SUMMARY OF ISSUE
BANGKOK, Thailand — The planet’s seas are choking on our junk: soda bottles, plastic bags and tons of cigarette butts. Distant spots in the ocean — called garbage gyres — have become vortexes where humanity’s trash bobs atop the water for miles on end.
Worse yet, the filth floating on the surface accounts for only 5 percent of all the plastic trash dumped into the sea. According to Ocean Conservancy, a US environmental nonprofit, the other 95 percent is submerged beneath, where it strangles underwater creatures and wrecks the aquatic ecosystem. It turns out that five countries are the leading contributors to this crisis. And all are in Asia.
In a recent report, Ocean Conservancy claims that China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are spewing out as much as 60 percent of the plastic waste that enters the world’s seas.
WHY ITS IMPORTANT
As it stands, humans leak a staggering 8 million metric tons of plastic into the ocean each year, according to research published in Science Magazine. If our behavior doesn’t change, Ocean Conservancy says, we’ll double that rate in just 10 years.
All that garbage is having devastating effects on the seas: choking marine life to death, dramatically warping ecosystems and wreaking environmental havoc that some experts liken to the climate change crisis.
BANGKOK, Thailand — The planet’s seas are choking on our junk: soda bottles, plastic bags and tons of cigarette butts. Distant spots in the ocean — called garbage gyres — have become vortexes where humanity’s trash bobs atop the water for miles on end.
Worse yet, the filth floating on the surface accounts for only 5 percent of all the plastic trash dumped into the sea. According to Ocean Conservancy, a US environmental nonprofit, the other 95 percent is submerged beneath, where it strangles underwater creatures and wrecks the aquatic ecosystem. It turns out that five countries are the leading contributors to this crisis. And all are in Asia.
In a recent report, Ocean Conservancy claims that China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are spewing out as much as 60 percent of the plastic waste that enters the world’s seas.
WHY ITS IMPORTANT
As it stands, humans leak a staggering 8 million metric tons of plastic into the ocean each year, according to research published in Science Magazine. If our behavior doesn’t change, Ocean Conservancy says, we’ll double that rate in just 10 years.
All that garbage is having devastating effects on the seas: choking marine life to death, dramatically warping ecosystems and wreaking environmental havoc that some experts liken to the climate change crisis.