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Researchers identified the first floating islands of plastic and other trash more than 20 years ago. Plastic has also been found in the stomachs of diverse marine life, including whales, birds, and turtles. Other animals have been found washed up dead on the beach as a result of such pollution. Now, a study published last week (December 10) in PLOS ONE estimates the global abundance and distribution of ocean plastic: based on data collected during 24 expeditions from 2007 to 2013 along with and information from visual survey transects, the researchers’ model predicted that the oceans contain “a minimum of 5.25 trillion particles weighing 268,940 tons,” they wrote.
“[T]here is too much plastic in the ocean,” Andrés Cózar of Spain’s University of Cadiz who was ...
