abundance on all of these different systems," as Mason says, it is becoming clear microplastics, particularly microfibers, are pervasive, with some hotspots hewing close to populated areas. Experts are excited. "The movement of the science is so rapid, I think we're going to know a ton more in five or 10 years," Sutton says. They will then have a better idea of which organisms and ecosystems are most threatened, and may be able to advise policy makers on where to intervene to keep plastic out of the environment in the first place.

While the work to locate microplastic continues, scientists are not losing any time tracing the harm it might be doing to organisms and ecosystems. That includes humans, through the health of the soils in which we grow our food, the quality of our drinking water and even more directly as we ingest it and breath it in. As Mason put it: "That's the question that everyone wants to answer."

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Earth Has a Hidden Plastic Problem-Scientists Are Hunting It Down

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This is the first of a three-part series that examines our growing understanding of the scope and impacts of microplastics pollution. During a research cruise to the Sargasso Sea in fall 1971 marine biologist Ed Carpenter first noticed peculiar, white specks floating amidst the mats of brown sargassum seaweed.

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Every minute, one million plastic bottles are bought around the world. That equated to more than 480 billion plastic drinking bottles sold globally in 2016, with that number estimated to rise 20% by 2021. 32% of all discarded plastic packaging ends up in nature, polluting communities and the world's oceans. In fact, the equivalent of one garbage truck of plastic is dumped into our oceans every minute. The volumes are so enormous that, by 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish by weight.

With this vast scale of plastic bottle production and consumption, how can we prevent and reduce the negative impacts that beverage container waste has on the planet? How can we recycle and reuse this material effectively, and how can society motivate people to return their used bottles and cans for recycling in the first place?

An increasingly popular, but far from new, solution is container deposit schemes. These programs achieve up to 40% higher collection rates for plastic, aluminium and glass beverage containers than other collection methods. In fact, TOMRA's reverse vending machines for container collection - which operate in more than 40 markets with container deposit systems, for both refillable and non-refillable containers - received 35 billion used beverage containers across 82,000 installations worldwide in 2017 alone.

Here's a simple guide to deposit return systems and why they are so successful for recycling used containers.

What is a container deposit scheme?

Container deposit schemes work by adding a small extra deposit on top of the price of a beverage - such as those in plastic and glass bottles and aluminium cans - which is refunded to the consumer when they return the empty drink container for recycling. Also known as bottle deposit schemes, deposit refund/return systems (DRS) or bottle bills, they are typically established through legislation passed by state or national governments.

Container deposit schemes for non-refillable beverage containers have been around for several decades, and those for refillable containers for centuries, with early inceptions used particularly for glass collection. Today, these schemes are in place in 40 regions, including 10 US states, with the additional deposit value on drink containers ranging from €0.09 to €0.25.
(See the full version of this video, which also explains how container deposit systems are financed and interviews policy makers around the world.)
To make the en masse return of bottles and cans more efficient and convenient, many container deposit schemes use automated 'reverse vending machines' (see left) to analyze and sort containers when they are collected for recycling and reuse. Reverse vending machines instantly count the number of containers returned, sort away ineligible containers, and pay out the correct deposit refund to recyclers - much faster than is possible through manual, human handling.

Reverse vending machines can usually be found at convenient places such as supermarkets, allowing users to receive their refund in cash or as vouchers they can use in store. In some countries it is also possible to donate the deposit money to charity, direct from the reverse vending machine. Learn more here about reverse vending machines and how they work.

Why are container deposit schemes successful?

There are two main reasons container deposit schemes succeed in increasing recycling rates and reducing plastic waste.

Financial incentive: Deposit return systems provide a financial incentive for consumers to return drink containers, which might otherwise be littered or thrown in landfill. Giving a financial value to these empties - in some countries as much as €0.25 per bottle - communicates that they have a value for society. Containers are viewed and treated as a resource, rather than simply as trash. In fact, deposits reduce beverage litter by up to 80%.

Increased purity: By separating bottles and cans for recycling through reverse vending machines, drink containers are collected without contamination from other types of waste in a household recycling bin. This ensures containers can be recycled into new bottles and cans, rather than used for lower quality applications. This is a process known as closed-loop recycling, which TOMRA calls the Clean Loop. This reduces both reliance on raw materials needed to produce new beverage containers (that is, coming into the loop) and waste ending up in landfills or in nature as litter (going out of the loop).

How container deposit schemes work around the world

Many countries around the world operate these schemes. Container deposit systems see 70% to almost 100% of all drink containers returned for recycling; no other waste collection system comes even close to such high return rates.

Norway: Norway has long been recognized as a trailblazer in container deposit schemes, with countries around the world replicating its deposit return model. Starting with TOMRA's first innovative reverse vending machines in 1972, today return rates in Norway are at 97% for cans and 95% for PET plastic containers, with collections managed by scheme coordinator Infinitum.

Germany: The German market outperforms the rest of the world in beverage container recycling results, following the introduction of its container deposit scheme in 2003. Germany's collection rate is extremely high, with approximately 97% of all plastic bottles returned (and 99% for cans), compared to a far more modest 43% in the UK, which only operates curbside collections.

Lithuania: Lithuania introduced its container deposit scheme in 2016, with the aim of reducing litter, cutting local government costs and boosting recycling rates. Prior to the introduction of this scheme, only a third of PET containers were collected (34%). Two years later, the country's deposit initiative, which operates with TOMRA's reverse vending machines, has seen return rates increase to 92%.

Canada: In Canada, the first container deposit scheme rolled out in 1970, with nearly all provinces and territories featuring the programs today. Canadian provinces and territories that operate return programs recover 80% of non-refillable beverage containers sold, compared to an average of just 50% in the only jurisdiction that recovers containers through municipal curbside recycling programs.

Resource revolution

Calls are increasing around the world for other countries to follow suit, with the United Nations Environment Agency in December 2017 encouraging all nations to implement container deposit schemes. The European Commission in May 2018 proposed requirements for member states to collect 90% of single-use plastic drinks bottles by 2025, through initiatives such as deposit refund schemes. (Find out more about the European Commission's Circular Economy plastics strategy.)

Indeed, more and more regions are announcing deposit return systems. In March, the UK government announced a consultation on introducing a container deposit scheme, which followed the announcement by the Scottish First Minister in September 2017. The Indian state of Gujarat in June called for reverse vending machines, and the Australian state of Queensland will launch new deposit legislation in November 2018. Going beyond brand new initiatives, Denmark announced expanding its existing scheme from 2020 to include juices and juice concentrates sold in glass, plastic or metal containers.

With our planet facing a waste crisis, we need to live more sustainability and recycle more efficiently. TOMRA's mission is to lead the way in the resource revolution and change consumer and manufacturer behaviour. Container deposit schemes provide one part of the solution to changing attitudes around empty drink containers and improving recycling rates.

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How does a container deposit scheme work?

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Every minute, one million plastic bottles are bought around the world. That equated to more than 480 billion plastic drinking bottles sold globally in 2016, with that number estimated to rise 20% by 2021. 32% of all discarded plastic packaging ends up in nature, polluting communities and the world's oceans.

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The world is using nitrogen fertilizer less and less efficiently. A greater proportion than ever before is washing into rivers and oceans. An environmental catastrophe looms, nitrogen scientists say, and the world urgently needs to develop strategies to prevent it.

Post-war physicists fearing nuclear apocalypse came up with the Doomsday Clock. In the 1980s, biologists contemplating ecological meltdown began talking about "biodiversity" loss as a way to tag and measure the crisis. Soon after, climate scientists recast concern over global warming with a warning that within a century it would lead to temperatures greater than any in human history.

Now, it is nitrogen's turn.

Last month, in a seminar room at New York University, a score of nitrogen experts from around the world began drawing up scenarios of what a future nitrogen-soaked planet might look like - and to devise simple metrics for encouraging a global effort to head off disaster.

They met as part of the International Nitrogen Management System, a five-year, $60-million research project from the UN Environment Programme and the Global Environment Facility, that is intended, says its chief Mark Sutton, as nitrogen's equivalent to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The bottom line, many there concluded, was that we must halve the amount of nitrogen we dump into the environment by mid-century or our ecosystems will face epidemics of toxic tides, lifeless rivers, and dead oceans. And that to do that will require, among other things, almost doubling the efficiency of nitrogen use on the world's farms.

In the past half-century, humans have increased the amount of nitrogen in the environment more than any other major element. Sewage, livestock waste, fossil-fuel burning, and especially our use of synthetic fertilizer have all contributed to a doubling of nitrogen flows. Half the world's crops today are grown with the aid of fertilizer made by capturing inert nitrogen from the air.

"We've done pretty well feeding the world," says one scientist. "But now we have to address the fallout from that."

Earth system scientists say nitrogen is the major factor in biogeochemical pollution, one of four "planetary boundaries" that we have exceeded, risking " irreversible and abrupt environmental change." The world is attempting to address the other three: climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. But, says Sutton, a British researcher at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh, nitrogen pollution is a largely ignored environmental story, with no international agreement or UN agency to galvanize action.

The New York meeting was part of an effort to change that. The focus was on agriculture, which is responsible for about two-thirds of global nitrogen pollution. "We've done pretty well feeding the world," says Sutton. "But now we have to address the fallout from that."

That fallout is all around us. In the United States, it is being felt in virtually all parts of the country - unleashing algal blooms in rivers from the Ohio to the Klamath in California; poisoning underground water reserves in California; leaving fish gasping for oxygen in Chesapeake Bay; and creating toxic "red tides" off the shores of Florida.

The Gulf of Mexico has a regular "dead zone," where excess nitrogen stimulates so much aquatic plant growth that its eventual rotting consumes all the available oxygen, suffocating most other marine life. The zone arises from nitrogen pouring down the Mississippi from the grain fields of the Midwest. It typically extends each summer for 5,300 square miles. Last summer's reached 8,800 square miles, the largest ever.

All told, there are more than 400 dead zones in the world's oceans, covering an area four times as great as in 1950. The largest, in the partially enclosed Baltic Sea in Europe, often covers more than 20,000 square miles.

The largest cause of this ecological mayhem is the 120 million tons of synthetic nitrogen used globally in agriculture each year. That is twice the amount of nitrogen reaching fields from organic sources such as animal manure, crop waste, and leguminous plants that fix their own nitrogen.

But the most shocking statistic is that less and less of the nitrogen poured onto fields is being incorporated into crops; more than half is washing from fields into rivers. The nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE) of the world's farmers has slipped from more than 50 percent in 1961 to about 42 percent today, according to Xin Zhang, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland.

While most of the world's natural resources are being used with increasing efficiency, fertilizer is being used with evermore abandon. As a result, more than half of all the synthetic fertilizer ever produced has been applied to farmland in the past 30 years.

Asian countries are doing the worst. In India, where fertilizer application has doubled in 20 years, NUE has slipped from 40 percent to 30 percent, Zhang said. But the absolute worst case is China, which has gone from an average NUE of more than 60 percent in 1961 to just 25 percent today.

This compares with modest efficiency improvements seen in many developed nations, including the U.S., which is at 68 percent. Half a century ago, China's NUE was similar to that of the U.S; now it is little more than a third as good.

Chinese ecosystems are under siege as a result. Nitrogen kills fish in huge numbers from the Yellow River in the north to the Pearl River in the south. Algal blooms are reported in a third of the country's lakes. Massive " red tides" of toxic algae spread from river estuaries across the East China Sea.

Chinese farmers typically put twice as much nitrogen onto their fields as their European counterparts.

There are two main reasons for the dramatic decline in NUE in Asia: cheap fertilizer prices and the genetic makeup of the "green revolution" crops developed half a century ago to feed fast-rising populations in a hungry world.

In the mid-20 th century, plant breeders, such as Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, produced varieties of grain crops such as corn and rice that responded exceptionally well to additional fertilizer. To grow more, farmers simply have to pour on more fertilizer.

At high applications, there is a law of diminishing returns. Extra nitrogen has a diminishing effect on yield. Farmers make a judgment about how much more is worth pouring on - usually based on economic rather than ecological reasons. When fertilizer is cheap, it makes sense to keep on pouring. As a consequence, Chinese farmers typically put twice as much nitrogen onto their fields as their European counterparts.

The scariest result from Zhang's analysis is the prospect of Africa following the path taken by China. At present, most African farmers apply only small amounts of fertilizer. Supplies are sporadic and many farmers poor. As a result, Africa's average grain yields are not much more than one ton per hectare, compared to three tons in most of Asia and seven tons in Europe and North America. But what fertilizer African farmers do use is readily taken up by nutrient-starved crops. So Africa's average NUE is currently the highest in the world, at 72 percent.

But as it tries to grow more to feed itself - the African green revolution called for by everyone from the World Bank to the Gates Foundation - the law of diminishing returns will kick in here too. In future decades, we can expect a rapid rise in the amount of fertilizer run-off across the continent, says Zhang.

Her data show a clear sign of what economists call the environmental Kuznets curve. The Russian-American, Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets argued that as countries industrialize and grow wealthy, the efficiency with which they use natural resources shows a common pattern. They begin in a cheap-and-dirty way, with terrible resource efficiency. But gradually, as pollution and other downsides of this inefficiency increase, they invest in doing things better. Eventually, at least for some materials, efficiency gains exceed rising demand for the products being produced. At that point, economies can start to "dematerialize," as Rockefeller University futurologist Jesse Ausubel has put it.

In most rich countries, use of agricultural nitrogen shows this curve. The NUE of American and European farms deteriorated until around 1970, as farmers poured on more fertilizer. But after that, it began to improve. Since 2001, the U.S. has been getting higher yields despite putting on less fertilizer, says Zhang.

But in developing countries, there is so far little sign of similar tipping points. The crops bred by the green revolution in effect optimize the cheap-and-dirty approach. With heavily subsidized fertilizer prices in countries like China and India, there are no incentives for farmers to use less. That is why so many nations - and the world's farmers as a whole - remain stuck on the wrong side of the Kuznets curve, says Zhang.

So what to do? The huge NUE discrepancies between countries mean that the world could cut nitrogen losses simply by rearranging where crops are grown. Ecologist Nathaniel Mueller, of Harvard University, reported recently that the world emits 69 percent more nitrogen from fields than it would if crops were grown in places with optimum nitrogen-use efficiency. But such a global rearrangement of crops sounds unlikely.

So how can we reconcile feeding a world of 9 billion people by mid-century with slaying the nitrogen dragon?

Zhang suggests the world should aim to reduce nitrogen runoff from crop fields from the current roughly 100 million tons to 50 million tons by 2050. That, she says, will likely require raising average agricultural NUE from the current 42 percent to about 70 percent. To achieve that might involve getting Europe and North America to 75 percent, and China and the rest of Asia to 60 percent, while finding ways to keep Africa from dropping below 70 percent.

Plant breeders may come up with high-yielding grains that can fix their own nitrogen from the air.

How to achieve that is the big question. Economics suggests that a big hike in the price of fertilizer would help, by discouraging over-fertilizing when the yield benefits are marginal. But should the hungry, especially in Africa, be sacrificed to optimize nitrogen production? A better way is needed. Perhaps technical solutions can accelerate Asian countries on the upside of the Kuznets curve, and help Africa leapfrog the cheap-and-dirty phase.

Plant breeders may come up with high-yielding grains that fix their own nitrogen from the air. But, with or without such a boon, the smart money now is on finding better ways to make sure fertilizer is only applied when and where it will actually get to plant roots. Low-tech ideas include fertilizer granules that can be planted in soils close to plant roots. This is labor-intensive, but is already being tried in Bangladesh.

A high-tech approach would involve what is becoming known as precision agriculture. This involves using algorithms that analyze plant health and local soil and climate conditions to provide a bespoke program for the amount and timing of fertilizer applications, which are then carried out with pinpoint accuracy, often using GPS-guided equipment.

Fixing the fertilizer failings of modern farming is only part of the solution to the nitrogen problem, of course. When it produces its final report in late 2021, the International Nitrogen Management System is also likely to push for global efforts to recycle livestock manure, to turn more treated human sewage into fertilizer, to reduce food waste, and even to encourage changes to our diets.

The group's report may also suggest that environmentally aware citizens start checking their nitrogen footprint with as much concern as their carbon footprint. (An average American has a nitrogen footprint of about 41 kilograms a year, compared to 24 kilograms for an average person in the Netherlands, says Allison Leach of the University of New Hampshire, a footprint pioneer.)

The Nitrogen Problem: Why global warming is making it worse. Read more.

There may be environmental trade-offs along the way. Those gathered in New York last month were spooked by the impacts of the push to grow biofuels as a solution to climate change. By mid-century, biofuels could become the biggest source of nitrogen in the environment.

But the bottom line is that the scandalously inefficient use of nitrogen fertilizer, the biggest source of surplus nitrogen in the environment, has to be tackled head on. Should every nation be given a nitrogen use efficiency target? Or should, as Sutton suggested, the world agree to adopt a target of halving nitrogen waste by 2050 - the nitrogen equivalent of the 2-degree temperature target set by the Paris Accord on climate change? Even that, those at the New York meeting thought, might not bring total emissions below the planetary boundary for nitrogen. But, like the 2-degree target for climate, it might avoid the worst.

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Can the World Find Solutions to the Nitrogen Pollution Crisis?

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More and more nitrogen keeps pouring into waterways, unleashing algal blooms and creating dead zones. To prevent the problem from worsening, scientists warn, the world must drastically cut back on synthetic fertilizers and double the efficiency of the nitrogen used on farms.

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20 June 2018, Rome - Water pollution from unsustainable agricultural practices poses a serious risk to human health and the planet's ecosystems, a problem often underestimated by policymakers and farmers alike, cautions a new report.

In many countries the biggest source of water pollution today is agriculture - not cities or industry - while worldwide, the most common chemical contaminant found in groundwater aquifers is nitrate from farming, according to More People, More Food, Worse Water? A Global Review of Water Pollution from Agriculture, launched by FAO and the International Water Management Institute at a conference in Tajikistan ( 19-22 June).

Modern agriculture is responsible for the discharge of large quantities of agrochemicals, organic matter, sediments and saline trading into water bodies, the report says.

This pollution affects billions of people and generates annual costs exceeding billions of dollars.

"Agriculture is the single largest producer of wastewater, by volume, and livestock generates far more excreta than do humans. As land use has intensified, countries have greatly increased the use of synthetic pesticides, fertilizers and other inputs," write Eduardo Mansur, Director of FAO's Land and Water Division, and Claudia Sadoff, IWMI Director-General, in their introduction to the report.

"While these inputs have helped boost food production, they have also given rise to environmental threats, as well as to potential human health concerns," they add.

The agropollutants of greatest concern for human health are pathogens from livestock, pesticides, nitrates in groundwater, trace metallic elements and emerging pollutants, including antibiotics and antibiotic-resistant genes excreted by livestock.

The new report represents the most comprehensive review of the dispersed scientific literature on the issue complied to date, and aims to fill information gaps and lay out policy and farm-level solutions in one consolidated reference.

How agriculture affects water quality

The boom in global agricultural productivity that followed the Second World War was achieved in large part through the intensive use of inputs such as pesticides and chemical fertilizers.

Since 1960 the use of mineral fertilizer has grown ten times, while since 1970 global sales of pesticides climbed from around $one billion to $35 billion a year.

Meanwhile, the intensification of livestock production - world livestock numbers have more than tripled since 1970 - has seen a new class of pollutants emerge: antibiotics, vaccines and hormonal growth promoters that travel from farms through water into ecosystems and our drinking water.

At the same time, water pollution by organic matter from livestock farming is now significantly more widespread than organic pollution from urban areas.

And another booming sector, aquaculture (which has expanded twenty-fold since 1980) is now releasing ever greater amounts of fish excreta, uneaten feed, antibiotics, fungicides and anti-fouling agents into surface waters.

Water pollution from agriculture is a complex challenge and effectively managing it requires a range of responses, according to More People, More Food, Worse Water.

The most effective way to mitigate pressure on aquatic ecosystems and rural ecologies is to limit the export of pollutants at the source or to intercept them before they reach vulnerable ecosystems. Once off-farm, the costs of remediation progressively increase.

One way to do this is to develop policies and incentives that encourage people to adopt more sustainable diets and limit increases in demand for food with a large environmental footprint - for example taxes and subsidies.

At the consumer level, reducing food waste can help. One study covered in the report estimated that nitrogen pollution from food waste adds up to 6.3 teragrams per year.

"Traditional" regulatory instruments will also continue to be a key tool in reducing farm outputs of pollutants. These include water quality standards; pollution discharge permits; mandatory best practices; environmental impact assessments for certain farming activities; buffer zones around farms; restrictions on agricultural practices or the location of farms; and limits on the marketing and sale of dangerous products.

However, the report acknowledges that well-known principles for reducing pollution, such as 'polluter pays,' are hard to apply to non-point agricultural pollution because identifying the actual polluters is neither easy nor cheap.

That means that measures that promote farmer "buy in" are critical to preening pollution at the source - such as tax breaks for the adoption of practices that minimize farm export of nutrients and pesticides or payments to for "landscape maintenance."

On the farm, a number of best practices can reduce the export of pollutants into surrounding ecosystems, for example: minimizing the use of fertilizers and pesticides, establishing buffer zones along watercourses and farm boundaries, or improving drainage control schemes.

Integrated pest management, which combines the strategic use of pest-resistant crop varieties with crop rotation and the introduction of natural predators of common pests is another helpful tool

On livestock operations, traditional techniques such as restoring degraded pasturelands and better managing animal diets, feed additives and medicines are needed - while more also needs to be done with new nutrient recycling techniques and technologies, such as farm waste biodigesters.

Agricultural water pollution: Numbers of note

Irrigation is the world's largest producer in volume of wastewater (in the form of agricultural drainage).

Globally, around 115 million tonnes of mineral nitrogen fertilizers are applied to croplands each year. Around 20 percent of these nitrogen inputs end up accumulating in soils and biomass, whereas 35 percent enters the oceans.

Worldwide, 4.6 million tonnes of chemical pesticides are sprayed into the environment every year.

Developing countries account for 25 percent of world pesticide use in farming, but 99 percent of the world's deaths due to pesticides.

Recent estimates that the economic impact of pesticides on non-target species (including humans) is approximately $8 billion annually in developing countries.

Oxygen-depletion (hypoxia) resulting from manmade nutrient overloading affects an area of 240 000 km2 globally, comprising 70 000 km2 of inland waters and 170 000 km2 of coastal areas

Worldwide, an estimated 24 percent of the area under irrigation is affected by salinization

Currently, more than 700 emerging pollutants, their metabolites and transformation products, are listed as being present in the European aquatic environment.

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Pollutants from agriculture a serious threat to world's water

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20 June 2018, Rome - Water pollution from unsustainable agricultural practices poses a serious risk to human health and the planet's ecosystems, a problem often underestimated by policymakers and farmers alike, cautions a new report.

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Image: REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol - RC1B30F822B0

Jim Leape William and Eva Price Senior Fellow, Woods Institute; Co-Director, Center for Ocean Solutions, Stanford University

The ocean represents 99% of the living space on Earth. It provides livelihoods and nourishment for more than 3 billion people, and brings $3 trillion into the global economy each year. Yet, for all of human history, the ocean has been largely out of sight and, as a consequence, largely out of mind. We have been able to see very little of what's happening in the water, or even on the surface. We have been blithely confident that the ocean is inexhaustible; able to provide all the fish we can catch, and absorb all the waste we produce.

But today the ocean is coming into view with startling rapidity. New technologies powered by the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) are creating an information revolution that will transform our relationship with the ocean. A rapidly proliferating array of advanced sensors - carried by fleets of satellites, ocean-going drones, fishing nets and even surfboards - is producing a flood of new data. New analytical techniques, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, translate this flow of data into streams of understanding, providing powerful new tools for governments and communities to manage ocean resources - all in a process transparent enough to create new accountability for resource users and businesses.

These capabilities arrive not a moment too soon. The ocean is in crisis. Most of the world's fisheries have been fished to the limit or beyond. The ocean has mitigated our impacts on the climate - absorbing 30% of our CO2 emissions and 90% of the excess heat we have produced. But the result is that we are making the ocean warmer and more acidic. In 2015 and 2016, record global temperatures drove global bleaching across 70% of the world's coral reefs. Fertiliser running off our farm fields has created more than 400 dead zones in estuaries and coastal waters. And each year we dump 8 million tons of plastic into the ocean; it is estimated that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

In the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), governments have agreed on an ambitious global agenda to address this crisis. SDG 14 sets out a wide-ranging set of targets for better stewardship of ocean resources - including better management of fisheries, large and small; protection of key marine resources; and sustainable development for the Small Island Developing States (SIDS). Success will require bold action by governments, communities, companies and civil society. Harnessing the power of the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be essential.

New technologies can help governments better manage their fisheries. Ocean-going drones can cruise the ocean for a year at a time, offering a cost-effective solution for assessing fish stocks and patrolling remote areas. Real-time reporting allows dynamic management of fishing to reduce bycatch of protected species. Facial recognition technology can even be used to automate the tracking of catch - identifying every fish as it lands on the boat.

New technology creates new possibilities for small-scale fisheries as well. Smartphone apps can deliver information on weather, fish stocks, and market prices, and provide a platform for fishers to collect data on where they're fishing and what they're catching, helping them to achieve and demonstrate sustainability and access new markets.

Image: World Economic Forum/Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution for Oceans

As governments redouble their efforts to protect critical marine areas, 4IR technology strengthens their ability to make those protections stick. Satellites now track the Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders that must be carried by all big boats. Three initiatives are now combining AIS data with other datasets and machine learning to monitor fishing and other activities, enabling countries to monitor all the waters within their 200-mile limit. In 2015, for example, the Pacific island nation of Kiribati used Global Fishing Watch to snare a fishing vessel operating illegally in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, and collect a $2 million fine.

These capabilities provide new opportunities for sustainable development in SIDS, whose economies depend on a healthy ocean. They allow these countries to monitor and regulate their own fishing fleets, as well as the foreign fleets who license the right to fish their waters or who fish as pirates. More broadly, they allow them to monitor ocean conditions to help sustain the health of their ocean ecosystems.

The history of technology in the ocean gives cause for caution. Too often, technological advances - more powerful fishing gear, ever-deeper oil drilling, industrial agriculture - have accelerated depletion and pollution. As innovation enables even more intensive exploitation, the weaknesses of current governance are thrown into sharp relief. The 4IR thus demands strong action both from the governments who own the resources and from the governments whose companies would exploit them.

Success will require a commitment to flexibility - to open up entrenched management regimes to take advantage of the tools now becoming available - for dynamic management of resources, more effective law enforcement, and better understanding and control of risks. It will require a willingness to allow managers and communities to experiment with new capabilities in order to find better ways of managing their resources.

Most importantly, harnessing the power of the 4IR will require an openness to collaboration between a wide range of actors - allowing fishers and other resource users, NGOs, companies, communities and consumers to find creative ways to use new technology to create new solutions.

With flexibility, and all hands on deck, the 4IR can be a powerful resource in achieving SDG 14, and sustaining the ocean resources that are vital for our future.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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Our oceans are in crisis. Here's how technology could save them

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Jim Leape William and Eva Price Senior Fellow, Woods Institute; Co-Director, Center for Ocean Solutions, Stanford University The ocean represents 99% of the living space on Earth. It provides livelihoods and nourishment for more than 3 billion people, and brings $3 trillion into the global economy each year.

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The enzyme is able to digest PET - commonly used in plastic bottles.

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We don't need to ban plastic. We just need to start using it properly

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A material that can be constantly recycled is a great help to ecology and the economy, especially when the human population is growing rapidly and our lifestyle demands are increasing exponentially.

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90% of plastic polluting our oceans comes from just 10 rivers

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The world has become increasingly alarmed at the amount of plastic in its oceans. But where does all this plastic waste come from?

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Posted September 23, 2018 06:15:55

How do you clear 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, weighing 80,000 tonnes, from the surface of the Pacific Ocean?

That's the challenge Dutch not-for-profit The Ocean Cleanup is facing as it attempts to clean a vast area between the coasts of California and Hawaii, using a unique 600-metre-long floating boom and a three-metre impenetrable skirt that hangs in the water beneath it to collect the plastic.

The group believes that with their cleaning vessels, or "systems" as they call them, they can halve the notorious Great Pacific Garbage Patch in just five years.

But despite the optimism from the group, many in the science community are not sold on the idea.

Environmental scientist and founder of the 5 Gyres Institute, Dr Marcus Eriksen, said The Ocean Cleanupdid not understand the problem or how to tackle it effectively.

"I think people still perceive that there are islands of trash out there and it's just the opposite ... it's mostly small particles," he told Pacific Beat.

"I think the better analogy, instead of islands, would be a smog. Like the way we have smog over our cities, we have a smog of plastic over our oceans."

Addressing the tiny plastics the real key to solving issue

Dr Eriksen explained that rather than forming islands, microplastics mix with chemicals that have also found their way into the water, posing potential harm to the ocean life that ingest them, and humans who consume them.

"The frontline of research right now is understanding what are the population-level effects of microplastics on marine life, including close to 50 species that we consume and harvest from the sea," Dr Eriksen said.

"The net array that they've deployed, it's not going to capture the microplastics, and that's where I would argue the majority of the harm is coming from."

Lead Oceanographer at The Ocean Cleanup, Laurent Lebreton, agreed that microplastics were the problem, but said there was still value in retrieving larger pieces of plastic.

"We still have to deal with the legacy of plastic accumulated in the last 60 years," Mr Lebreton said.

"The idea is to try to collect this from the natural environment before it breaks down into microplastic particles."

But Dr Eriksen argued that oceans already had natural mechanisms to sink or beach bulky debris at a similar rate to what The Ocean Cleanup planned to operate.

Citing a recently published paper by the International Pacific Research Centre's Nikolai Maximenko looking at debris from the 2011 Japan tsunami, he said of the estimated 1,000 boats that were lost at sea, it was projected that less than 10 per cent remained.

"That's because of sinking and stranding, the boats getting beached, the ocean is moving things and kicking things out. It doesn't want that trash on the sea surface," he said.

This, Dr Eriksen argued, made prevention a more viable solution to reducing plastic pollution, and he believed that The Ocean Cleanup's systems could play a role on that front.

"If they want to build these structures, at the very least, the last place you put them is the mouth of rivers," Dr Eriksen said.

"Even better, go further upstream and work on prevention to stop the problem in the first place. That's what's sorely needed, and that's where the conversation is today."

Danger of giving public a 'magic solution'

Beyond the debate over The Ocean Cleanup's effectiveness, Jen Kennedy, executive director of the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation, suggested they should also be mindful of their message to the public.

"I think this happens in a lot of situations where people just want this magic solution, which means they don't have to change their behaviour or do anything more difficult with their lives," she said.

"This big clean up thing is going to happen, and you can keep putting plastic in the ocean, and they're going to clean it up, and we don't have to worry about it anymore."

But Mr Lebreton disagreed, saying that by showing the huge quantity of plastic retrieved by the project, the public can visualise the magnitude of the crisis.

"I don't think that's a valuable argument ... no-one is saying, 'Let's keep putting plastic in the ocean because someone is going to clean it up for them'," he said.

"The whole idea is to bring it back to land and put it in front of people ... it's really bringing that visibility there and helping people understand that we need to do something about it."

Dr Christian Schmidt - a hydrogeologist from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, who co-authored a 2017 study that found that nearly a quarter of ocean plastics came from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa - said that multiple strategies are needed.

"I think there's probably no one-size-fits-all strategy," Dr Schmidt said.

"Developing countries have very different problems and pathways for plastics entering the environment than industrial countries."

According to Dr Schmidt, the complexities of the issue and cultural differences in each national context means that while a prevention strategy will work in one instance, visual proof from groups like The Ocean Cleanup will be more successful in another.

But all the debate around their approach is not getting to The Ocean Cleanup, who are confident that if their current two-week trial of prototype "System 001" is successful, the group will be ready to tackle the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

"The idea is, if everything goes well with System One, to scale up to about 60 systems, and by 2020 ... hopefully start a clean up of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch," Mr Lebreton said.

Topics: pollution, oceans-and-reefs, science-and-technology, environment-education, environmental-health, environment, hawaii, japan, asia

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Experts unsure if Ocean Cleanup is going to rid the seas of plastic

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Posted September 23, 2018 06:15:55 How do you clear 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, weighing 80,000 tonnes, from the surface of the Pacific Ocean? That's the challenge Dutch not-for-profit The Ocean Cleanup is facing as it attempts to clean a vast area between the coasts of California and Hawaii, using a unique 600-metre-long floating boom and a three-metre impenetrable skirt that hangs in the water beneath it to collect the plastic.

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More Recycling Won’t Solve Plastic Pollution

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It’s a lie that wasteful consumers cause the problem and that changing our individual habits can fix it

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How pollution is changing the ocean's chemistry | Triona McGrath

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United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

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Causes, Effects and Solutions to Ocean Pollution That Could Save Our Planet - Conserve Energy Future

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Ocean pollution, also known as marine pollution, is the spreading of harmful substances such as oil, plastic, industrial waste and chemical particles into the ocean. Here are various causes, effects and solutions to ocean pollution.

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Each year, billions of pounds of trash and other pollutants enter the ocean.

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Covering more than 70 percent of our planet, oceans are among the earth's most valuable natural resources. They govern the weather, clean the air, help feed the world, and provide a living for millions. They also are home to most of the life on earth, from microscopic algae to the blue whale, the largest animal on the planet. Yet we're bombarding them with pollution. By their very nature-with all streams flowing to rivers, and all rivers leading to the sea-the oceans are the end point for so much of the pollution we produce on land, however far from the coasts we may be. And from dangerous carbon emissions and choking plastic to leaking oil and constant noise, the types of ocean pollution that humans generate are vast. As a result, collectively, our impact on the seas is degrading their health at an alarming rate. Here are some ocean pollution facts that everyone on our blue planet ought to know.

Ocean acidification

When we burn fossil fuels, we don't pollute just the air but the oceans too. Indeed, today's seas absorb as much as a quarter of all man-made carbon emissions, which changes the pH of surface waters and leads to acidification (pH is a measure of how acidic or basic water is). This problem is rapidly worsening-oceans are now acidifying faster than they have in some 300 million years. In absorbing so much of the carbon emissions from the atmosphere, the pH level of the ocean surface has increased an estimated 30 percent since the start of the industrial revolution 200 years ago. If greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, the surface waters of the ocean could be nearly 150 percent more acidic by the end of the century.

So what happens when the ocean's chemistry is knocked out of whack? Marine ecosystems-and the coastal economies that depend on them-go out of whack too. Take reefs and shellfish, for starters. To build their shells and skeletons, creatures like mussels, clams, coral, and oysters require calcium carbonate (the same compound found in chalk and limestone). But the ocean's carbonate levels go down when acidity levels rise, threatening the survival of these animals. Bivalves are at the bottom of the food chain, so these effects ripple up to many fish, seabirds, and marine mammals. More-acidic waters also contribute to the bleaching of coral reefs and make it harder for some types of fish to sense predators and for others to hunt prey.

Meanwhile, ocean acidification threatens us land dwellers too. The billion-dollar American shellfish industry is the economic backbone of myriad coastal communities, from Louisiana to Maryland to Maine. In the Pacific Northwest, the shellfish that are vulnerable to ocean acidification make up more than 60 percent of the fishery revenue. In total, the U.S. shellfish industry could lose more than $400 million annually by 2100 due to impacts of ocean acidification.

Trash in the ocean

The majority of the garbage that enters the ocean each year is plastic-and here to stay. That's because unlike other trash, the single-use plastic bags, water bottles, drinking straws, and yogurt containers, totalling some eight million metric tons of the plastic waste we toss (instead of recycling), won't biodegrade. Instead, they can persist in the environment for a millennium, polluting our beaches, entangling marine life, and getting ingested by fish, whales, turtles, and seabirds.

The most infamous example of marine debris is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But these patches (which are more like " soups") represent only a fraction of the trash in our oceans. In fact, plastic debris has been found at the bottom of the deepest ocean trench.

Where does all this debris originate? While some is dumped directly into the seas, 80 percent of marine litter makes its way there gradually from land-based sources―including those far inland―via storm drains, sewers, and other routes, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Oil from boats, airplanes, cars, trucks, and even lawn mowers is contributing to water pollution circulating in ocean waters. (An excellent reason for why we should all reduce plastic pollution, no matter where we live.) Chemical discharges from factories, raw sewage overflow from water treatment systems, and stormwater and agricultural runoff add other forms of marine-poisoning pollutants to the toxic brew, contributing to algal blooms and aquatic dead zones.

Ocean noise

The ocean is far from being a " silent world." Sound waves travel farther and faster in the sea's dark depths than they do in the air, and many marine mammals like whales and dolphins, in addition to fish and other sea creatures, rely on communication by sound to find food, mate, and navigate. But an increasing barrage of human-generated ocean noise pollution is altering the underwater acoustic landscape, harming-and even killing-marine species worldwide.

Consider the incessant din of the roughly 60,000 commercial tanker and container ships that ply the seas at any given time. The underwater racket that results creates a kind of "smog" that reaches nearly every corner of the ocean and shrinks the sensory range of marine wildlife. High-intensity sonar used by the U.S. Navy for testing and training causes some of the same effects-and has been linked to mass whale strandings.

Meanwhile, in the hunt for offshore oil and gas, ships equipped with high-powered airguns fire compressed air into the water every 10 to 12 seconds for weeks to months on end. Traveling as far as 2,500 miles, these deafening seismic blasts disrupt foraging, mating, and other vital behaviors of endangered whales (and may ultimately push some, such as the North Atlantic right whale, to extinction). The blasts lead some commercial fish species to abandon their habitat-a direct hit on coastal economies dependent on catch rates; they also injure and kill marine invertebrates, including scallops, crabs, and squid.

Offshore drilling

In addition to noise pollution, the oil and gas industry's routine operations emit toxic by-products, release high levels of greenhouse gases, and lead to thousands of spills in U.S. waters annually. That oil can linger for decades and do irreversible damage to delicate marine ecosystems. Take the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound, from which oil still remains, or the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling disaster, which spread millions of gallons of oil throughout the Gulf of Mexico, imposing a heavy toll on coastal communities. But smaller spills also pollute the ocean (and the air) with long-lasting impacts. Even the most advanced cleanup efforts remove only a fraction of the oil, and sometimes they use hazardous technologies. Chemical dispersants used in the largest spill response efforts-1.8 million gallons were released into the Gulf after the BP disaster-are dangerous pollutants themselves.

NRDC works to defend our oceans

From the earliest days of NRDC's founding, we've advocated-and litigated-to protect the world's oceans. As political tides changed in Congress and the White House, NRDC has been steadfast in our defense of policies that protect marine species, as well as coastal communities and their ocean-based economies. In addition to advocating for climate policies that will ensure the health of marine ecosystems, NRDC has played a key role in halting offshore drilling and seismic blasting in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, in the creation of the Atlantic's first marine national monument, and in the push for more sustainable, ethical seafood. Today, we're part of a growing coalition calling for governments to fully and highly protect at least 30 percent of our oceans by 2030 (part of what's known as " 30x30 ") to help safeguard the marine ecosystems and fisheries that provide food, jobs, and cultural sustenance to billions around the world.

Ocean pollution and you

The fate of our seas is not only up to the government or industry. Our individual, daily actions matter too. You can start by reducing water pollution and runoff at home, being more mindful of your plastic consumption, or organizing a cleanup of your local waterway. You can also support the work of NRDC and other environmental advocacy groups as well as businesses and organizations that work to preserve our coasts and waters.
This story was originally published on January 22, 2018, and has been updated with new information and links.

This NRDC.org story is available for online republication by news media outlets or nonprofits under these conditions: The writer(s) must be credited with a byline; you must note prominently that the story was originally published by NRDC.org and link to the original; the story cannot be edited (beyond simple things such as grammar); you can't resell the story in any form or grant republishing rights to other outlets; you can't republish our material wholesale or automatically-you need to select stories individually; you can't republish the photos or graphics on our site without specific permission; you should to let us know when you've used one of our stories.

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Ocean pollution in the form of fossil fuels, trash, offshore drilling, and noise is harming marine life. Learn what you can do to reduce harm to our oceans.

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Pollution is often classed as point source or nonpoint source pollution. Point source pollution occurs when there is a single, identifiable, localized source of the pollution. An example is directly discharging sewage and industrial waste into the ocean. Pollution such as this occurs particularly in developing nations. Nonpoint source pollution occurs when the pollution comes from ill-defined and diffuse sources. These can be difficult to regulate. Agricultural runoff and wind blown debris are prime examples.

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US Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

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Ocean acidification refers to a reduction in the pH of the ocean over an extended period time, caused primarily by uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.

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national oceanic and atmospheric administration

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The air we breathe: the ocean produces over half of the world's oxygen and absorbs 50 times more carbon dioxide than our atmosphere. Climate regulation: covering 70% of the Earth's surface, the ocean transports heat from the equator to the poles, regulating our climate and weather patterns. Transportation: 76% of all U.S.

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US Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

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Eutrophication is a big word that describes a big problem in the nation’s estuaries. Harmful algal blooms, dead zones, and fish kills are the results of the eutrophication process—which begins with the increased load of nutrients to estuaries and coastal waters.

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Eighty percent of pollution to the marine environment comes from the land. One of the biggest sources is called nonpoint source pollution, which occurs as a result of runoff. Nonpoint source pollution includes many small sources, like septic tanks, cars, trucks, and boats, plus larger sources, such as farms, ranches, and forest areas. Millions of motor vehicle engines drop small amounts of oil each day onto roads and parking lots. Much of this, too, makes its way to the sea.

Some water pollution actually starts as air pollution, which settles into waterways and oceans. Dirt can be a pollutant. Top soil or silt from fields or construction sites can run off into waterways, harming fish and wildlife habitats.

Nonpoint source pollution can make river and ocean water unsafe for humans and wildlife. In some areas, this pollution is so bad that it causes beaches to be closed after rainstorms.

More than one-third of the shellfish-growing waters of the United States are adversely affected by coastal pollution.

Correcting the harmful effects of nonpoint source pollution is costly. Each year, millions of dollars are spent to restore and protect areas damaged or endangered by nonpoint source pollutants. NOAA works with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture, and other federal and state agencies to develop ways to control nonpoint source pollution. These agencies work together to monitor, assess, and limit nonpoint source pollution that may result naturally and by human actions.

NOAA's Coastal Zone Management Program is helping to create special nonpoint source pollution control plans for each coastal state participating in the program. When nonpoint source pollution does cause problems, NOAA scientists help track down the exact causes and find solutions.

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national oceanic and atmospheric administration

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What is the biggest source of pollution in the ocean?

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Eighty percent of pollution to the marine environment comes from the land. One of the biggest sources is called 'runoff' pollution.contaminants in the environment, all working towards healthy coasts and healthy economies.

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Ocean Pollution Causes

You might think that in order to pollute the ocean you'd have to dump bad materials directly into it. But in fact, 80% of ocean pollution comes from land. This means that to keep pollution from the ocean we have to be aware of all of our actions.

There are two types of water which can be affected by pollution and then lead to the ocean: The first is surface water - bodies of water like oceans, lakes, and rivers. Any water you can see is surface water.

The second type is ground water, which is held underground and accessed by wells, but which still flows into rivers and over surface water. The following is a short list of the main pollutants for both water types.

Oil - Oil pollution can come from tankers that have accidents, or from boats that are dry docked and emptied. But surprisingly, over 35% of oil pollution in the ocean comes from oil in the cities and industry runoff, even the sort you see on driveways and roads. This oil is washed away by rain into the sewage system, which lead to rivers and eventually the ocean.

Agricultural Chemicals - Pesticides and fertilizer used on crops are another large environmental issue, because again the rain will wash the chemicals away and push them toward the ocean, which kills marine life, cause eutrophication and algal blooms, or even damage coral reefs.

Garbage - Although garbage is not usually dumped into the sea on purpose, boats that are transporting trash will lose trash over the side, or littered trash can often end up in rivers and oceans. Plastics are especially damaging, as it does not degrade quickly and marine animals often mistake it for food. There are now five giant trash patches called 'gyres' in different areas of the ocean.

On shore and off shore mining - Any mining done near or in the ocean has several different negative effects. Chemicals and oil leak into the water, and mining on the ocean floor causes ground shifts that can open vents that release additional chemicals.

Prevention

There are several different preventative measures to help to decrease pollutants. In agriculture, using alternatives to pesticides such as pheromones or bacteria that detract pests can reduce chemical runoff that pollute the ocean. Crop rotation can help reduce the need for fertilizers.

Ensuring that regulations are enforced and tested regularly for tanker soundness and platform safety can help prevent incidents like the Ixtoc I platform spill in 1979 or the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010.

Finding ways to filter the water from sewage before it is released into surface or ground water can reduce ocean pollutants. Unfortunately, the costliness of these processes can deter farmers or industrial corporations from engaging in them.

Measure that can apply individually or on a grand scale include recycling materials so they don't end up in the ocean, and to avoid flushing harmful chemicals down sewers or sinks. Things like bath oils, unsafe soaps, shampoos, and conditioners can actually be bad for the ocean.

There have also been laws put into effect across the globe to address ocean pollution prevention. The United Nations created the London Dumping Convention in 1972, which ensures that planes, boats, and any platforms set out at sea cannot purposefully dump anything into the water. However, unfortunately it does not address issues like the pollution that comes from land.

Another law put into effect was the Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act created in 1988, which addresses the deliberate dumping of trash and chemicals from any U.S. agency.

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ocean pollution: causes & prevention | study.com

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Ocean Pollution: Causes & Prevention | Study.com

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You might think that in order to pollute the ocean you'd have to dump bad materials directly into it. But in fact, 80% of ocean pollution comes from land. This means that to keep pollution from the ocean we have to be aware of all of our actions.