Plastic pollution in the deep sea

Every year, thousands of plastic garbage poured into the sea, so that plastic garbage has become the "unique species" of the ocean. The source of marine plastics, the harm of plastic to the ocean, and the measures we can take are worthy of in -depth discussion. Recently, China ’s biological diversity protection and Green Development Foundation (China Green Fair and Green Association) learned a article from internationally renowned journals to discuss how plastic pollution in the deep sea occupy our ocean. The Green Club International Department now compiles this article for reference for friends who are interested.

Picture source: Andrey Nekrasov

As we all know, the ocean is now full of plastic garbage. Each year, more than 8 million tons of plastic garbage poured into the ocean. These garbage flowed into the ocean along the river, and they were dumped on the coast line or were abandoned by fishing boats. Plastic not only contaminated seawater, but also the air in the sea — the plastic particles were blown up by the water mist, and then the wind was blown to the surface of the earth. In many places on the earth, there are indeed "plastic rain" and "plastic snow".

Although most marine pollution pictures only show that the plastic bottle shakes on the sea, or the straw is dragged out of the turtle's nose, these may be just the corner of the iceberg contaminated by plastic -because the bottles and straws in the ocean only occupy the total pollution. a small part.

This is why the "Guardian's Seascape Project" of the Guardian's "Sea View" project will observe the ocean with a microscope in the next few months to find out what exactly is among these plastic polluting oceans. What are the harm of creatures and humans, and what humans can do to protect the environment.

The types of plastic types that people observe at different levels of marine ecosystems depends to a large extent on the location of humans. Although plastic bags and food packaging on the coastline occupy the dominant position, in the farther sea areas, the type of plastic pollution there is an abandoned fishing gear and plastic cover, which is a deeper waters.

"Guardian" picture, source: "A classification system that reveals near -shore to offshore in the global classification of marine garbage", "Nature · Sustainability".

The source of some plastic is also surprising -cigarette butt, yes, the filtering mouth of cigarettes is mainly made of plastic. Similarly, small bags -small packaging that is used to supply tomato sauce or soap separately. As the Seascape reporter Karen Mcveigh revealed, small packaging bags are a huge pollution problem, especially in Asia, United Leahua and other companies as a convenient sales of sales Methods, because small bags can provide affordable products for low -income people. It turns out that they are difficult to solve pollutants because they are small, difficult to collect, and have no recycling value at all.

Then there are huge, invisible micro -plastic -tens of trillions of tiny fibers, beads and plastic fragments. Plastic has now fully incorporated the earth's water system, so that most people drink plastic equivalent to a credit card every week.

There are many sources of micro -plastic itself: it comes from clothes fiber, rotating from the washing machine into the sewer, and then entering the ocean; it comes from micro -plastic particles before production, they are like large plastic "Laogao built -in blocks", such plastics, such plastics The particles often leaked from the container ship unexpectedly, causing damage as large as the leakage of petroleum (although it is not listed as a dangerous product); it comes from the dust attached to the tire (more than a quarter of all micro -plastic in the ocean), That is, people (or to some extent, to some extent when they are driving on the street).

Synthetic fiber is the biggest source of marine micro -plastic:

Source: Citi Bank, 2018.

In order to prevent us from being in trouble, we will also study how to deal with these plastics -how to clean up them, how to stop them from the source, and what we can do to help solve them.

Now there are thousands of plastic in the ocean, so that scientists regard it as a new biological community: "plastic circle". The species living in the "plastic circle" are now its unique species. Plastic seemed to make their eternal home, but we cannot let the "plastic circle" become our home.

For the original text: Plastic in the depths: How Pollution Took Our Oceans | Environment | The Guardian

Translator: Xu Lingzi

Review: SARA

Edit: Pierre

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