PLASTIC waste in our oceans is really a big problem. To show how serious it is, there’s recent news about a remote and uninhabited island littered with plastic. The place is Henderson Island, a coral atoll which lies in the South Pacific, halfway between New Zealand and Chile. It is a United Nations World Heritage site and one of the world’s biggest marine reserves.
Despite being untouched by humans, Henderson’s white sandy beaches is littered with waste, mostly plastic, from Russia, the United States, Europe, South America, Japan, and China. According to National Geographic, the waste is deposited onto tiny Henderson’s shore at a rate of about 3,500 pieces a day. It is estimated that there are about 38 million pieces of plastic debris in the small island or about 18 tons, giving Henderson the highest density of plastic debris recorded anywhere in the world.
But there’s a bigger problem than these “visible” plastic waste that are in the oceans. Of utmost concern are microplastics, small plastic pieces less than five millimeters long which can be harmful to our ocean and aquatic life. Microplastics can come from a variety of sources including larger plastic pieces that have broken apart, resin pellets used for plastic manufacturing, or in the form of microbeads, which are small, manufactured plastic beads used in health and beauty products.
There’s a study entitled “A global inventory of small floating plastic debris” by Erik van Sebille et al. which estimates that the accumulated number of microplastic particles in 2014 ranges from 15 to 51 trillion particles, weighing between 93 and 236 thousand metric tons, which is only approximately one percent of global plastic waste estimated to enter the ocean in the year 2010.
Micro plastics have invaded even the deepest part of the oceans. A team of researchers working in the mid-Atlantic and southwest Indian Ocean have found evidence of microplastics inside hermit crabs, squat lobsters and sea cucumbers, at depths of between 980-6,000 feet. The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports on September 30, 2016, is the first time microplastics have been found to have been ingested by animals at such depths, and thousands of miles away from the land-sourced base of the pollution.
And now here’s the latest news. According to an article published in the website treehugger.com, salt samples from eight different countries revealed the presence of plastic contaminants from ocean pollution. Yes, microplastics might be in our food now.
The article says that aquatic toxicologist Ali Karami and his team from the Universiti Putra Malaysia analysed sea salt extracted from eight different countries: Australia, France, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Portugal, and South Africa. In their lab they removed suspected microplastic particles larger than 0.149 mm (0.0059 inches) from 17 different salt brands. Microplastics were found in all but the French salt; of the 72 extracted particles they found, 41.6 percent were plastic polymers, 23.6 percent were pigments (from plastic), 5.50 percent were amorphous carbon, and 29.1 percent remained unidentified.
Once again it was proven that “Ang basurang tinapon mo, ay babalik sa iyo”. At bumalik na nga…