HONOLULU (KHON2) — Plastic trash continues to litter our beaches and ocean. Local environmental groups say they’re concerned the pandemic is making plastic pollution more of a problem, despite City efforts to reduce single-use plastics.

According to the Kokua Hawaii Foundation, 70% of ocean plastic waste comes from land.

“Just by virtue of how they’re designed they only get used for 10 minutes and then they’re disposed of,” Kokua Hawaii Foundation’s Jennifer Milholen said. “The way that our waste collection systems are set up and our behaviors a lot of those materials end up in the marine environment, they end up in the land.”

The first phase of Honolulu’s ban on single-use plastic utensils and bags went into effect on April 1, but early fears about surface contamination during COVID-19 led to an increase in single-use plastics for foods, condiments and bento boxes.

“There’s been definitely a huge increase in the dependence of single-use plastics and the perception that is the most effective way to be safe and healthy, but I think what the science continues to show over time and what the CDC has recently confirmed is that surface transmission has not and is not a real danger for transmission,” Milholen continued.

More people have also been ordering take-out from their favorite restaurants.

“A lot of them are seeing a five or six-fold increase in what they were spending in food service takeout and disposable containers,” he said.

According to the CDC, generally, the chances of someone contracting COVID after touching an infected surface is 1 in 10,000.

Experts say if you want to make a positive impact on the environment while protecting yourself from getting sick, remember to bring your reusables with you.

“Always remember to bring your reusable bag. I have a reusable straw that I have inside of a utensil set and that utensil allows me to refuse any form of reusable utensils,” Shin said.

On a grander scale, both Milholen and Shin are operating a pilot program as Hawaii’s first full cycle reusable takeout program, funded by a NOAA marine grant. They provide washing stations along with containers that customer can bring back to participating Haleiwa restaurants.

The restaurants are Haleiwa Joes, Cosmic Kitchen, Rajanee Thai and Cholo’s.

“Our big goal is to make it scalable. We want to show that our pilot is something that can be scaled up across Hawaii’s 4,000 restaurants, and eventually statewide,” Milholen said.

Plastic is the most common type of debris floating in the world’s oceans. Waves and sunlight break much of it down into smaller particles called microplastics – fragments less than 5 millimeters across, roughly the size of a sesame seed.

To understand how microplastic pollution is affecting the ocean, scientists need to know how much is there and where it is accumulating. Most data on microplastic concentrations comes from commercial and research ships that tow plankton nets – long, cone-shaped nets with very fine mesh designed for collecting marine microorganisms.

But net trawling can sample only small areas and may be underestimating true plastic concentrations. Except in the North Atlantic and North Pacific gyres – large zones where ocean currents rotate, collecting floating debris – scientists have done very little sampling for microplastics. And there is scant information about how these particles’ concentrations vary over time.

To address these questions, University of Michigan research assistant Madeline Evans and I developed a new way to detect microplastic concentrations from space using NASA’s Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System. CYGNSS is a network of eight microsatellites that was launched in 2016 to help scientists predict hurricanes by analyzing tropical wind speeds. They measure how wind roughens the ocean’s surface – an indicator that we realized could also be used to detect and track large quantities of microplastics.

Looking for smooth zones

Annual global production of plastic has increased every year since the 1950s, reaching 359 million metric tons in 2018. Much of it ends up in open, uncontrolled landfills, where it can wash into river drainage zones and ultimately into the world’s oceans.

Researchers first documented plastic debris in the oceans in the 1970s. Today, it accounts for an estimated 80% to 85% of marine litter.

The radars on CYGNSS satellites are designed to measure winds over the ocean indirectly by measuring how they roughen the water’s surface. We knew that when there is a lot of material floating in the water, winds don’t roughen it as much. So we tried computing how much smoother measurements indicated the surface was than it should have been if winds of the same speed were blowing across clear water.

This anomaly – the “missing roughness” – turns out to be highly correlated with the concentration of microplastics near the ocean surface. Put another way, areas where surface waters appear to be unusually smooth frequently contain high concentrations of microplastics. The smoothness could be caused by the microplastics themselves, or possibly by something else that’s associated with them.

By combining all the measurements made by CYGNSS satellites as they orbit around the world, we can create global time-lapse images of ocean microplastic concentrations. Our images readily identify the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and secondary regions of high microplastic concentration in the North Atlantic and the southern oceans.

Tracking microplastic flows over time

Since CYGNSS tracks wind speeds constantly, it lets us see how microplastic concentrations change over time. By animating a year’s worth of images, we revealed seasonal variations that were not previously known.

We found that global microplastic concentrations tend to peak in the North Atlantic and Pacific during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer months. June and July, for example, are the peak months for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Concentrations in the Southern Hemisphere peak during its summer months of January and February. Lower concentrations during the winter in both hemispheres are likely due to a combination of stronger currents that break up microplastic plumes and increased vertical mixing – the exchange between surface and deeper water – that transports some of the microplastic down below the surface.

This approach can also target smaller regions over shorter periods of time. For example, we examined episodic outflow events from the mouths of the China’s Yangtze and Qiantang rivers where they empty into the East China Sea. These events may have been associated with increases in industrial production activity, or with increases in the rate at which managers allowed the rivers to flow through dams.

Better targeting for cleanups

Our research has several potential uses. Private organizations, such as The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit in The Netherlands, and Clewat, a Finnish company specializing in clean technology, use specially outfitted ships to collect, recycle and dispose of marine litter and debris. We have begun conversations with both groups and hope eventually to help them deploy their fleets more effectively.

Our spaceborne imagery may also be used to validate and improve numerical prediction models that attempt to track how microplastics move through the oceans using ocean circulation patterns. Scholars are developing several such models.

While the ocean roughness anomalies that we observed correlate strongly with microplastic concentrations, our estimates of concentration are based on the correlations that we observed, not on a known physical relationship between floating microplastics and ocean roughness. It could be that the roughness anomalies are caused by something else that is also correlated with the presence of microplastics.

One possibility is surfactants on the ocean surface. These liquid chemical compounds, which are widely used in detergents and other products, move through the oceans in ways similar to microplastics, and they also have a damping effect on wind-driven ocean roughening.

Further study is needed to identify how the smooth areas that we identified occur, and if they are caused indirectly by surfactants, to better understand exactly how their transport mechanisms are related to those of microplastics. But I hope this research can be part of a fundamental change in tracking and managing microplastic pollution.

[The Conversation’s science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories. Weekly on Wednesdays.]

The waste plastic deluge fouling the world’s beaches could be more than just an eyesore. It could be a toxic timebomb.

LONDON, 8 July, 2021 − European researchers have warned that the wave of pollution engulfing the globe could be nearing a tipping point. The waste plastic deluge could become an irreversible crisis.

Somewhere between 9 and 23 million tonnes of polymers get into the rivers, lakes and seas of the world every year. Even more may be getting into the terrestrial soils and by 2025 − unless the world changes its ways − these levels of pollution will have doubled.

And, the researchers warn, the uncertain and as yet unknown effects of weathering on such volumes of plastic could bring what has been called “a global toxicity debt” as drinking bottles, bits of fishing gear, coffee cups and carrier bags become covered with microbial life; as plastic particles foul the sea’s surface, become suspended in the water column, and build up in the sediments of the ocean.

Plastic waste has now been found everywhere: on the world’s highest mountains, in the deepest oceanic trenches, on the beaches of desolate islands in the Southern Ocean, in the Arctic ice, and in the tissues of living creatures, from seabirds to whales.

Worsening climate crisis

“Right now we are loading up the environment with increasing amounts of poorly reversible plastic pollution. So far we don’t see widespread evidence of bad consequences but if weathering plastic triggers a really bad effect we are not likely to be able to reverse it,” said Matthew Macleod of Stockholm University in Sweden.

“The cost of ignoring the accumulation of persistent plastic pollution in the environment could be enormous. The rational thing to do is act as quickly as we can to reduce emissions of plastic into the environment.”

Professor Macleod and colleagues warn in the journal Science that alongside threats to wildlife, and the potential hazard of environmental poisoning, there could be a number of other hypothetical consequences.

Plastic pollutants could exacerbate climate change by disrupting the traffic of carbon between the natural world and the atmosphere, and they could heighten biodiversity loss in the already over-fished oceans.

Researchers do not yet know of the long-term non-toxicological effects of plastic pollution on carbon and nutrient cycles, soil and sediment fertility, and biodiversity. Nor has there been any assessment of the potential for delayed toxic effects as the plastic polymers are altered by weathering.

“The rational thing to do is act as quickly as we can to reduce emissions of plastic into the environment”

And if there are such effects, then they could persist, to trigger what the scientists call a “tipping point”, long after people have stopped discarding plastic waste into the environment.

“The world promotes technological solutions for recycling and to remove plastic from the environment. As consumers, we believe that when we properly separate our plastic trash, all of it will magically be recycled,” said Mine Tekman, of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, and a co-author.

“Technologically, recycling of plastic has many limitations, and countries that have good infrastructures have been exporting their plastic waste to countries with worse facilities. Reducing emissions requires drastic actions, like capping the production of virgin plastic to increase the value of recycled plastic, and banning the export of plastic waste unless it is to a country with better recycling.”

And her colleague Annika Jahnke of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany warned: “In remote environments, plastic debris cannot be removed by cleanups, and weathering of large plastic items will inevitably result in the generation of large numbers of micro- and nano-plastic particles as well as leaching of chemicals that were intentionally added to the plastic and other chemicals that break off the plastic polymer backbone.

“So, plastic in the environment is a constantly moving target of increasing complexity and mobility. Where it accumulates and what effects it may cause are challenging or maybe even impossible to predict.” − Climate News Network

LISBON (Reuters) – New measures to reduce plastic waste in the European Union have drawn fire from environmental campaigners who say they do not go far enough, while manufacturers worry the rules could lead to different standards being adopted across the bloc.

In an effort to reduce pollution, the EU banned a range of single-use plastic products on Saturday, including straws, plates, cutlery and cotton bud sticks and said drinking bottles must contain more recycled plastic.

The directive, which also requires member states to reduce consumption of certain single-use items, came into force in 2019 but member states had until July 3 to turn it into national law.

“Single-use plastic is the symbol of today’s throw-away society, and phasing them out constitutes an obvious first step to fight plastic pollution,” said Frédérique Mongodin, from NGO Seas At Risk. “Yet we cannot rely on the sole political will of national governments.”

Only eight member states have informed the European Commission of measures put in place to transpose the directive, according to the Commission’s database. Most have adopted “bare minimum requirements” or are missing some of the required measures, Zero Waste Europe said.

In others, such as Poland and Bulgaria, the transposition of the directive into national law is still in progress or has not started.

Plastics manufacturers have also criticized the new rules, which they say risk fragmenting the market if some countries stick to the EU requirement for 30% of recycled content in plastic drinking bottles by 2030 and others go for more ambitious targets.

The result could be that some manufacturers might have to produce different products for different countries, which would not be economically viable, one industry source said.

In an industry statement, Plastics Europe, which represents manufacturers, called on the Commission to ensure the guidelines are not open for interpretation so member states do not end up adopting different rules.

A Commission spokesperson said it has been “monitoring the transposition process and will provide member states with guidance and assistance where needed.”

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Taiwanese architect and engineer Arthur Huang wanted to do something to help. As the construction industry across the world ground to a halt, putting many of his projects on hold, Huang turned his attention to solving the urgent need for medical supplies and hospital space.

With the pandemic affecting shipments of conventional materials, Huang found an alternative that’s never in short supply. “We have been building medical parts, medical components and a medical modular ward system all out of local trash,” he says.

The result is the Modular Adaptable Convertible (MAC) ward — the world’s first hospital ward built out of recycled materials, according to Miniwiz. It was designed by the company in partnership with the Fu Jen Catholic University Hospital in Taipei, and may begin to admit patients as early as June.

The walls of the MAC ward are lined with panels made from 90% recycled aluminum, and insulation made from recycled polyester. Cupboard handles and clothes hooks are made from recycled medical waste such as PPE.

A portable version can be built from scratch in 24 hours, Huang says, allowing it to be transported to places with high medical need.

“I think that [the] pandemic forces us to become very innovative to come up with the solutions to adapt to the current situation,” he says.

Taking inspiration from ancient Rome

Huang’s interest in reusing waste has its roots in antiquity. While studying archaeology in Rome in 1999, he noticed something that would send him on a life-long mission to revolutionize recycling: many of the city’s ancient buildings were partly made from trash.

“A lot of foundations, aqueducts, infrastructure built in Rome are actually made from cement … from single-use packaging,” Huang says. The idea of taking waste and repurposing it for building would form the foundation of his work for the next 20 years.

Huang has worked on developing ways to turn post-consumer waste, like plastic bottles, as well as post-construction and post-agricultural waste, into materials that have now been used in buildings, restaurants and stores across the world, from Milan to Shanghai.

One material which can be used for ceiling panels is made from waste rice husks mixed with recycled DVDs and LED lenses. Another, made from recycled plastic, electronic waste and automotive waste, is used to make a weather-resistant shading system for buildings.

The Nike Kicks Lounge store in Taipei is full of such innovations. A giant air bubble made from recycled factory waste hangs suspended from the ceiling, acting as both insulation against the sun and a lighting structure. Many of the fixtures, including the cash register counter, have been made from ReGrind — a material Miniwiz developed from ground down soles of Nike shoes and other waste. Chairs in the store are made from the recycled shoes of famous Taiwanese athletes.

“Democratizing” zero-waste technology

Alongside developing new materials, Huang is looking for ways to tackle the environmental challenges posed by the global recycling industry.

The business of shipping recycling across the world to be processed is a big part of the problem, Huang says, as it increases the risks of contaminating materials, which makes recycling difficult. It also has a bigger carbon footprint than recycling locally.

To help “democratize” its zero-waste technology, Miniwiz shifted its mission to make recycling more accessible to communities around the world to help avoid the practice of exporting waste.

Inspired the Disney movie Wall-E, about a little robot with the ability to detect different kinds of waste in a dystopian world covered in landfills, Huang and his team set about designing a portable, solar-powered recycling machine that could be taken to places where plastic waste is an increasing problem. The Trashpresso was born.

The Trashpresso machine can melt and compress post-consumer plastic, like bottle tops, into new plastic products.

The latest version comes with an AI recycling system that can detect different types of plastic, which the machine can shred and melt into new products such as containers or tiles.

Miniwiz says its Trashpressos have recycled over 203,000 water bottles across 10 cities worldwide. The goal is to develop a fully automated version and to scale up this system to make local recycling facilities that are easily accessible for communities worldwide.

“We don’t need to create new things,” Huang says. “We just need to use our ingenuity, innovations and our good heart and good brain to transform these existing materials into the next generation of products and buildings to power our economy.”

The plastic food containers, coffee cups and cutlery that came with all that take-away during lockdown are now off the table as the EU gives single-use plastics the bin.

The great packaging purge has begun.

Ten single-use plastic (SUP) products that for years have blighted Europe’s beaches will be largely banned from July 3 as the EU’s Single-Use Plastics Directive of 2019 comes into force.

Plastic cotton bud sticks, cutlery, plates, straws, stirrers, balloon sticks and polystyrene drink and food vessels cannot be sold as of Saturday. Also getting binned are oxo-degradable plastic bags that are marketed as biodegradable but which, according to the EU, break down into microplastics that long remain in the environment.   

These disposable plastics make up around 70% of marine litter in Europe. Cafes and restaurants will now be forced to stock cups and straws made of bamboo, cellulose or other biodegradable materials.

But not all has been outlawed as part of the plastics reforms. 

SUP bags, bottles, beverage and food containers for immediate consumption, packets and wrappers, tobacco filters, sanitary items and wet wipes will still instead be restricted, while producers will have to pay for the clean-up and institute awareness campaigns about their environmental impact.

The end goal is an EU circular economy model via which any remaining disposable plastics will be reusable or recyclable by 2030.

Here are five things to know about the EU’s plans for a plastic-free future.

1. How the new plastic regime will be implemented  

EU Member States have drawn up their own laws to implement the Single Use Plastics Directive. Some have even decided to add to the list of banned SUPs.

As part of France’s ‘law on the circular economy and the fight against waste‘ adopted in February 2020, most fruit and vegetable packaging will also be banned, as will plastic tea bags, confetti and plastic toys offered as part of kids menus.

Europe’s battle with marine plastic pollution: Some of the 22 kilograms (48.5 pounds) of plastic found in its belly of a sperm whale found dead off Sardinia in 2019

In Germany, measures approved in Novemberadded EPS polystyrene food containers to the SUPs included in the directive.

In Luxembourg, SUPs have been banned from being sold at festivals from July 3. In Greece, meanwhile, they’ve been outlawed from use in government agencies since February, the first ban of its kind.

Other countries like Italy and Belgium are also introducing a plastics tax or levy to disincentivize the use of plastics.

It might all appear haphazard, but in line with the European Green Deal, all EU member states must ultimately fall in line with a waste and pollution-free circular economy model in which any SUPs are sustainably re-used and recycled by the end of the decade.

2. Plastic drink bottles still allowed 

While the plastics directive deals with a lot of throwaway plastic items that end up on Europe’s coasts, it does not ban some of the 1.3 billion plastic drink bottles that are sold daily around the world.

Made of PET, these fossil-based plastic containers are, however, one of the few that can be recycled and used to make new bottles, packaging or fibers. The problem remains that only 65% of PET bottles in Europe are collected for recycling, and the rest will take hundreds of years to decompose.

The SUP directive sets a collection target of 90% recycling for PET bottles by 2029 (with an interim target of 77% by 2025). These bottles should also contain at least 25% recycled, as opposed to virgin, plastic by 2025

And manufacturers who sell PET bottles now also have more stringent accountability as part of the “extended producer responsibility” mandate included in the directive. Based on the “polluter pays” principle, producers will have to cover the cost of waste management clean-up as well as raising awareness about the environment impact of the product and the most sustainable disposal methods.

3. Some alternatives to plastic

Natural polymers that have not been chemically modified are exempt from the directive. Any plastics created from modified natural polymers, or fossil or synthetic feedstocks, are effectively banned.

The winners here will be a range of new sustainable materials that are not considered chemically modified. These include regenerated cellulose, which is used to create viscose, lyocell and cellulosic films.

The most abundant biopolymer on our planet, regenerated cellulose is used to create a strong, transparent and completely biodegradable film or sheet that is largely impermeable to oils and greases. A long-used food packaging material before the introduction of oil-based plastics, cellulose is back.

Meanwhile, biodegradable cotton bud sticks will typically be made from compostable bamboo, meaning they can be disposed of in the normal organic waste. All that SUP cutlery is also likely to be replaced by completely compostable, 100% biodegradable bamboo that is cheap and fast to grow.

That said, when implementing the SUP directive, countries like France and Belgiun have banned the labeling of products as “biodegradable” because it can be a form of greenwashing that encourages packaging consumption.

4. Cigarette butts also on the list

Article 8 of the EU Single Use Plastics Directive specifies that tobacco producers have to foot the bill for the clean-up of cigarette butts containing plastic filters.

Made with cellulose acetate, a polymer that breaks down in the environment very slowly, some 4.5 trillion butts are discarded annually, making it the most littered item on the planet.

But the EU’s SUP directive is forcing producers to label the butts and packets to create awareness as opposed to an outright ban.

Activists want plastic butts to simply be outlawed — which won’t happen until 2027 when the list of banned SUPs will be updated. 

In September 2020, anti-plastic campaigners collected 142,000 cigarette butts from streets across the Netherlands.

“Communication campaigns do not solve the issue,” said Karl Beerenfenger from By the Ocean we Unite, which co-organized the clean-up. “We must change the product itself. Cigarette filters only serve as a marketing tool to sell more cigarettes. We want to get rid of the plastic cigarette filter altogether.”

But so far there are no plans to ban butts.

Sustainable filters could be an interim solution, with the company Green Butts pitching its water dispersable filter to the EU Commission on social media, claiming its product biodegrades in days and is produced with sustainable natural fibers.

5. ‘Pandemic plastics’ yet to be included

The SUPs ban exempts medical-related plastics, including the masks and gloves that have become so widespread during the pandemic. In addition to the many types of packaging made from long-lasting SUPs for these pandemic response products, these materials have ended up as waste on both land and in marine environments, with potentially harmful impacts on ecosystems, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA).

“Imports of face masks into the EU more than doubled compared with business as usual before the pandemic,” said the EEA. The increase happened while EU production was also increasing.

With around 170,000 additional tons of these plastic-based face masks introduced into the EU during the first six months of the pandemic, calls are growing to find alternatives.

But so far, pandemic plastics are not addressed by the new SUP rules: “Notably, the directive on single-use plastics does not even apply to single-use plastic products used in the health sectors, such as single-use gloves, gowns and masks,” said Justine Maillot from Zero Waste Europe in a statement. 

• 

  Eco drinking straws: Grass is greener

  Natural innovation

  Vietnamese entrepreneur Tran Minh Tien has tapped into the natural resources in his local area in a bid to do his bit to tackle plastic waste. His company 3T produces drinking straws from hollow grass which grows wild in the Mekong river delta, west of Vietnam’s capital, Ho Chi Minh City.

• 

  Eco drinking straws: Grass is greener

  Harvest time

  Tien and his team pick the grass by hand from swampland areas near their village. Grey sedge grass has hollow stems which makes the plant ideal for making straws. That’s just the beginning: Transforming the wild glass to a finished product fit to drink from is a labor-intensive process.

• 

  Eco drinking straws: Grass is greener

  Green and clean

  Once the grass has been harvested, workers wash the long stems to get rid of excess dirt. Because the grass, known locally as “co bang,” grows in the wild, it is naturally organic and free of chemicals and pesticides.

• 

  Eco drinking straws: Grass is greener

  Scaling up precision

  Workers use thin metal rods to fully hollow out the grass stems before cutting them into uniform lengths of about 20cm, the same size as a regular drinking straw. The business started in 2017, and the company now produces about 3,000 straws a day.

• 

  Eco drinking straws: Grass is greener

  Dry and mighty

  The straws are then left out to dry in the sun for two or three days, or alternatively baked in an oven. Once completely dried out, the they can be used for up to six months. Demand for the reusable, biodegradable drinking straws is growing, but company founder Tran Minh Tien says he has to be careful about how fast he can expand his business in order to keep it sustainable.

• 

  Eco drinking straws: Grass is greener

  Respecting nature

  “Right from the start, I formed this idea around the fact that the harvesting can never exceed the grasses’ natural reproduction rate,” said Tran Minh Tien, 32. “Nature has to have enough time to recover as well.”

• 

  Eco drinking straws: Grass is greener

  Drinking straws with a difference

  Finally, the straws are gathered into bundles and wrapped in banana leaves ready to be sold. Tien’s company now makes a profit of around 3,600 euros a month. He says he sees the grass straws as a temporary solution to the problem of plastic waste. But for him, they’re a step in the right direction — and proof that it pays to be green.

  Author: Loveday Wright

The plastic in our oceans may have changed the planet… forever, according to new research.

It has reached a tipping point – triggering effects we will not be able to reverse.

Recycling schemes are failing to stem the tide. Capping production and banning waste exports is the last chance.

Actions that drastically reduce emissions are “the rational policy response,” say an international team.

Lead author Professor Matthew MacLeod, of the University of Stockholm, explained: “Plastic is deeply engrained in our society and leaks into the environment everywhere – even in countries with good waste-handling infrastructure.”

The study in the journal Science found the pollution threat is getting worse despite better public awareness.

Plastic is found everywhere on Earth – from deserts and mountaintops to deep oceans and Arctic snow.

As of 2016, estimates of global emissions to the world’s lakes, rivers and oceans ranged from nine to 23 million metric tons a year. The same again is dumped on land.

Quantities are expected to almost double by 2025 if business-as-usual scenarios apply.

Co author Mine Tekman, a PhD candidate at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven, Germany, said it is also a “political and economic” issue.

Current solutions, such as recycling and cleanup technologies, are not enough – and we must tackle the problem at its root.

She said: “The world promotes technological solutions for recycling and to remove plastic from the environment.

“As consumers, we believe when we properly separate our plastic trash, all of it will magically be recycled.

“Technologically, recycling of plastic has many limitations, and countries that have good infrastructures have been exporting their plastic waste to countries with worse facilities.

“Reducing emissions requires drastic actions, like capping the production of virgin plastic to increase the value of recycled plastic, and banning export of plastic waste unless it is to a country with better recycling.”

Plastic accumulates when amounts exceed those removed by cleanup initiatives and natural outdoor degradation from sunlight, air and moisture.

Co author Prof Hans Peter Arp, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, said: “Weathering of plastic happens because of many different processes, and we have come a long way in understanding them.

Accumulation

“But weathering is constantly changing the properties of plastic pollution, which opens new doors to more questions.

“Degradation is very slow and not effective in stopping accumulation, so exposure to weathered plastic will only increase.”

He describes plastic as a “poorly reversible pollutant”, both because of its continuous emissions and environmental persistence.

Untouched places – such as the pristine polar regions – are most vulnerable.

Co author Prof Annika Jahnke, of RWTH Aachen University, Germany, explained: “In remote environments, plastic debris cannot be removed by cleanups.

“Weathering of large plastic items will inevitably result in the generation of large numbers of micro and nanoplastic particles as well as leaching of chemicals intentionally added and other chemicals that break off the plastic polymer backbone.

“So, plastic in the environment is a constantly moving target of increasing complexity and mobility. Where it accumulates and what effects it may cause are challenging or maybe even impossible to predict.”

On top of the damage it causes by entanglement of animals and toxic effects, there are a range of potential indirect environmental impacts.

They include fuelling climate change by disrupting the global carbon pump and biodiversity loss in the ocean where plastic acts as an additional stressor to overfishing.

Others are ongoing habitat destruction from changes in water temperatures, reduction in nutrients and more chemical exposure.

The researchers hope taking all the findings together will provide “compelling motivation” for tailored actions.

Added Prof MacLeod: “Right now, we are loading up the environment with increasing amounts of poorly reversible plastic pollution.

“So far, we don’t see widespread evidence of bad consequences, but if weathering plastic triggers a really bad effect we are not likely to be able to reverse it.

“The cost of ignoring the accumulation of persistent plastic pollution in the environment could be enormous.

“The rational thing to do is to act as quickly as we can to reduce emissions of plastic to the environment.”

1.3billion tonnes

Last year a British study published in the same journal found 1.3 billion tonnes of plastic is destined for our environment – both on land and in the ocean – by 2040.

The finding by the University of Leeds was based on a global model of the scale of the plastic problem over the next two decades.

Another recent study by the University of Plymouth found a staggering 700 different species are threatened by plastic pollution – many of which are currently endangered.

Earlier this year Greenpeace urged the UK government to ban the export of plastic waste to all countries, invest in a domestic recycling industry and set a binding target for plastic reduction.

It also revealed how plastic waste from seven major UK supermarkets was being burned and dumped in Turkey rather than being recycled. It wants ministers to ban all exports of plastic by 2025.

Related: Watch: Greta Thunberg has again slammed world leaders about climate change action