How Much Plastic Is Floating In The World's Oceans?

A new estimate says that microplastic and macroplastic pollution could consist of as much as 269,000 tons floating in the world's oceans. Though there has been no sufficient data to truly estimate the amount of plastic in the oceans, there has been no limit to guessing and speculation so Marcus Eriksen, from Five Gyres Institute, and colleagues set out to build a better model. For their paper in PLOS ONE, they gathered data from 24 expeditions collected over a six-year period (2007-2013) across all five sub-tropical gyres, coastal Australia, Bay of Bengal, and the Mediterranean Sea. read more

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