The global annual production of plastics rose to 400 million metric tons in 2022 and is projected to double by 2050. Many items produced are single-use, and less than 10% of plastic waste is recycled.

In August 2025 more than 2,600 participants from United Nations Member States gathered — for the fifth time — to negotiate a deal to end plastic pollution, but failed to bridge fundamental divides over binding versus voluntary measures. Nations with a vested interest in oil and plastics production that call themselves the "like-minded group" insist that the treaty cover only plastic recycling and consumption and oppose curbs on production.

Clearly, the problem of plastic pollution in land and marine environments isn't going away. This series looks at some approaches to dealing with it, starting with the development of alternative materials.

We constantly see images of unsightly plastic pollution — rivers clogged with floating rafts of debris so dense you can't see the water, beaches piled with plastic trash rendering them unfit for even walking on, plastic bags fluttering from roadside vegetation. Aesthetics alone make a compelling case that something must be done.

But unsightliness is the least of many problems with plastic pollution.

In a paper published July 2025 in the journal Nature, scientists presented an inventory of 16,325 known plastic chemicals and identified more than 4,200 as chemicals of concern — meaning they're toxic, do not naturally break down in the environment, or accumulate in organisms. Released throughout the plastic life cycle, these chemicals constantly expose people and environments, often with serious consequences.

These chemicals are intentionally or unintentionally added across the plastics life cycle, from extraction of raw materials to end of life, says Susanne Brander, associate professor in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences at Oregon State University's Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station.

"There is no way to predict how many chemicals are in an individual plastic item," she says. "The biggest take-home is that it's not like there is one type of plastic that is safe. All have these mixes that are potentially problematic." Only 6% of all plastic chemicals are regulated internationally, and about 1,000 are subject to national regulations.

Once out in the world, plastic physically breaks down into ever smaller particles. Pieces less than 5 millimeters across, called microplastics, have long been recognized as the prevalent form of plastic pollution in marine and coastal environments. Toxic and endocrine-disrupting chemical substances adhere to the surface of microplastics, a process known as adsorption. Marine birds and plankton-eating organisms such as fish and corals ingest microplastics and introduce these chemicals into the food chain. Recent studies have found microplastics in human organs and tissues, with effects including cell aging, changing gene expression, increasing oxidative stress, and inflammation.

Now researchers report that nanoplastics are present in the ocean in amounts comparable to microplastics. Nanoplastic particles have diameters less than one micrometer (a human hair is about 100 micrometers thick). The uppermost layer of the North Atlantic contains an estimated 27 million metric tons (almost 30 million U.S. tons) of these particles.

At this smaller size, materials behave differently. Lacking buoyancy, particles may "rain" down into ocean depths. They can cross cell barriers in the human lung and intestine and may affect biological systems at the cellular or even molecular level.

Making a better plastic

An oft-floated solution to plastic pollution involves making the materials biodegradable — meaning they are naturally broken down by organisms like bacteria or fungi into water, carbon dioxide and biomass, such as soil. The rate at which this happens depends on the type and number of organisms and factors like temperature, light, and exposure to air. "Compostable" refers to materials that biodegrade relatively quickly under specific, human-driven conditions.

The current draft of a proposed United Nations global plastic treaty suggests making plastics biodegradable as much as possible. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommends redesigning plastic products using principles of green chemistry and engineering.

But this must be done correctly, stress the authors of a June 2025 letter in the journal Science. Most current "biodegradable" plastics are composites of bio-resourced materials — natural materials like wood and other fibers — and petrochemical-based materials. The letter points to research showing that when these materials weather they release potentially harmful chemicals into the environment. Those include terephthalic acid and bisphenol A, which have been shown to cause genetic, reproductive, and immune disruption.

Developers of biodegradable plastics, the letter goes on, must identify how these toxic ingredients degrade and design the materials for controlled and complete degradation.

Other scientists, including Brander, have urged phasing toxic chemicals out of plastic production altogether.

Another issue is the difficulty of separating the individual components in fossil-fuel based composite materials. As a result, most items made from them are landfilled or incinerated at the end of their service life rather than recycled or composted. Scientists note that changing the design and choice of materials could help address that.

But there also can be issues with the source of the "bio" side of these materials.

One, polylactic acid (PLA), is made from corn or sugarcane. The Plastic Pollution Coalition reports that these feedstocks often require intensive agricultural practices, contributing to problems such as deforestation and water pollution. Bioplastics make up only 1% of global plastics but require about 800,000 hectares (nearly 2 million acres) of arable land. Further, these materials typically are produced and manufactured in industrial facilities that run on fossil fuel.

Cellulose diacetate (CDA) is a bioplastic made from wood pulp treated with acetic acid, already used in consumer goods like straws and food wrappers. Research presented at a 2009 workshop on microplastic marine debris hosted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggested that very little CDA-based material biodegraded in marine environments. However, subsequent studies have showed that microbes can break it down in soil, wastewater, and the ocean.

Brander points out that testing of biobased plastics shows they break down into micro- and nanoparticles just like other plastics and can contain the same chemical mixtures. She adds that the way scientists test the degradation of these materials can be problematic.

"When I read papers about how about how [a material] breaks down completely, those claims often bear out in the lab," she says. "But in the real world, there may not be the right temperature or conditions. We need to think about conditions beyond the lab."

Scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts recently did just that, using a tank of continuously flowing seawater from Martha's Vineyard Sound — which replenished natural microbes and nutrients — and controlling variables like temperature and light to mimic the natural coastal marine environment.

They tested foamed and solid CDA in this setup for several months and found that the foam version degrades much faster, according to Collin Ward, a marine chemist at WHOI and senior author on the paper.

"Foaming the material makes more surfaces for microbes to attach to, which accelerates degradation," Ward says. Microbes turn the material into food, creating carbon dioxide and water as byproducts.

The work focused on conditions in the coastal ocean, as that is where much plastic ends up, but the material also biodegraded in other conditions.

"It's a promising technology," Ward says. "CDA won't replace every piece of Styrofoam used, but it is a priority to find alternatives for materials highly leaked into the environment." His paper reports that about 15% of all plastic collected in beach surveys globally in 2022 was plastic foam take-out containers.

CDA still has drawbacks, though. Like other forms of plastic, its production is often energy-intensive and generates chemical waste. Applying the principles of green chemistry and engineering to CDA manufacturing could partly address these issues.

The source of the cellulose also is a potential drawback to CDA, just as with PLA. One way to minimize that problem would be for manufacturers to sustainably source wood pulp through programs such as the Forest Stewardship Council Chain of Custody certification. Using materials such as industrial or food waste or feedstock produced on marginal agricultural land also would be more sustainable.

Cost may be CDA's main drawback.

"The CDA material costs more to make than plastic," Ward says. "Consumers have to decide whether they want to keep the status quo of normalized plastic pollution or are willing to invest in technologies to reduce the amount."

Of course, plastic pollution itself has a cost, and healthy ecosystems have economic value. According to Ward, economic analyses show significant savings from switching to material that doesn't persist as pollution. One study estimates that diverting plastic packaging material that currently ends up in the ocean would put around $80 to $120 billion back into the global economy.

Any alternative plastic has a significant drawback, though: perpetuating the concept of single-use items. Even if it degrades in weeks or months instead of decades, that is still a lot of trash piling up. Tellingly, the first recommendation of the National Academies report and a major goal of the proposed UN treaty is to reduce plastic production.

One way to do that is to focus on essential uses for plastic. Consider that the average plastic bag is used for 12 minutes.

"Do we really need to make something that is used for 12 minutes and then thrown away?" asked Brander. "Let's use plastic for things that keep people alive, versus for carrying groceries."

Individuals and businesses reducing their demand for single-use plastic could go a long way toward solving this problem.

And there is still hope for the treaty, Brander says, with new delegates and a new chair in place. An editorial in Science suggests an alternative negotiating process, perhaps led by a convener other than the UN. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), for example, initiated and facilitated the process 50 years ago that led to the international treaty known as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

But whatever happens with the treaty, and wherever design and engineering take plastics in the future, solving plastic pollution will take effort, Brander stresses. "There is not a quick fix where we can maintain this lifestyle without an impact."

This story was originally published by The Revelator.

Scientists have developed a new method to break down plastic waste, using moisture from the air.

By exposing a common type of plastic to an inexpensive catalyst and leaving it exposed to ambient air, researchers broke down 94% of the material in just four hours.

The plastic transformed into terephthalic acid (TPA), a highly valuable building block for polyesters. Because TPA can be upcycled into more valuable materials, the process offers a safer and cheaper alternative to current plastic recycling methods. The researchers published their findings Feb. 3 in the journal Green Chemistry.

"The U.S. is the number one plastic polluter per capita, and we only recycle 5% of those plastics," co-corresponding author Yosi Kratish, a research assistant professor of chemistry at Northwestern University, said in a statement. "What's particularly exciting about our research is that we harnessed moisture from air to break down the plastics, achieving an exceptionally clean and selective process. By recovering the monomers, which are the basic building blocks of PET [polyethylene terephthalate], we can recycle or even upcycle them into more valuable materials."

Plastic waste is an increasingly important issue. Over half of the plastic ever made has been produced since 2000, and annual production is projected to double by 2050, according to the European Environment Agency.

To date, only 9% of the plastics ever produced have been recycled. The remainder, with lifetimes often lasting generations, can have serious environmental and health impacts. For example, they wash out to sea to form floating blobs of trash, harm wildlife, and break down into microplastics that can enter the human brain and other parts of our bodies.

Related: Will we ever be able to stop using plastic?

To find a new method to break down some of this waste, the researchers applied a molybdenum catalyst — a silver, ductile metal — and activated carbon to PET, the most common type of polyester plastic. The researchers then heated the mixture. After a short time, this broke the polyethylene's chemical bonds.

Then, when the team exposed the material to air, the mixture transformed into TPA, a valuable polyester precursor; and acetaldehyde, an industrial chemical that is also valuable and is easy to lift from the mixture.

When they tested the method on mixed plastics, the researchers found that it had an effect only on the polyester materials. That meant they didn't have to presort the plastics. It worked on plastic bottles, T-shirts and colored plastics, breaking them down into pure, colorless TPA.

"It worked perfectly," Kratish said. "When we added extra water, it stopped working because it was too much water. It's a fine balance. But it turns out the amount of water in air was just the right amount."

The team's next steps will be to adapt the process to large-scale industrial applications.

"Our technology has the potential to significantly reduce plastic pollution, lower the environmental footprint of plastics and contribute to a circular economy where materials are reused rather than discarded," study first author Naveen Malik, who was a researcher at Northwestern University at the time, said in the statement. "It's a tangible step toward a cleaner, greener future, and it demonstrates how innovative chemistry can address global challenges in a way that aligns with nature."

A shocking new study has claimed that the human brain is becoming contaminated with growing amounts of microplastics, with concentrations skyrocketing in just the past few years. However, some have cast doubts on the study's underlying methods.

The research, published Feb. 3 in the journal Nature Medicine, found that concentrations of tiny micro and nanoplastics in healthy human brain tissue rose by roughly 50% between 2016 and 2024. The analysis also found that the plastic concentration in people who died with dementia was even higher — about six times higher than that seen in healthy brains.

The average quantity found in healthy brains — 4,800 micrograms of microplastics per gram of brain tissue — amounts to roughly the same weight as an average plastic spoon.

"The plastics are there and seem to be getting worse," study co-author Matthew Campen, a toxicologist at the University of New Mexico, told Live Science in an email.

Yet scientists outside the research group have questioned the results, saying there could be flaws in the work that led to exaggeration in parts of the findings. Regardless, the exact impacts that microplastics in the brain have on human health are worryingly unclear.

Plastics on the brain

Microplastics are tiny pieces of plastic debris that measure between 0.2 inches (5 millimeters) to 0.00004 inches (one micrometer) long, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Nanoplastics, by comparison, are even smaller, measuring from one micrometer all the way down to one nanometer.

Related: 'Very concerning': Microplastics can accumulate in cancer cells and may help them spread, study hints

These broken-down remnants of industrial waste and consumer goods are impossible to avoid; they are found across the ocean and atmosphere, inside bottled water, and even in human poop. And their accumulation is only increasing as plastic production doubles every 10 to 20 years. The impact of these tiny plastic bits on human health remains unknown.

"We start thinking that maybe these plastics obstruct blood flow in capillaries," Campen said in a statement. "There's the potential that these nanomaterials interfere with the connections between axons [wires] in the brain. They could also be a seed for aggregation of proteins involved in dementia."

However, for now, "we just don't know," Campen said.

Studies into how microplastics affect human health are still scant and inconclusive, according to the World Health Organization. So far, some types of plastic are thought to be harmless, whereas others, such as polystyrene, have been shown to kill human cells in lab dishes, as well as cause bowel inflammation and reduce fertility in mice.

However, connecting the dots between these studies and what might be happening in human populations at large is challenging, especially as people are exposed to different amounts of plastic over their lifetimes.

Microplastics have been discovered in the brain before the recent paper — for example, in the human olfactory bulbs, which rest on the bottom of the brain, just above the nose. But how far into the brain the tiny plastics are capable of infiltrating was previously unexplored.

To investigate the prevalence of plastic in our neural tissue, the researchers behind the new study analyzed samples of brain, liver and kidney tissue from 28 people who had died in 2016 and compared them to the brains of 24 people who died in 2024. To extend the analysis, they also compared this brain tissue with older samples gathered between 1997 and 2013, showing a rising trend in microplastics across the years.

The results seemed to suggest that human brains are swimming in plastic shards, with concentrations about seven to 30 times higher than those found in kidney and liver tissue. The plastics primarily existed at a nanoscale, and in healthy brains their numbers were not influenced by the age of the person at death, their cause of death, sex or ethnicity, the researchers found.

However, microplastic concentrations were six times higher in the brains of 8 people who died with dementia, compared with the brains of people without the condition. The researchers note that brain changes associated with dementia would be expected to make it easier for the plastics to accumulate. Thus, at this point, it's unclear if dementia drove the plastic buildup or if the plastic somehow contributed to the disease itself.

Not all scientists are convinced by the new study's results, however. The most common type of plastic found in all of the brain samples was polyethylene. Typically used in food and drink packaging, it made up about 75% of the average total plastic found in each brain.

Yet the main analytical method the researchers used (called pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry) causes the abundant fats within the brain to release the same compounds as polyethylene. As this method actually measures these compounds and not the polyethylene directly, this effect could potentially lead to false-positive results.

"I think we need to take the study's findings with a big pinch of salt," Oliver Jones, a professor of chemistry at RMIT University in Melbourne who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "They are reporting higher concentrations of microplastics in the brain than we see in wastewater? That does not seem likely."

He added, "When you get a result like that, you have to ask yourself questions like, 'Are you sure you did the analysis right? And are these results biologically plausible?' I don't think the answer to either question is yes, myself."

In response to these doubts, the researchers say that while polyethylene may be vulnerable to interference that could produce false positives, other polymers that they found are not — and these other types of plastic also increased in consistent proportion to the total number of plastics detected, they said.

"What evolution in brain chemistry could explain the increasing trends over such a short period of time?" Campen told Live Science. "The absolute value of the plastics may be immaterial to these points — the plastics are there and seem to be getting worse."

Others have echoed his point, saying that even if the amounts found are dramatic overestimates, they're still high enough to prompt further inquiry into their potential health impacts.

"[An overestimate] doesn't change the fact that the other plastic types are indeed present in the brain," Emma Kasteel, a toxicologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "There thus seems to be no discussion if microplastics are present in the brain and the fact that it is there is concerning enough for me and calls for extra research in this area."

Campen and his team say they will study these questions further by improving their methods to measure the plastics, using this data to better link their concentrations to health outcomes.

"If our planet is on the 2nd ring of perdition or the 7th, it is clear that we have made some bad decisions and should begin the process of trying to climb back out," he said.

In the forest, certain fungi attach to trees and fallen logs to break down and digest the carbon within their wood before releasing it as carbon dioxide. But when their preferred meal isn't available, these wood-decaying fungi can chow down on plastic instead, according to a new study published July 26 in the journal PLOS One. 

White-rot fungi can break down lignin — an extremely strong organic polymer that helps give wood its rigidity — by using enzymes, which are proteins that accelerate the chemical reactions that take place within cells. 

"We were thinking, if these fungi can decay these decay-resistant hardwoods, and lignin particularly … they have some weapons with them to decay some other polymers as well," such as polyethylene, or plastic, study co-author Renuka Attanayake, a plant pathology professor at the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka, told Live Science. 

Related: Microbes in cow stomachs can help recycle plastic

For their study, the researchers isolated 50 fungal samples from decaying hardwoods found in the Dimbulagala dry zone forest reserve in central Sri Lanka. Then, they divided the samples into two main experimental conditions: a dish with low-density polyethylene (a type of plastic), and a dish with both the plastic and wood. After 45 days, it was clear that the fungi consistently preferred wood to plastic, but in both experimental setups, particularly the dish with just plastic, the fungi broke down the polyethylene. 

"We think that these organisms are metabolically flexible, I would say, and this may be an evolutionary advantage," Attanayake said. "[The fungi] had to survive in the environment utilizing whatever available."

Though the scientists don't yet know how the chemical pathways in the fungi change when they eat polyethylene, they do know that the white rot used some oxidizing enzymes to break down both the wood and the plastic. 

To date, more than 430 species of fungi and bacteria have been found to break down plastic, according to Royal Botanical Gardens Kew in London. Scientists believe that identifying and replicating the enzymes these microorganisms secrete to degrade plastic could eventually help remove some of the 400 million tons of plastic waste produced each year, which often sits in landfills or overflows into the ocean rather than being recycled. 

This new study is a "tiny baby step" toward understanding how fungi could help tackle plastic pollution, Attanayake said. First, though, scientists must see how wood-decaying fungi fare in different conditions, such as landfills, and whether they pose a threat to native trees. However, "under restricted conditions we may be able to utilize this thing one day, but a lot more research has to be done before that," she added. 

The corpse of a rarely seen type of beaked whale recently washed up on a California beach with mysterious wounds on its face and scrape marks all over its body. Experts are unsure what caused these injuries, how the whale died or even which species this pointy-nosed cetacean belongs to. 

The unusual dolphin-like whale's remains, which measured around 16 feet (4.9 meters) long, were found May 15 on a beach at Jug Handle State Natural Reserve near Fort Bragg. A team from the nearby Noyo Center for Marine Science recovered the body with help from researchers at the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) in San Francisco. The group collected samples of the whale’s blubber, organs and skull, and sent them to the National Marine Mammal Tissue Bank in Charleston, South Carolina, for analysis.

Little is known about these mysterious whales, which belong to the family Ziphiidae. Scientists think there are around two dozen species, but of those only a few species, including Baird's beaked whale (Berardius bairdii) and Cuvier's beaked whale (Ziphius cavirostris), have been studied extensively. However, scientists do know that these whales can "dive deeper than any other marine mammal," according to a Facebook post by the Noyo Center, and they can stay underwater for more than three hours. 

This incredible diving ability is one of the main reasons why scientists know so little about beaked whales. "They’re not seen very often, alive or dead," which makes this stranding "really important," Moe Flannery, senior collections manager for birds and marine mammals at CAS, told news site SFGate. 

Related: Nearly 30 pilot whales die after mass stranding in New Zealand 

The recently washed-up specimen is likely a Hubbs' beaked whale (Mesoplodon carlhubbsi) or a Stejneger's beaked whale (Mesoplodon stejnegeri), Flannery told SFGate. However, it could also be a ginkgo-toothed beaked whale (Mesoplodon ginkgodens) or a pygmy beaked whale (Mesoplodon peruvianus), Sascha Hooker, a marine mammal biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who was not involved in the recovery process, told Live Science in an email. Sequencing the DNA from the whale's tissue samples will help determine the exact species. 

The team from the Noyo Center noted that the whale’s beak had unusual, nasty-looking injuries around it, but the scientists could not tell what had caused the wounds. "There appears to be some trauma near the jaw, but until they look more closely at the skull itself it’s hard to say what that was from," Trey Petrey, the interpretive facilities manager at the Noyo Center who helped remove the dead whale from the beach, told SFGate.

One possible cause of the whale's injuries is a vessel strike. Beaked whales and other cetaceans (the group that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises) are among the marine animals that are most at risk of being hit by a boat because they use sound for navigation and noise pollution from boats can disorientate them, according to a 2020 study published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

It will also be challenging to tell if the dead whale's injuries were caused before or after the body washed up on the beach, Hooker added.

The dead whale's corpse was also marred by scratches covering its face and body. But most of these scrapes, known as rake marks, were likely inflicted over time by other beaked whales. Most beaked whales are toothless except for a single large pair of tusk-like teeth in their lower jaw; these teeth are typically exclusive to males, who use them to fight off reproductive rivals, Hooker said. It's possible that the rake marks on the dead cetacean were inflicted during past duels, she added, although it is as yet unknown if the dead whale is male or female. It's also possible that some of the scratches were caused by past vessel strikes that were non-lethal. 

"It's hard to tell from the photos, but the body condition looks a little poor," with the backbone appearing quite pronounced in some of the images, Hooker said. This could suggest that the whale had either been struggling to find food or had potentially ingested plastic, which has become a big problem for beaked whales, she noted. (Whales that swallow plastic may starve if the indigestible material can't be expelled; plastic that lodges in a whale's guts prevents the whale from filling its stomach with food and may affect the animal's digestion.) Analysis of the whale's stomach contents will determine if this played a part in its death. 

Another noteworthy detail of the beached carcass was the presence of a whale louse on the cetacean's skin. Whale lice are tiny parasitic shrimp that attach themselves to cetaceans and live their entire lives clinging to the skin of a single individual, where they filter microbes out of the water and occasionally nibble on their host's skin. In a 2018 study published in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, scientists found that whale lice, which are often specific to a single cetacean species, can be analyzed to track the migration patterns of whales. But it is unknown if the louse on the dead beaked whale has preserved a record of its host's journeys. 

Nevertheless, the researchers at the Noyo Center hope that much will be learned about beaked whales from this unfortunate event.

"I think it’s sometimes very humbling to see these animals washed ashore and to get a really good look at them so close," Petrey told SFGate. "It’s kind of heartbreaking to see them dead, but it’s a good experience in terms of anyone interested in marine science to have the opportunity to see a specimen like that."

Originally published on Live Science.

A once-in-a-century wave that pummeled a cargo ship in 1997 caused the worst toy-related environmental disaster of all time. As the vessel Tokio Express pitched and rolled near the United Kingdom's southwestern coast, 62 shipping containers tumbled off the ship — and one of them dumped nearly 5 million plastic Lego pieces into the ocean.

Soon after the event, which some referred to as the Great Lego Spill, beachgoers in Cornwall, U.K., began finding brightly-colored plastic Legos. Even now, 25 years after the Feb. 13 disaster, numerous Legos from the spill still appear on beaches in Cornwall.

Coincidentally, many of those sea-tossed Lego pieces were nautically-themed. There were tens of thousands of octopuses, life jackets, scuba tanks, diving fins and pirate cutlasses, along with terrestrial shapes such as flowers, "witches' brooms" and dragons, said British beachcomber and writer Tracey Williams, author of "Adrift: The Curious Tale of the Lego Lost at Sea" (Unicorn Publishing Group, 2022).

Related: How much plastic actually gets recycled? 

Williams began collecting beach Legos in 1997 in South Devon, U.K., soon after the spill; more than a decade later, she launched the Lego Lost at Sea Facebook group, where people shared photos of the Legos that they found on British beaches, Williams told Live Science.

"In 2010, I moved to Cornwall to be close to my family, and on my first trip to the beach I noticed Legos from the spill again," Williams said. "I was amazed that it was still washing up after all that time."

On that fateful day in 1997, the Lego bricks and objects had been loaded onto the Tokio Express in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and they were bound for New York. But disaster struck about 20 miles (32 kilometers) off the coast of western Cornwall, in the form of a rogue wave, Cornwall Live reported in 2014.

For centuries, rogue waves — immensely tall and dangerous ocean waves that seemingly appeared out of nowhere — were thought to exist only in maritime legends. However, evidence in recent decades has shown that these waves do exist, though their unpredictability makes them difficult to track and study, according to the National Ocean Service (NOS). Also known as extreme storm waves, rogue waves are thought to form out of merging swells; the resulting wall of water can measure dozens of feet high and may rise suddenly and unexpectedly from a direction other than that of visible surface waves, the NOS says.

The captain of the Tokio Express described the Feb. 13 rogue wave as a "once in a 100-year phenomenon" that first rocked the ship 60 degrees in one direction and then 40 degrees in the opposite direction, according to the BBC. The ship's manifest listed 4,756,940 Lego pieces that were lost at sea, of which 3,178,807 were light enough to float, Cornwall Live reported. In 2015, the BBC mapped more than 40 beach locations in Cornwall where people had reported collecting wayward Lego bits. Williams and her family have probably collected thousands of Legos since the time of the spill, she told Live Science.

Beachcombers initially found the lighter-weight pieces, such as slippers, flowers, lifejackets and octopuses. Black and green dragons, which were also a common sight on beaches but were slightly heavier by comparison, may have also floated because they contained air pockets, Williams said.

"What we're finding now are the pieces that sank as well as the pieces that floated," she said. "It's providing us with an insight into what happens to plastic in the ocean, how far it drifts — both on the surface of the ocean but also along the seabed — and what happens to it as it breaks down." But one of the big problems with plastic pollution is that it can take centuries to degrade in the ocean, and as it deteriorates it releases chemicals that can harm animals' hormones and disrupt their reproduction, according to the American Chemical Society.

In fact, it may be even longer than a few hundred years until the lost Lego pieces break down. When scientists recently analyzed the structure of weathered beach Legos using  X-ray fluorescence, they found that it could take up to 1,300 years for Legos from the 1997 spill to degrade entirely, researchers reported in July 2020 in the journal Environmental Pollution.

Originally published on Live Science.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 28,000 tons (25,000 metric tons) of pandemic-related plastic waste, such as masks and gloves, have ended up in the ocean, according to a new study. 

That's more than 2,000 double-decker buses  worth of waste, The Guardian reported. And within a few years, a portion of those plastic gloves and packaging materials from pandemic purchases could be swirling around the North Pole.

The analysis found that 193 countries produced about 9.2 million tons (8.4 million metric tons) of pandemic-associated plastic waste from the start of the pandemic to mid-August 2021, according to The Guardian. 

The majority of the plastic — about 87.4% — was used by hospitals, while 7.6% was used by individuals. Packaging and test kits accounted for about 4.7% and 0.3% of the waste, respectively, the authors reported in a recent study, published online on Nov. 8 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Related: Sea science: 7 bizarre facts about the ocean 

The team developed a model to predict how much of this plastic waste wound up in the ocean after being discarded. They predicted that, as of Aug. 23, about 28,550 tons (25,900 metric tons) of the plastic debris had already found its way into the oceans, transported there by 369 major rivers, according to The Guardian. 

In three years' time, the majority of the  debris will shift from the surface ocean to beaches and the seafloor, with more than 70% washing onto beaches by year's end, the authors wrote. 

While in the short-term, the trash will mostly impact coastal environments near its original sources, in the long-term, garbage patches may form in the open ocean, the model predicts. For instance, patches may accumulate in the northeast Pacific and the southeast Indian oceans. And plastic that gets swept toward the Arctic Circle will hit a dead-end, and much of it will then swiftly sink to the seabed, the model predicts. The researchers also predict that a so-called circumpolar plastic accumulation zone will form by 2025. 

And "at the end of this century, the model suggests that almost all the pandemic-associated plastics end up in either the seabed (28.8%) or beaches (70.5%), potentially hurting the benthic ecosystems," meaning the deepest regions of the ocean, the authors wrote.

"The recent COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increased demand for single-use plastic, intensifying pressure on this already out-of-control problem," the study authors wrote. "These findings highlight the hotspot rivers and watersheds that require special attention in plastic waste management." 

In particular, the study highlights a need for better systems for collecting, treatmenting and disposing of medical plastic waste in developing countries, to keep it out of rivers, and an overall need to limit the use of single-use plastics and increase the use of sustainable alternatives, where possible, the authors wrote. 

Read more about the new study in The Guardian. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Microbes fished from the stomachs of cows can gobble up certain kinds of plastic, including the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) used in soda bottles, food packaging and synthetic fabrics.

Scientists uncovered these microbes in liquid that was drawn from the rumen, the largest compartment of a ruminant's stomach; ruminants include hooved animals like cattle and sheep, which rely on microorganisms to help break down their diet of coarse vegetation. The rumen acts as an incubator for these microbes, which either digest or ferment foods consumed by a cow or other ruminant, according to the University of Minnesota. The researchers suspected that some microbes lurking in a cow's rumen should be capable of digesting polyesters, substances whose component molecules are linked by so-called ester groups. 

That's because, due to their herbivorous diets, cows consume a natural polyester produced by plants, called cutin. As a synthetic polyester, PET shares a similar chemical structure to this natural substance. Cutin makes up most of the cuticle, or the waxy outer layer of plant cell walls, and it can be found in abundance in the peels of tomatoes and apples, for example, said corresponding author Doris Ribitsch, a senior scientist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. 

Related: How much plastic actually gets recycled? 

"When fungi or bacteria want to penetrate such fruits, they are producing enzymes that are able to cleave this cutin," or split the chemical bonds within the substance, Ribitsch told Live Science. Specifically, a class of enzymes called cutinases can hydrolyze cutin, meaning they jump-start a chemical reaction in which water molecules break the substance into bits. 

Ribitsch and her colleagues have isolated such enzymes from microbes in the past and realized that cows might be a source of similar polyester-munching bugs. "These animals are consuming and degrading a lot of plant material, so it's highly probable that you can find such microbes" living in the stomachs of cows, she said. 

And, in fact, in their new study, published Friday (July 2) in the journal Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, the researchers found that microbes from the cow rumen could degrade not only PET but also two other plastics — polybutylene adipate terephthalate (PBAT), used in compostable plastic bags, and polyethylene furanoate (PEF), made from renewable, plant-derived materials.

To assess how well these rumen-borne microbes could eat plastic, the team incubated each type of plastic in rumen liquid for one to three days. They could then measure the byproducts released by the plastics, to determine whether and how extensively the bugs broke down the materials into their component parts. The rumen liquid broke down the PEF most efficiently, but it degraded all three kinds of plastic, the team reported.

The team then sampled DNA from the rumen liquid, to get an idea of which specific microbes might be responsible for the plastic degradation. About 98% of the DNA belonged to the bacteria kingdom, with the most predominant genus being Pseudomonas, of which several species have been shown to break down plastics in the past, according to reports in the journal Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology and the Journal of Hazardous Materials. 

Bacteria of the genus Acinetobacter also cropped up in high quantities in the liquid, and likewise, several species within the genus have been shown to break down synthetic polyesters, according to a 2017 report in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Looking forward, Ribitsch and her team want to fully characterize the plastic-eating bacteria in rumen liquid and determine which specific enzymes the bacteria use to break down the plastics. If they identify enzymes that could potentially be useful for recycling, they can then genetically engineer microbes that produce those enzymes in large quantities, without the need to collect said microbes directly from cow stomachs. In this way, enzymes can be produced easily and inexpensively, for use at industrial scales, Ribitsch said. 

In that vein, Ribitsch and her team have already patented a recycling method in which textile materials get exposed to various enzymes in sequence; the team identified these enzymes in previous work. The first batch of enzymes eats away at cloth fibers in the material, while the next batch of enzymes goes after specific polyesters. This works because each enzyme targets very specific chemical structures and therefore won't break down just any material it encounters. In this way, textiles that contain multiple materials can be recycled without first being separated into their component parts, Ribitsch explained.

Per the new study, cow rumens may represent another environment in which to discover these sorts of helpful enzymes, but such enzymes crop up in many places in nature, said David Levin, a molecular biologist and biotechnologist in the University of Manitoba Department of Biosystems Engineering who was not involved in the research. 

For instance, the first bacterium found to be capable of consuming PET was Ideonella sakaiensis, a species involved in sake fermentation, Levin said. Certain marine organisms secrete cutinases that can break down plastic, as do various fungi that infect land plants, he noted. 

Thus far, scientists have had luck finding plastic-eating enzymes that break down PET and biodegradable plastics like PBAT and PEF, but now, the real challenge lies in finding enzymes to break down more troublesome plastic products, Levin said. 

For example, plastics like polyethylene and polypropylene are largely made up of strong bonds between carbon atoms, and this structure limits the ability of enzymes to grab hold of the molecules and jump-start hydrolysis, Ribitsch said. So while scientists have already discovered, characterized and commercialized enzymes to degrade PET, researchers are still on the hunt for microbes that can handle polyethylene and polypropylene, Levin said. Levin and his lab have identified a few promising candidates on this front, but they are still figuring out how to maximize the bugs' plastic-eating powers. 

Ribitsch said her team also has an eye out for microbes that can consume polyethylene and wonders if the bugs might be lurking in the stomachs of cows. "Maybe we can find, in such huge communities, like in the rumen liquid, enzymes that can also degrade polypropylene and polyethylene," she said.

Originally published on Live Science. 

In the future, your vanilla ice cream may be made from plastic bottles. Scientists have figured out a way to convert plastic waste into vanilla flavoring with genetically engineered bacteria, according to a new study.

Vanillin, the compound that carries most of the smell and taste of vanilla, can be extracted naturally from vanilla beans or made synthetically. About 85% of vanillin is currently made from chemicals taken from fossil fuels, according to The Guardian. 

Vanillin is found in a wide variety of food, cosmetic, pharmaceutical, cleaning and herbicide products, and the demand is "growing rapidly," the authors wrote in the study. In 2018, the global demand for vanillin was about 40,800 tons (37,000 metric tons), and it's expected to grow to 65,000 tons (59,000 metric tons) by 2025, according to the study, published June 10 in the journal Green Chemistry.

Related:  Plastic legacy: Humankind's trash is now a new rock 

The demand for vanillin "far exceeds" the vanilla bean supply, so scientists have resorted to synthetically producing vanillin. For the new study, researchers used a novel method to convert plastic waste into vanillin, as a way to both supply vanillin and reduce plastic pollution.

Previous studies showed how to break down plastic bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate into its basic subunit, known as terephthalic acid. In the new study, two researchers at The University of Edinburgh in Scotland genetically engineered E. coli bacteria to convert terephthalic acid into vanillin.  Terephthalic acid and vanillin have very similar chemical compositions and the engineered bacteria only needs to make minor changes to the number of hydrogens and oxygens that are bonded to the same carbon backbone. 

The researchers mingled their genetically engineered bacteria with terephthalic acid and kept them at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degree Celsius) for a day, according to The Guardian. About 79% of the terephthalic acid subsequently converted into vanillin. 

"The global plastic waste crisis is now recognized as one of the most pressing environmental issues facing our planet," the authors wrote in the study. About 1 million plastic bottles are sold every minute around the world, and only 14% are recycled, according to The Guardian. Those that are recycled can only be turned into fibers for clothing or carpets. 

"Our work challenges the perception of plastic being a problematic waste and instead demonstrates its use as a new carbon resource from which high-value products can be made," co-author Stephen Wallace, a senior lecturer in biotechnology at The University of Edinburgh, told The Guardian.

Now, the study authors hope to further improve the bacteria to be able to convert even more terephthalic acid into vanillin.

Read more about this technology in The Guardian.

Originally published on Live Science.

A burning container ship dumped tons of plastic debris onto Sri Lanka's beaches, prompting a widespread environmental disaster, according to recent news reports.

The ship, the X-Press Pearl, had sailed to Sri Lanka from India and was anchored near Colombo on May 20, when the crew first reported smoke coming from their cargo hold, according to the X-Press Pearl Incident Information Center. On May 21, a fire started on deck and over the next week, the fire intensified and continued to spread. On May 24, the 13-person crew and 12-person firefighting crew were evacuated from the ship.

By May 31, with the help of the Sri Lankan Navy, firefighting tugs and the Indian coast guard, the fire was brought under control, with no visible flames remaining, but still some smoke, according to the Information Center. It's not yet clear how the fire started, but authorities are suggesting that a leak from the ship's containers sparked the flames, according to The Washington Post.

Related: Top 5 ways to reduce toxins in homes

The ship was carrying 327 tons (297 metric tons) of heavy fuel oil, 56 tons (51 metric tons) of marine fuel oil and 81 containers full of "dangerous goods," including 28 tons (25 metric tons) of nitric acid, a corrosive compound. The ship was also carrying three containers or 86 tons (78 metric tons) of plastic pellets, some of which fell off the ship and are now covering beaches down to the south coast of Sri Lanka, according to Mongabay.

Authorities are warning people not to touch the pellets, known as nurdles, as they can be contaminated with chemicals, according to Mongabay. Nurdles, which are the raw material used in making other plastic items, can absorb chemicals over time, and if marine species swallow them, they can contaminate the food chain.

"It's an environmental disaster," and currents can carry the pellets as far as the other side of Sri Lanka, potentially killing wildlife and damaging ecosystems, marine biologist Asha de Vos told the Post. Vos described the beaches as being filled with piles of plastic "snow."

Authorities have also temporarily banned fishing in these areas; and the National Aquatic Resources Research and Development Agency is sampling and analyzing dead fish and turtles found along the western coast to see if their deaths are related to the spills.

Sri Lanka's Marine Environment Protection and military personnel are working to remove the nurdles from the beaches before the pellets wash back into the water. Crews are temporarily dumping them into a hazardous waste yard and once scientists analyze the pellets , authorities will destroy them, according to Mongabay.

The cleanup will likely be challenging, Muditha Katuwawala, coordinator of the Pearl Protectors, a nonprofit organization that sends volunteers to clean beaches, told Mongabay. "We foresee that the cleaning process will be a lengthy operation, so we started creating tools that can assist the cleaning operations and to create awareness around beach pollution of such magnitude."

Because of a nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in Sri Lanka, Pearl Protectors hasn't been able to clean up after this incident, according to Mongabay. 

Originally published on Live Science.

A photo of a baby loggerhead sea turtle that died after eating 104 pieces of plastic went viral on Facebook this week. The photo was posted by the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton, Florida, on Tuesday (Oct. 1) and shows the lifeless turtle, no bigger than the palm of your hand, next to the dozens of small pieces of plastic found in the animal's digestive tract, neatly organized in rows. 

The little turtle found a wide variety of plastic to chow down on. "We found a piece of a balloon. There was a wrapper that goes on the outside of bottles," Whitney Crowder, the sea turtle rehabilitation coordinator at the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

Related: Plastic Bag Waste Litters Landscape (Infographic)

This poor hatchling was a "washback" turtle — a baby that swam a few miles out to sea, where it started eating, but washed back to shore after a few weeks. Washbacks this size are around 1 to 2 months old, said Leanne Welch, manager of the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, which has been rescuing and rehabilitating sea turtles and providing marine science education programs for more than 30 years. 

"It's washback season at Gumbo Limbo and weak, tiny turtles are washing up along the coastline needing our help," Gumbo Limbo Nature Center staff wrote in the Facebook post. "Unfortunately, not every washback survives. 100% of our washbacks that didn't make it had plastic in their intestinal tracts." The plastic clogs up the animal's digestive tract, they wrote. 

"Unfortunately, it's not unique," Welch told Live Science. "I was just down there, and they're necropsying another washback with plastic in it. It's something we see every day." 

Florida beaches serve as nesting grounds for five species of sea turtle: the loggerhead (Caretta caretta), green (Chelonia mydas), leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea), Kemp's ridley (Lepidochelys kempii) and hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata), according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. All of these species are considered endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The loggerhead is the most common species found nesting in the Boca Raton area of South Florida. 

Once a female loggerhead lays her nest, the eggs incubate in the sand for about 60 days until hatchlings emerge and make a desperate sprint across the beach to their ocean home. They hit the water and immediately swim several miles offshore to floating mats of seaweed known as sargassum, Welch said. 

Defenseless baby turtles find food and shelter in the seaweed for the first few years of their lives. And unfortunately, in addition to the small shrimp and other crustaceans the turtles find to eat in the sargassum, they find a wealth of bite-size pieces of plastic to feast on, Welch said. 

"Many of these young turtles are dying from plastic impaction. The plastic plugs them up and causes them to go into septic shock," center staff wrote in response to a comment on the Facebook post. "Plastic pollution is the sad world we live in now. We need to do better." 

• In Photos: Tagging Baby Sea Turtles
• Deep Blue Sea: Winning Underwater Photographs
• Sea Science: 7 Bizarre Facts About the Ocean

Originally published on Live Science.

The amount of plastic pollution previously thought to exist around the world may be a dramatic underestimate — because the vast majority of plastic pollution may actually be below the surface.

That's the takeaway from a survey of plastic pollution on the beaches of Australia's Cocos Islands, made up of two coral atolls.

An estimated 414 million pieces of debris are now littering the remote islands, and the vast majority of that waste is buried below the surface, according to a new study. But even that is likely an underestimate, a group of researchers reported May 16 in the journal Scientific Reports.

What's more, because most of this plastic is buried below the surface, and most global surveys don't look below the surface, the amount of plastic pollution worldwide may be way more than we previously thought, they reported. [In Images: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch]

The scientists surveyed seven of the 27 islands, which made up 88 percent of the total landmass of the islands, and estimated that they were littered with 262 tons (238 metric tons) of plastic. A quarter of those pieces of debris were single-use or disposable items such as straws, bags and toothbrushes (about 373,000 of them), The researchers also identified some 977,000 shoes.

Roughly 93% of the debris found, most of it tiny micro-debris, was actually buried below the surface. But because they only dug 3.94 inches (10 centimeters) into the sand, and couldn't access some beaches that are known to have a lot of debris, these numbers are likely conservative, lead author Jennifer Lavers, a research scientist at the University of Tasmania, said in a statement.

"Plastic pollution is now ubiquitous in our oceans, and remote islands are an ideal place to get an objective view of the volume of plastic debris now circling the globe," Lavers said. Back in 2017, the same group of researchers revealed that the Henderson Island, a remote, uninhabited island in the South Pacific, was also the world's most polluted one.

Plastic production has increased dramatically over the last decade — in the last 13 years alone, we've manufactured nearly half of all the plastic produced in the last six decades A recent global estimate finds that 5.25 trillion items of plastic are now in the ocean, which is more than the number of stars in the Milky Way, according to the paper.

The amount of debris buried up to about 4 inches (10 cm) below the surface of the beach is 26 times higher than the amount visible on its surface, the researchers wrote. "This suggests global debris surveys, the majority of which are focused solely on surface debris, have drastically underestimated the scale of debris accumulation."

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• 7 Everyday Toxic Things You Shouldn't Toss in the Trash

Originally published on Live Science.

Explorer and businessman Victor Vescovo descended 35,853 feet (10,927 meters) into the Pacific Ocean, breaking the record for deepest dive ever.

At the very bottom, he found colorful rocky structures, weird critters and the ever-pervasive mark of humankind — plastic.

Until now, only two people have successfully made it to the bottom of Challenger Deep, the planet's deepest point at the southern end of the Mariana Trench. Back in 1960, oceanographer Don Walsh was the first to make it down to the trench successfully, reaching about 35,814 feet (10,916 m). He took the journey with Swiss oceanographer and engineer Jacques Piccard. [In Photos: James Cameron's Epic Dive to Challenger Deep]

Over 50 years later, Canadian explorer and filmmaker (writer and director of movies such as "Avatar" and the "“Titanic") James Cameron took the first solo dive and reached a depth of 35,787 feet (10,908 m).

In the recent dive, Walsh accompanied a team up above on the ship, as Vescovo descended alone in a submersible called the DSV Limiting Factor. It took 3.5 to 4 hours to reach the record-breaking depth — a flat, beige basin covered with a thick layer of silt.

From inside the submersible designed to withstand extreme pressures, he spent hours observing and documenting the quiet, dark alien world.

It was chilly; it was quiet; and "it was so very peaceful," he told Live Science. "I was surrounded by enormous pressure, but I was safely cocooned in my technological bubble." The pressure at that depth is about 16,000 pounds per square inch, over a thousand times more than the pressure at sea level. After Vescovo's record-breaking dive, other team members took four other subsequent dives to the trench.

In the depths, during those five dives, they discovered red and yellow rocky outcrops that could be chemical deposits or bacterial mats, which are made by chemosynthetic microbes, meaning they can convert carbon-containing molecules into organic matter.

They also observed a variety of critters. "There were some small, translucent animals," gently moving about, Vescovo said.

They saw arrowtooth eels at 9,843 feet (3,000 m) and a wriggly little spoon worm (Echuria) at 22,966 feet (7,000 m). At 26,247 feet (8,000 m), they observed Mariana snailfish and supergiant amphipods (Alicella species) — creatures about 20 times larger than typical amphipods.

The team also found what they think are four new species of amphipods, or shell-less crustaceans. They found one 8,530 feet (2,600 m) below the surface, one 14,600 feet (4,450 m) and two at the deepest point they reached.

At the deepest point, they were accompanied by some transparent bottom-dwelling sea cucumbers (Holothurians) and an amphipod called the Hirondellia gigas. Because on previous missions these amphipods have been found to have microplastics in their guts, the team collected samples to test how much. Sitting there in the deepest point of the planet, Vescovo also came across a plastic bag and candy wrappers.

After spending hours crisscrossing the bottom of the Challenger Deep, collecting video evidence of different wildlife, geological formations and man-made objects, Vescovo stopped for a second.

"Honestly, toward the end, I simply turned the thrusters off, leaned back in the cockpit and enjoyed a tuna fish sandwich while I very slowly drifted just above the bottom of the deepest place on Earth, enjoying the view and appreciating what the team had done technically," Vescovo said. "It was a very happy, peaceful moment for me."

In the months leading up to this dive, the explorer reached the deepest points of the Atlantic, Southern and Indian oceans as part of the Five Deeps Expedition, which aims to reach the bottom of every ocean on the planet. The expedition is being filmed for "Deep Planet," a documentary series that will air on the Discovery Channel later this year.

• In Photos: Spooky Deep-Sea Creatures
• Images: Cameron's Dive to Earth's Deepest Spot
• Photos: Deep-Sea Expedition Discovers Metropolis of Octopuses

Originally published on Live Science.

Yet another whale carcass has washed up with a stomach full of plastic. This time, it was a pregnant female sperm whale with 49 lbs. (22 kilograms) of plastic in her stomach. She washed up on a beach in Porto Cervo, a popular tourist destination in Sardinia, Italy.

Luca Bittau, president of SEAME Sardinia, a nonprofit organization that aims to protect cetaceans in the Mediterranean through research and education, told CNN that the beached mammal's stomach contained plastic bags, fishing nets and lines, and other objects that were too decomposed to identify.

That’s not all that was inside her.

"She was pregnant and had almost certainly aborted before (she) beached," Bittau said. "The fetus was in an advanced state of decomposition." [Whale Album: Giants of the Deep]

Sperm whales (Physeter microcephalus­) are the only living species of their genus and are the largest living species of toothed whales. Fully grown adult females reach up to 36 feet (11 meters) in length and weigh some 13 to 14 tons (11.7 to 12.7 metric tons), while adult males are far bigger, growing to 59 feet (18 m) long and weighing 35 to 45 tons (31.7 to 40.8 metric tons), according to the American Cetacean Society.

The young female sperm whale that washed up in Italy was a little over 26 feet (8 m) long, and the fetus was about 6 feet (2 m) long, local news agency ICONA NEWS reported. The whale's cause of death is still under investigation.

These marine giants primarily feed on deep-water squid, fish, rays and octopus and consume about 2,000 lbs. (907 kg) of food each day, according to the American Cetacean Society. However, it seems that plastic has also become a part of their diet.

In recent months, sperm whale carcasses with stomachs full of plastic have washed up in Spain and Indonesia. And sperm whales aren't the only marine mammals with an increasingly plastic-filled diet. Just two weeks ago, the carcass of a Cuvier's beaked whale washed up in the Philippines with an astonishing 88 lbs. (40 kg) of plastic bags packed inside its stomach.

• In Photos: World's Most Polluted Places
• Images: Sharks & Whales from Above
• The World's Biggest Beasts: Here and Gone

Originally published on Live Science.

A young Cuvier's beaked whale washed up dead on a beach in Compostela Valley in the Philippines, its stomach filled with 88 pounds (40 kilograms) of plastic bags.

Workers from the D'Bone Collector Museum Inc. in Davao City in the Philippines recovered the whale — a male — on Saturday (March 16) and later performed a necropsy. They found its stomach was packed with plastic bags — 16 rice sacks, four banana-plantation-style bags and some shopping bags, according to a Facebook post from the museum.

His stomach "had the most plastic we have ever seen in a whale," they wrote in the post. "It's disgusting." And it wasn't just plastic bags: The museum said it plans to post a full list of all the plastic items found in the whale's stomach in the next few days.

This isn't the first time a whale full of plastic has washed ashore. A dead sperm whale washed up in Indonesia last November with 100 plastic cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags and even a couple of flip-flops inside its stomach. The Cuvier's whale in the Philippines held seven times more plastic than that sperm whale, the museum said

"Everytime you see this it's shocking," said Lindsay Mosher, the program manager for the nonprofit Oceanic Society's Blue Habits project. "It's obviously tragic."

Plastics are one of the most common types of debris found in the ocean, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The garbage can enter the water through improper waste management, litter on shorelines or out in the sea, and stormwater runoff.

Around 8.8 million tons (8 million metric tons) of plastic get dumped into the ocean every year, according to a 2015 report by the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy. In particular, about 60 percent of it comes from China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

But in any case, this is a global problem, said Mosher, who added that people can take relatively simple steps to help combat plastic pollution. Even something as simple as taking reusable bags to the grocery store or bringing glass containers to work for lunch could build a habit and influence others to do the same, she said.

Once these and similar societal habits take hold, and large companies and corporations catch on to good practices that avoid plastic waste, she said. The result could give marine creatures a chance of life without drowning in the debris of human ignorance.

• Marine Marvels: Spectacular Photos of Sea Creatures
• 10 of the Most Polluted Places on Earth
• What We Recycle (Infographic)

Originally published on Live Science.

Plastic pollution in the world's oceans has become a global environmental crisis. Many people have seen images that seem to capture it, such as beaches carpeted with plastic trash or a seahorse gripping a cotton swab with its tail.

As a scientist researching marine plastic pollution, I thought I had seen a lot. Then, early in 2017, I heard from Alex Weber, a junior at Carmel High School in California.

Alex emailed me after reading my scientific work, which caught my eye, since very few high schoolers spend their time reading scientific articles. She was looking for guidance on an unusual environmental problem. While snorkeling in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary near the town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Alex and her friend Jack Johnston had repeatedly come across large numbers of golf balls on the ocean floor.

As environmentally conscious teens, they started removing golf balls from the water, one by one. By the time Alex contacted me, they had retrieved over 10,000 golf balls — more than half a ton.

Golf balls sink, so they don't become eyesores for future golfers and beachgoers. As a result, this issue had gone largely unnoticed. But Alex had stumbled across something big: a point source of marine debris — one that comes from a single, identifiable place — polluting federally protected waters. Our newly published study details the scope of this unexpected marine pollutant and some ways in which it could affect marine life.

Cleaning up the mess

Many popular golf courses dot the central California coast and use the ocean as a hazard or an out-of-bounds. The most famous course, Pebble Beach Golf Links, is site of the 2019 U.S. Open Championship.

Alex wanted to create a lasting solution to this problem. I told her that the way to do it was to meticulously plan and systematically record all future golf ball collections. Our goal was to produce a peer-reviewed scientific paper documenting the scope of the problem, and to propose a plan of action for golf courses to address it.

Alex, her friends and her father paddled, dove, heaved and hauled. By mid-2018 the results were startling: They had collected nearly 40,000 golf balls from three sites near coastal golf courses: Cypress Point, Pebble Beach and the Carmel River Mouth. And following Alex's encouragement, Pebble Beach employees started to retrieve golf balls from beaches next to their course, amassing more than 10,000 additional balls.

In total, we collected 50,681 golf balls from the shoreline and shallow waters. This represented roughly 2.5 tons of debris — approximately the weight of a pickup truck. By multiplying the average number of balls lost per round played (1-3) and the average number of rounds played annually at Pebble Beach, we estimated that patrons at these popular courses may lose over 100,000 balls per year to the surrounding environment.

The toxicity of golf balls

Modern golf balls are made of a polyurethane elastomer shell and a synthetic rubber core. Manufacturers add zinc oxide, zinc acrylate and benzoyl peroxide to the solid core for flexibility and durability. These substances are also acutely toxic to marine life.

When golf balls are hit into the ocean, they immediately sink to the bottom. No ill effects on local wildlife have been documented to date from exposure to golf balls. But as the balls degrade and fragment at sea, they may leach chemicals and microplastics into the water or sediments. Moreover, if the balls break into small fragments, fish, birds or other animals could ingest them.

The majority of the balls we collected showed only light wear. Some could even have been resold and played. However, others were severely degraded and fragmented by the persistent mechanical action of breaking waves and unremitting swell in the dynamic intertidal and nearshore environments. We estimated that over 60 pounds of irrecoverable microplastic had been shed from the balls we collected.

Game-changer

Thanks to Alex Weber, we now know that golf balls erode at sea over time, producing dangerous microplastics. Recovering the balls soon after they are hit into the ocean is one way to mitigate their impacts. Initially, golf course managers were surprised by our findings, but now they are working with the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary to address the problem.

Alex is also working with managers at the sanctuary to develop cleanup procedures that can prevent golf ball pollution in these waters from ever reaching these levels again. Although her study was local, her findings are worrisome for other regions with coastal golf courses. Nonetheless, they send a positive message: If a high school student can accomplish this much through relentless hard work and dedication, anyone can.

Matthew Savoca, Postdoctoral researcher, Stanford University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The stomach of a whale is bound to be pretty gross — all those giant intestines and immense amounts of blood — but now officials have found nearly 13 pounds (6 kilograms) of plastic trash in the stomach of a dead sperm whale that washed ashore on a beach in southern Indonesia late Monday (Nov. 19).

The trash included more than 100 plastic cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags, two flip-flops and hundreds of other pieces of plastic, WWF-Indonesia said in a Facebook statement.

The 31-foot-long (9.5 meters) whale was in such an advanced state of decay by the time it washed up on the beach that it was impossible for researchers to determine if the enormous lump of plastic was what ultimately killed the animal.

"Although we have not been able to deduce the cause of death, the facts that we see are truly awful," Dwi Suprati, a marine species conservation coordinator at WWF-Indonesia, told the Associated Press. [Whale Album: Giants of the Deep]

Sperm whales (Physeter microcephalus­) are the only living species of their genus and the largest living species of toothed whales. Adult females reach up to 36 feet (11 m) in length and weigh some 13 to 14 tons (11.7 to 12.7 metric tons), while adult males are far bigger, growing to 59 feet (18 m) long and weighing 35 to 45 tons (31.7 to 40.8 metric tons), according to the American Cetacean Society (ACS).

These marine giants primarily feed on deep-water squid, fish, rays and octopus and consume about 2,000 lbs. (907 kg) of food each day, according to the ACS. And, it appears plastic is becoming a more common part of their diet.

Earlier this year, another dead sperm whale washed up on the coast of Spain, likely killed by the 65 lbs. (29 kg) of plastic trash discovered in its gut.

Sperm whales are found throughout the world's oceans and it's no surprise that they'd be cruising around Indonesia. The country is smack in the middle of the so-called Coral Triangle — a hotspot of marine diversity and the area with the highest risk of plastic pollution in the marine environment, according to a 2017 study published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Microplastic Pollution in the Mediterranean Sea.  

Since 2010, Indonesia has ranked as the second-highest plastic-polluting country in the world after China; it produces more than 3 million tons of plastic waste per year, according to a 2015 study published in the journal Science. 

Indonesia's coordinating minister of maritime affairs, Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, told the AP that the dead sperm whale should inspire the country's government and its citizens to significantly reduce plastic use.

He said the government is working to urge shops to discontinue use of plastic bags and for communities to educate students nationwide about the problem. The Indonesian government aims to reduce plastic use by 70 percent by 2025, the AP reported.

"This big ambition can be achieved if people learn to understand that plastic waste is a common enemy," Pandjaitan said.

• In Photos: World's Most Polluted Places
• In Images: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
• In Photos: Spooky Deep-Sea Creatures

Originally published on Live Science.

The global invasion of microplastics now extends to the remotest islands in Chile, and the source could be your washing machine.

Scientists have found plastic microfibers, tinier than 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) in length, in the poop of fur seals on far-flung Guafo Island. It's the first discovery of these tiniest fragments of plastic in wild animal scat, researchers report in the November issue of the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin.

The finding points to an alarming, invisible stew of plastic pollution in the ocean, but it also provides a way to track that contamination, said study senior author Cristóbal Galbán-Malagón, a professor in ecology and biodiversity at the Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile. [Our Amazing Planet Top to Bottom: Mountaintop to Ocean Trench (Infographic)]

"We can use these animals, without disturbing them, as sentinels for microplastics," Galbán-Malagón told Live Science.

Pervasive pollutants

Galbán-Malagón's doctoral student, marine biologist Diego Joaquín Perez-Venegas came up with the idea to search fur seal species for microplastics about five years ago, Galbán-Malagón said. The researchers tramped Guafo Island, scooping seal poop from the fur seals (Arctocephalus australis) that use it as a breeding ground. The island is outside the Corcovado Gulf in northern Patagonia and is uninhabited other than small rotating crews who man a small lighthouse built there. The researchers then returned the samples to their lab to dissolve the organic material with lye, leaving only inorganics like plastic behind.

Studies across the globe have found microplastics, or plastics less than 0.2 inches (5 mm) in length, everywhere, including in human feces and in the digestive tracts of creatures living deep in the Mariana Trench. But Galbán-Malagón and his team wanted to think smaller. They focused on even tinier plastic microfibers, which are much harder to detect because they're invisible to the naked eye. The researchers had to be vigilant against contamination because fibrous microplastics are everywhere — even floating in indoor and outdoor air.

Of the 51 samples collected at Guafo Island and analyzed by the researchers, 67 percent had these miniscule fibers inside, the researchers found. There were between about 3 and 13 fibers per gram, overall, corresponding to a range of up to 180 fibers per stool sample.

Fibers everywhere

The plastic fibers could be coming from several sources, Galbán-Malagón said. They may be degraded bits of lost or abandoned fishing nets, which are typically made of polymer rope. Many probably come from the breakdown of larger plastic pollution, like the plastic bags and candy wrappers frequently found in the guts of seabirds and other marine animals. Another source may be wash water and textiles, Galbán-Malagón said: Synthetic fabrics like polyester fleece shed tiny fibers every time they're washed. Wastewater treatment plant filters don't remove fibers that tiny; to find them in the lab, Perez-Venegas and his colleagues had to use filters normally used for catching phytoplankton or even bacteria.

Fur seals are top ocean predators, so the microfibers in their digestive systems probably come from plastics accumulated from the bottom up. The tiny fibers get mixed in with and consumed by plankton, which are then eaten by crabs and fish, which are fur seals' main meals.

"You have something like an umbrella to test if the community that is sharing this space is exposed or not to microplastics," Galbán-Malagón said.

Now that microfibers have been found nearly everywhere, the question is if and how they affect animal (and human) health. Lab experiments suggest that invertebrates like sea cucumbers and scallops struggle to reproduce, feed and stay healthy when fed microplastics, according to a 2016 paper in the journal Scientific Reports, but health impacts on larger vertebrates have yet to be studied. For Galbán-Malagón and his colleagues, that kind of research is the crucial next step. The team plans to submit a paper on the topic for peer review in the coming weeks.  

• Marine Marvels: Spectacular Photos of Sea Creatures
• In Images: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
• In Photos: The Wonders of the Deep Sea

Originally published on Live Science.

A team of engineers and scientists aims to clean up the several tons of ocean trash called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The plan? A behemoth noodle of sorts. The team hopes to use a 2,000-foot-long (600 meters) floating cylindrical boom with an impenetrable screen hanging from the bottom to sieve out bits of the trash.

Several experts, however, question the efficiency and practicality of the garbage-patch-cleanup plan. Even so, on Saturday (Sept. 8), the team launched the $20 million device, called System 001, from San Francisco Bay. It will get towed 300 to 400 miles (480 to 640 kilometers) offshore for a two-week test run before continuing its journey to the mid-Pacific Ocean.

System 001 was developed by a team of scientists and engineers at The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit dedicated to creating technology that removes plastic from the oceans. The organization's founder, Boyan Slat, is a 24-year-old Dutch inventor who started the organization in the Netherlands when he was 18 years old. [Top 10 Craziest Environmental Ideas]

"Today's launch is an important milestone, but the real celebration will come once the first plastic returns to shore," Slat said in a statement. "For 60 years, mankind has been putting plastic into the oceans; from that day onwards, we're taking it back out again."

Slat's organization plans to create and launch many more devices like System 001 in coming years. The organization estimates that deploying several dozens of these systems over a period of five years will lead to a 50 percent reduction in waste  the Pacific garbage patch.

But many experts are skeptical about the plan and question whether it will work at all.

Sea life and weather

One of the things the experts are concerned about is how the system will avoid catching sea life.

"There's worry that you can't remove the plastic without removing marine life at the same time," George Leonard, chief scientist at the Ocean Conservancy told The New York Times. "We know from the fishing industry if you put any sort of structure in the open ocean, it acts as a fish-aggregating device."

The system is designed to allow sea life to go under the impenetrable screen without harm or risk of entanglement, according to the Ocean Cleanup's website. The site also states that an independent agency, CSA Ocean Sciences, conducted an environmental impact assessment for the system and found no major risks to the environment.

Some oceanographers also wonder whether the system can hold together in the rough weather of the Pacific. And intense sun and violent wave action might cause the device, which is made of plastic, to degrade and contribute to the problem it was designed to clean up.

"I sort of wonder what kinds of microplastics this thing is going to be generating on its own, assuming that it's even functioning," Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association, told Wired. "If it's shedding nano-size particles and then gets smashed into 200-meter-long [660 feet] pieces, you're really covering the whole size range there."

According to the Ocean Cleanup website, the system was thoroughly tested and is designed to withstand forces from even the strongest, once-in-a-century storm.

An ineffective promise?

But the biggest concern might be whether the system will even make a dent in cleaning up the plastic waste in the ocean. The device is designed to float on the surface, with the screen hanging vertically in the water column as anchors on either end of the float hold that object in a horseshoe shape. As waves and currents move toward the device, the net should catch pieces of trash and the floating boom should stop the trash from getting pushed over the net.

But what will the system pick up? "The ocean's surface is simply not where [the plastic is] at," said Marcus Eriksen, an environmental scientist and co-founder of the 5 Gyres Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to finding solutions to plastic pollution. "There isn't a need for at-sea cleanup," Eriksen told Live Science.

Eriksen and his colleagues performed their own assessment of the amount of trash in the Pacific Ocean, and published their findings in 2014 in the journal PLOS ONE. They found that while ocean currents and winds gather trash together in a general area, it's not a giant float like people might imagine, and there was far less plastic than previously estimated. Instead, a lot of the trash falls apart, sinks to the bottom and gets eaten. Eriksen described the area more like "a smog of microplastic particles."

Eriksen said the Ocean Cleanup's device is an ineffective solution because it's focused on a such small part of the problem and doesn't begin to tackle the source of plastic pollution. Instead, he said, people should focus on stopping the trash from making it to the ocean in the first place. In other words, look to the rivers. "Everyone realizes it's going to take an upstream fix," he said. "It's about prevention."

As an acquaintance of Slat's, Eriksen said he thinks the young executive has good intentions but feels obligated to deliver a product to his investors. (The Ocean Cleanup has multiple prominent investors, including Marc Benioff, the co-CEO of Salesforce.com, and Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, the Times reported.)  

In 2015 and 2016, The Ocean Cleanup toured the Pacific Ocean by air and sea to collect data on how much trash was out there. They concluded that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was up to 16 times more dense with plastic than previously estimated. The research team, which included 15 authors who worked for The Ocean Cleanup and only one who didn't, published their results in March 2018 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Many news outlets reported that the garbage patch was 16 times larger than previously thought based on this new research, although the study authors never stated that the size of the garbage patch had grown.

"For the last 10 years, we've worked really hard to undo this Texas-sized-island [of trash] myth and get the public looking upstream," Eriksen said. But The Ocean Cleanup has largely dismissed that approach and instead keeps their focus on the garbage patch as the primary source of the problem, Eriksen said.

"While the rest of the NGOs [non-governmental organizations] use science to drive their work, Ocean Cleanup uses their business to drive science, and that creates bias." Eriksen said.

Live Science reached out to The Ocean Cleanup for comment but didn't receive a response in time for publication.

"It's frustrating," Eriksen said. "There's an opportunity that is lost on this insistence to make good on a promise."

Original article on Live Science.

There may be a hidden source of greenhouse gas that we aren't accounting for.

Plastic may release the heat-trapping, climate-warming gases as soon as it's exposed to light, new research from the University of Hawaii at Manoa has found. Light not only breaks down plastic, but also releases methane and ethylene — two of the most problematic greenhouse gases. Though the gases from degrading plastic probably account for a small percentage of global emissions, it's likely their contributions will grow. [In Images: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch]

To learn what gases plastics were releasing, the research team collected samples of the seven most common types of consumer plastic — both newly produced pieces and fragments fished from the ocean — and monitored the objects' gas production while floating in seawater or exposed to air. All of the samples emitted methane and ethylene, but low density polyethylene (LDPE) exposed to air produced more gases than all other material-environment combinations. A thin material found in plastic wrap and grocery bags, LDPE is one of the main plastics in production and one of the most frequently discarded, said Sarah-Jeanne Royer, a marine biologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the lead researcher on the paper.

The longer the LDPE sat in the sun, the more methane and ethylene it released, the researchers reported in the new study, which was published Aug. 1 in the journal PLOS One.

Royer and her team said the gases result from ultraviolet (UV) rays slowly breaking down the material. As plastic ages, it breaks apart, which is how fingernail-size fragments of plastic end up floating in the ocean. Royer reasoned that smaller pieces mean more surface area for light to damage, so her team evaluated gas emissions from LDPE pieces of different sizes. LDPE powder, they found, emitted 500 times more methane than LDPE pellets.

If the amount of gas from plastic is small now, the constantly increasing surface area of degrading plastics explains why the problem will probably only worsen, Royer said. "It's very worrying, because all the plastic we've produced since 1950 is still here on Earth, and it's degrading as we speak, so it will produce more and more [methane]," Royer told Live Science.

Chris Ellison, a chemical engineering and material science professor at the University of Minnesota, who was not involved in the current research, agreed that the paper shows that light is triggering greenhouse gas release from our plastics.

"Light is well-known to accelerate all kinds of reactions, some desired and some not desired," Ellison told Live Science in an email. He said he was also curious what percent of global methane levels stem from this newfound source, but that's a notoriously difficult type of question to answer. One bit of good news: Most plastic ends up buried in landfills, with little to no light exposure as it falls apart, Ellison noted.

It's also hard to tell if plastic in the real world behaves like it did in Royer's lab. The team analyzed pure samples of each plastic, but the contents of ocean and landfill plastic aren't usually pure. Plastic producers add strengthening additives to pure plastics, and the recipes are proprietary. Royer contacted producers for exact contents, she said, but all refused to supply that information.

Even if this research doesn't replicate real-life conditions perfectly, it's a jumping off point, Royer said. Learning just how much of the world's methane comes from plastic, as well as which plastics are the worst offenders, is next on the list, she said.

Originally published on Live Science.

This story was updated March 22 at 2:44 p.m. EDT.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is getting denser. The enormous plastic soup floating in the vast North Pacific spans more than 617,000 square miles (1.6 million square kilometers), and its density is now between four and 16 times greater than previous estimates, scientists have found.

Researchers made the discovery by looking at the accumulation of plastic trash in the Pacific between California and Hawaii. They found that the patch has more than 87,000 tons (79,000 metric tons) of plastic in it. That equates to 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, or roughly 250 pieces for every person on the planet, the researchers said.

Moreover, the concentration of tiny pieces of plastic, known as microplastics, has exponentially increased since the 1970s, like a person adding more pulp to a glass of orange juice. In the 1970s, the patch housed 2.28 lbs. of plastic per square mile (0.4 kilograms per square kilometer), but by 2015, that number had grown to 7.02 lbs. of plastic per square mile (1.23 kg per square km), the researchers found. [In Images: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch]

The researchers also looked at the size of the plastics in the water. While debris larger than 2 inches (5 centimeters) across accounted for more than 75 percent of the total weight of the plastics, there were far more microplastics, which represented the majority of the 1.8 trillion pieces inside the patch, said Laurent Lebreton, the lead researcher of the Ocean Cleanup Foundation and the lead author of the study. The foundation aims to develop technologies that can extract the plastic from the garbage patch.

"Plastic pollution in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is more severe than expected," Lebreton told Live Science in an email, adding that the study results "are alarming and support the urgency of the situation and the necessity to take action rapidly."

By air and sea

The Ocean Cleanup was founded by Dutch inventor Boyan Slat in 2013, when he was just 18 years old. The new study was paid for, in part, by a crowdfunding campaign in 2014 that raised more than $2 million, according to Slat, who is the study's second author.

In addition to thanking their donors, the researchers also tipped their hats to Taylor Swift, a fisherman who helped construct the mega nets used during the first expedition and deployed onboard the RV Ocean Starr. Funnily enough, Swift owns the Taylor Swift gmail address, and "regularly receives love (and hate) letters in his mailbox," for the singer, Lebreton said.

Once the foundation had the money and equipment, its scientists conducted reconnaissance missions into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch between 2015 and 2016 to get a more accurate picture of the plastic out there, Lebreton said. These missions included 652 net tows carried out by 18 vessels, as well as a reconnaissance trip on a C-130 Hercules aircraft

After collecting water samples, "we also carried out laboratory experiments to quantify, characterize and understand physical properties of buoyant plastic collected at sea," Lebreton said. "Finally, we developed a numerical model to supplement our field data, allowing us to provide more insights on the patch's dynamics and composition." [Infographic: Take a Tour from the Tallest Mountain to the Deepest Ocean Trench]

The results showed that plastics made up 99.9 percent of the debris in the patch. Fishing nets accounted for at least 46 percent of the plastic, the researchers found. Smaller items had broken into fragments, but researchers still managed to identify quite a few objects, including containers, bottles, lids, packaging straps and ropes. Fifty items even had discernable dates, including one from 1977, seven from the 1980s, 17 from the 1990s, 24 from the 2000s and one from 2010.

"Debris were predominantly made of hard, thick polyethylene and polypropylene fragments and derelict fishing gear," Lebreton said.

Whose plastic is it?

The plastic in the patch comes from both land and marine sources, as well as from the 2011 Tohoku tsunami that hit Japan.

"On land, implementing better waste management practices and diverting consumption away from single-use plastics [such as water bottles] may help stem the tide of plastic at sea in the coming years," Lebreton said. "In the ocean, developing better technologies for the fishing and aquaculture industries to retrieve lost gear may also help mitigate the problem."

These plastics can harm marine life, which can get tangled up in the debris. Animals can even chow down on small bits of trash, which can lead to starvation because the plastic takes up room in their stomachs but offers no nutritional value. The plastics can also contaminate the animals with persistent organic pollutants (POPs), which were found in 84 percent of the ocean plastic collected by the trawls, Lebreton said.

Outside take

The fact that the garbage patch is growing is also supported by research coming out soon by Capt. Charles Moore, who discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 1997.

He noted that the large disparity in the density of the patch now compared with previous estimates — that is, four to 16 times higher than previously thought — is due to different methods researchers have used to calculate the patch's innards in the past. Some researchers have looked at larger pieces of plastic, which led them to underestimate the density of the patch, he said. In contrast, others measured as many plastic bits as possible, especially the microplastic pieces, which gave a more realistic view of the patch's magnitude, said Moore, who was not involved with the new study.  

Despite these differences, the key point is that research shows the patch is getting denser as time marches on. "We are destroying [the oceans] with our trash," Moore told Live Science.

The study was published online today (March 22) in the journal Scientific Reports.

Editor's Note: This article has been updated to clarify that the garbage patch is getting denser, not larger in size.

Original article on Live Science.

"I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics."

This famous line from the 1967 classic film "The Graduate" was meant as advice for Dustin Hoffman's character, Benjamin Braddock, but in retrospect, it should have been a warning.

A new study, which is the first global analysis of all mass-produced plastics ever made, finds that since large-scale manufacturing of plastics took off in the 1950s and until 2015, humans have produced approximately 9 billion tons (8.3 billion metric tons) of plastic. [In Photos: World's 10 Most Polluted Places]

To put that in perspective, all that plastic would be equivalent to 85,567 aircraft "supercarriers" like the USS Gerald R. Ford, which weighs 107,000 tons (97,000 metric tons), according the U.S. Navy.

Of those 9 billion tons, half was made in the last 13 years, said Roland Geyer, an associate professor of industrial ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the new study, which was published online today (July 19) in the journal Science Advances.

"You could say, 'What a phenomenal success story,' but I do think it will come with some heavy environmental collateral damage," he told Live Science.

As of 2015, about 7 billion tons (6.3 billion metric tons) of plastic have been disposed of as waste, with only 9 percent of it recycled, 12 percent incinerated, and a whopping 79 percent finding its way into landfills, the researchers report.

If this doesn't change, 13.2 billion tons (12 billion metric tons) of plastic waste will be disposed of in landfills by 2050, Geyer and his colleagues wrote in the study.

Those were really stunning numbers at the time, Geyer said, and he was compelled to get a more comprehensive view of society's plastic use and management. But now that he knows the big picture, Geyer said he's no longer surprised by the amount of plastic marine debris.

"It's a lot, but it's only a fraction of the total amount we're making," he said.

Currently, the world produces 440 million tons (400 million metric tons) annually, he said. The amount in the ocean is about 1 or 2 percent of that total. [In Images: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch]

To arrive at their finding, Geyer and his colleagues pulled data, available publicly and privately, from several different industry associations describing production of high-density polyethylene (PE), low-density and linear low-density PE, polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS), polyvinylchloride (PVC), polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and PUR resins; and polyester, polyamide and acrylic (PP&A) fibers. The study did not include bio-based or biodegradable plastics, which account for 4.4 tons (4 metric tons) annually.  

Originally, the researchers compiled numbers for plastics that people use in everyday situations, such as packaging, household items, car parts, electronics and other common products. But then, Geyer said the researchers decided to include plastic fibers used in textiles, such as in fleece and polyester, which are used to make clothing, carpets, curtains and furniture.

"I was really surprised by how big the production numbers were," he said.

In 2015, 66 million tons (60 million metric tons) of synthetic fibers were manufactured, about as much as the amount of aluminum that was made in that same year, he said.

When the scientists looked at the life cycle of plastics, they found that 60 percent of all plastics produced has been discarded into landfills or some other part of the environment. Plastics, which are made from fossil fuels, do not biodegrade. Instead, they break down into tinier "micro-plastics," which have been shown to infiltrate marine and freshwater sources where their impact is still largely unknown, Geyer said.

Geyer is convinced that dealing with the plastic waste problem requires a solution that goes beyond recycling. "It's not up to the job," he said.

Rather, he said the problem needs to be tackled with the entire tool kit of sustainable materials management, which includes not only recycling but also substitution, reducing the amount of materials required to make a product or construct a building, and perhaps creating energy through incineration.

"Hopefully, everyone who reads this article will come away with the same idea, that we need to change the way we make use of and manage plastics," he said.

Original article on Live Science.

A tiny, uninhabited piece of land in the South Pacific Ocean, called Henderson Island, is considered one of the most remote islands in the world. But now, researchers say it has earned a much more worrisome new title: the world's most polluted island.

Henderson Island is so remote thatit's visited only every five to 10 years, for research purposes, and is listed as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). But this isolation from humanity has not prevented the island's beaches from becoming filled with trash. In a new study, researchers estimate that 37.7 million pieces of plastic — amounting to 17 tons of plastic debris — litter the beaches of Henderson Island.

With as many as 671 pieces of debris per square meter (about 62 pieces per square foot), Henderson Island has the densest plastic pollution ever recorded anywhere on Earth, the researchers said. [In Photos: World's 10 Most Polluted Places]

The island sits near the center of the South Pacific Gyre ocean current, which means litter from South America or debris dropped by fishing boats culminates at the island.

"Far from being the pristine 'deserted island' that people might imagine of such a remote place, Henderson Island is a shocking but typical example of how plastic debris is affecting the environment on a global scale," study lead author Jennifer Lavers, a researcher at the University of Tasmania's Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), said in a statement.

Lavers was part of the most recent scientific expedition to the island. She said just one beach on Henderson Island will have more than 3,750 new pieces of litter wash up every day.

The true total amount of debris on Henderson Island is likely much larger, Lavers said, because the new study was limited to debris samples that were both larger than 0.08 inches (2 millimeters) and located up to 4 inches (10 centimeters) deep in the sandy beaches. Also, pollution along the island's rocky coastline and cliffs has not yet been measured, the researchers said.

Henderson Island's polluted beaches show that there is no escaping plastic pollution, Lavers said. More than 300 million tons of plastic are produced each year, and most is not recycled, according to Lavers. Plastic's durability and buoyancy make its impact on the ocean, and ocean inhabitants, a long-term concern.

"Plastic debris is an entanglement and ingestion hazard for many species, creates a physical barrier on beaches to animals such as sea turtles, and lowers the diversity of shoreline invertebrates," Lavers said in the statement. "Research has shown that more than 200 species are known to be at risk from eating plastic, and 55 percent of the world's seabirds, including two species found on Henderson Island, are at risk from marine debris."

As a World Heritage Site, Henderson Island has a protection and management plan that includes prevention of marine pollution, according to UNESCO. However, the UNESCO listing does not detail any environmental efforts underway to clean up the plastic debris.

The study of Henderson Island's world-record debris is detailed in a paper published online today (May 15) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Original article on Live Science.

A vast amount of the plastic garbage littering the surface of the ocean may be disappearing, a new study suggests.

Exactly what is happening to this ocean debris is a mystery, though the researchers hypothesize that the trash could be breaking down into tiny, undetectable pieces. Alternatively, the garbage may be traveling deep into the ocean's interior.

"The deep ocean is a great unknown," study co-author Andrés Cózar, an ecologist at the University of Cadiz in Spain, said in an email. "Sadly, the accumulation of plastic in the deep ocean would be modifying this mysterious ecosystem — the largest of the world — before we can know it."

Researchers drew their conclusion about the disappearing trash by analyzing the amount of plastic debris floating in the ocean, as well as global plastic production and disposal rates. [Photos: Trash Litters Deep Ocean]

Age of plastic

The modern period has been dubbed the Plastic Age. As society produces more and more of the material, storm water runoff carries more and more of the detritus of modern life into the ocean. Ocean currents, acting as giant conveyer belts, then carry the plastic into several subtropical regions, such as the infamous Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.

In the 1970s, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that about 45,000 tons of plastic reaches the oceans every year. Since then, the world's production of plastic has quintupled.

Missing mass

Cózar and his colleagues wanted to understand the size and extent of the ocean's garbage problem. The researchers circumnavigated the globe in a ship called the Malaspina in 2010, collecting surface water samples and measuring plastic concentrations. The team also analyzed data from several other expeditions, looking at a total of 3,070 samples.

What they found was strange. Despite the drastic increase in plastic produced since the 1970s, the researchers estimated there were between 7,000 and 35,000 tons of plastic in the oceans. Based on crude calculations, there should have been millions of tons of garbage in the oceans.

Because each large piece of plastic can break down into many additional, smaller pieces of plastic, the researchers expected to find more tiny pieces of debris. But the vast majority of the small plastic pieces, measuring less than 0.2 inches (5 millimeters) in size, were missing, Cózar said.

Unknown impact

So what exactly is happening to the debris?

One possibility is that it is being broken down into tiny, undetectable particles, whose impact on the ocean is unknown. Another possibility is that it is being carried into the deep ocean.

Whether that's good or bad isn't clear.

Less trash at the surface may mean less wildlife comes into contact with plastic.

"The plastic pollution in surface waters can more easily interact with the ocean life, because the surface layer of the ocean hosts most of the marine organisms," Cózar said.

On the other hand, small fish — particularly lanternfishes — may be eating some of these small plastic pieces, dubbed microplastics, and breaking them down even more. Because small fish are the ecological link between plankton and small vertebrates, and because commercial fish such as swordfish and tuna eat these small fish, it's important to understand whether the absorption of toxins from the plastic will impact these animals'  health, he said.

The findings were published today (June 30) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

There's a secret world of microbes hidden on the plastic littering the oceans, and scientists are untangling how these mysterious microbial communities, dubbed the "plastisphere," are impacting the ocean ecosystem.

The ocean is teeming with trash, which collects in places in the ocean where currents can trap the debris, such as the great Pacific garbage patch, which is about the size of Texas. Researchers have found that seabirds often ingest this debris, but little was known about how sea debris affected the entire ocean ecosystem.

Last year, scientists discovered that about 1,000 microbes thrived on the plastic debris drifting in the oceans. Many of the bacteria belong to the genus Vibrio (the same genus as the cholera bacteria), which is known to cause diseases in humans and animals. Other microbial members of the plastisphere seemed to hasten the breakdown of the plastic. The microbes also look markedly different from ordinary marine microbes, the scientists said.

But the researchers didn't understand exactly how those microbes got on the plastic, or whether they were affecting the ocean ecology.

In follow-up research, scientists have found evidence that these microbes can form colonies on plastic in just a few minutes. In addition, some types of harmful bacteria tend to prefer living on plastic more than others do. [In Photos: Trash Litters Deep Seafloor]

As a follow-up, the researchers are trying to see whether fish ingesting the plastic could help these bizarre microbes thrive, by providing additional nutrients for the bacteria in their guts.

Unlocking the mysterious world of these microbes could help scientists understand the role of plastic in the ocean as a whole.  

"One of the benefits of understanding the plastisphere right now and how it interacts with biota in general, is that we are better able to inform materials scientists on how to make better materials and, if they do get out to sea, have the lowest impact possible,” Tracy Mincer, an associate scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass., said in a statement, referring to how the plastisphere interacts with other life in the oceans.

The findings were presented yesterday (Feb. 24) at the 2014 Ocean Sciences Meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Plastic bags are the modern environmental scourge — piling up in landfills, polluting the oceans and choking wildlife. Now, Hawaii has taken a stand by becoming the first U.S. state to ban plastic bags at checkout counters.

Hawaii has always valued the land, or "Aina," so the step isn't too surprising. Four of the state's five counties have passed plastic bag bans (Hawaii's Kalawao County, the only outlier, is hardly populated), the Huffington Post reported. "Being a marine state, perhaps, we are exposed more directly to the impacts of plastic pollution and the damage it does to our environment," Robert Harris, director of the Sierra Club's Hawaii chapter, said in 2012, according to the Huffington Post.

Customers can bring their own reusable bags to local shops and restaurants, or use paper bags. Shops will still provide plastic bags for bulk items such as meat, grains or fresh produce. The islands of Maui, Kauai and the Big Island have already banned plastic bags, and Oahu will ban them starting July 2015. Stores and restaurants on the Big Island had been charging customers for plastic bags for a year.

While no other U.S. states have banned the omnipresent bags, several cities have. Los Angeles banned them at the beginning of 2014, and San Francisco and Santa Monica have bans as well. Portland, Ore., and Washington, D.C., have bans too. Coastal North Carolina enacted a ban, but suspended it indefinitely when a tornado hit a paper bag distribution center in 2011. Plastic bag bans also exist in some cities in England, Mexico, India, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Rwanda and Australia, according to HowStuffWorks. Others, including Italy, Belgium, Ireland, Switzerland and Germany, tax the bags or charge a fee for them. Taiwan banned them for three years before lifting the ban in 2006.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+.

Plastic is the dominant trash in the ocean, and has been found just about everywhere people have looked, from the supposedly pristine Antarctic seafloor to the Mariana trench, the deepest point on Earth. But a recent survey of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and elsewhere found less than expected. "We were expecting values in excess of one million tonnes [1.1 million tons] of plastic, and only found [11,000-33,000 tons] of plastic," said Carlos Duarte, director of the University of Western Australia Oceans Institute, in a recent presentation. Somewhere, the plastic is being lost.

But where is it going? One place it's ending up is the stomachs of lanternfish, which are the dominant bottom-dwelling fish in the gyres, or rotating ocean currents, where much of the plastic is found, according to the news site Quartz. Many of the plastic bits are the same size as the fish's food and are mistakenly swallowed. Duarte found as many as 83 chunks in some of the fish.

Here is Duarte's presentation. He begins talking about lanternfish at 31:15.

Email Douglas Main or follow him on Twitter or Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook or Google+.

The Hawaiian Islands are famous for their iconic, pristine-looking beaches. But even in paradise, pollution can be found. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced this week that it will study remote Tern island, part of a coral atoll 550 miles (890 kilometers) northwest of Honolulu, to see if the area qualifies to be listed as a Superfund site, a federal designation for areas with hazardous waste in need of clean up, according to news reports. 

The agency will focus on that site because it contains a landfill that may be leaking contaminants. The study will also examine another 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) of Hawaiian beaches, as well as part of the Pacific Garbage Patch — a floating collection of plastic and other debris — to see if the area qualifies for Superfund status, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The action comes as a result of a suit by the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group. The area is home to one of the largest seabird rookeries in the world and provides habitat for the endangered Hawaiian monk seal and the threatened Hawaiian green sea turtle, the Times noted. The study serves as "an incredibly important first step towards understanding the hazards plastic pollution poses to wildlife," said Emily Jeffers, an attorney with the group.

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Researchers snapped a picture of a baby killer whale in the Pacific Northwest holding a plastic bag in its mouth, just the latest example of plastic pollution in the world's oceans. Last month, scientists from the Center for Whale Research monitoring orcas in the Salish Sea say they spotted a calf playing with what at first looked like a small scrap of blubber. When the baby whale dropped the item from its mouth, they realized it was actually a plastic bag.

Rogue plastic trash can be a problem when it gets into the mouths of the ocean's animals like whales, turtles and seals, but it can even harm creatures deep beneath the surface. One group of researchers recently published a database of trash on the seafloor from California to Canada and offshore of Hawaii. They found that most garbage in their catalogue was plastic, and of those items, more than half were plastic bags, some choking corals nearly 7,000 feet (2,115 meters) below.

Even the plastics we can't see are troubling. One of the most infamous examples of plastic pollution is the great Pacific garbage patch, a Texas-sized amalgamation of confetti-like debris that's barely noticeable to the naked eye. Fish mistake these tiny bits of plastic for prey, and the toxins inside these pieces of debris enter the food chain.

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Researchers who trawled Lake Eerie for floating debris say plastic pollution — already known to be a big problem for the world's oceans — could be getting worse in freshwater bodies like the Great Lakes.

Perhaps the most infamous example of plastic contamination in Earth's waters is the great Pacific garbage patch, known to scientists as the North Pacific Subtropial Gyre. While the nickname might conjure up images of bottles, bags, fishing lines and other trash rafted together and floating in a giant mass across the sea, most of the debris is microscopic.

And the same is true for Lake Erie. Researchers found that 85 percent of the particles they collected were smaller than two-tenths of an inch, in concentrations that varied from 1,500 to 1.7 million plastic particles per square mile.

Plastic can leach toxins into the water, and these substances also could enter the food chain when fish accidentally eat the tiny bits of garbage. Indeed, the team found plastic particles inside the stomachs of Lake Erie's fish.

"The main problem with these plastic sizes is its accessibility to freshwater organisms that can be easily confused as natural food," study researcher Lorena M. Rios-Mendoza, of the University of Wisconsin-Superior, said in a statement. She emphasized that it is not yet understood whether toxins from plastic are entering the food chain in harmful amounts in the lake, and the researchers are just starting to investigate whether the substances could be passed to consumers.

Plastics now account for 80 to 90 percent of ocean pollution, according to Rios, who said plastic production has increased 500 percent since 1980.

"The massive production of plastic and inadequate disposal has made plastic debris an important and constant pollutant on beaches and in oceans around the world, and the Great Lakes are not an exception," Rios added.

In addition to typical trash items, plastic pollution can come from household products like abrasive facial cleaners and synthetic fibers, as well as the plastic pellets that shipped to manufacturers around the world to be turned into anything from milk jugs to car parts.

The research was presented this week at the meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans.

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Plastic found in the stomachs of dead seabirds suggests the Pacific Ocean off the northwest coast of North America is more polluted than was realized.

The birds, called northern fulmars, feed exclusively at sea. Plastic remains in their stomachs for long periods. Researchers have for several decades examined stomach contents of fulmars, and in new study they tallied the plastic products in dead fulmars that had washed up on the coasts of Washington, Oregon and British Columbia, Canada.

The research revealed a "substantial increase in plastic pollution over the past four decades," the researchers said in a statement.

"Like the canary in the coal mine, northern fulmars are sentinels of plastic pollution in our oceans," said Stephanie Avery-Gomm, the study's lead author and a graduate student in University of British Columbia's Department of Zoology. "Their stomach content provides a 'snapshot' sample of plastic pollution from a large area of the northern Pacific Ocean."

Plastic products deteriorate slowly and several studies in recent years have shown vast amounts plastic and other trash in the Pacific Ocean. The garbage can be harmful to the entire ecosystem, scientists say.

The new study found that more than 90 percent of 67 fulmars had ingested plastics such as twine, Styrofoam and candy wrappers. An average of 36.8 pieces of plastic were found per bird. On average, the fraction of a gram in each bird would equate to a human packing 10 quarters in his stomach, the scientists figure. According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, globally, up to 1 million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die each year from eating plastic. [Video of plastic-entangled sea lions]

"Despite the close proximity of the 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch,' an area of concentrated plastic pollution in the middle of the North Pacific gyre, plastic pollution has not been considered an issue of concern off our coast," Avery-Gomm said in a statement. "But we've found similar amounts and incident rates of plastic in beached northern fulmars here as those in the North Sea. This indicates it is an issue which warrants further study."

The findings, announced this week, are detailed online in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin.

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