Cargo ship disasters are ‘oil spills of our time’ because of health risk from plastic
Sri Lankan beaches buried in pellets only ‘tip of the iceberg’ of environmental harm after analysis of nurdles from burning ship
Container ship accidents at sea should be considered the “oil spills of our time”, warned environmental organisations that found a toxic mix of metals, carcinogenic and other harmful chemicals on plastic washed up on Sri Lanka’s beaches after a cargo ship fire.
When the X-Press Pearl sank off nine nautical miles off Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital, in May 2021, the most “significant harm” from the country’s worst maritime disaster initially came from the spillage of 1,680 tonnes of plastic pellets, or “nurdles”, into the Indian Ocean. They were found in dead dolphins, fish and on beaches – in some places 2 metres deep. A UN report called it the “single largest plastic spill” in history.
Researchers analysed samples of nurdles and burnt lumps of plastic from four Sri Lankan beaches for heavy metals and various chemicals, including benzotriazole UV-stabilisers, which are used to prevent discoloration in plastics, bisphenols and polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
They found heavy metals as well as chemicals that both cause cancer and are “endocrine-disrupting”, or interfering with hormones. Of particular concern, they said, were levels of PAHs found on the burnt lumps, which far exceeded safe limits for consumer products set by the EU. For some substances, no level of exposure is considered safe.
Dr Therese Karlsson, a science adviser at IPEN and co-author of the study, said: “Until now, there hasn’t been any publicly available chemical analysis of the spill. The chemicals have largely been overlooked because they are not visible.”
While the nurdle spillage was “catastrophic”, Karlsson said, it was “the tip of the iceberg” due to the chemicals present – in particular BPA, which is used to make plastic and epoxy resins.
“We found bisphenol-A (BPA), which is a probable human carcinogen and has been linked to everything from depression, to respiratory disease, to breast and colon cancer,” she said. “It is also an endocrine disruptor.”
Of 1,486 containers carried on the vessel, 80 were classed as “dangerous goods” including caustic soda and nitric acid. The ship also carried epoxy resins, used in paints and primers, ethanol, and lead ingots, used to make vehicle batteries.
The study concluded that current legislation and practices are insufficient to mitigate the risk of poorly packaged chemicals on ships.
“Shipping is increasing, with 90% of the world’s trade moved by sea,” said Karlsson. “The cargo of these ships is so much more complex today. But the regulations have not kept up.”
Chalani Rubesinghe, of CEJ, said the disaster had exposed the complexity of shipping chemicals. “These accidents have huge consequences on the environment and economies,” she said.
The safety commission of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has been discussing how to track containers and address the loss of pellets at sea.
Sri Lanka has asked the IMO to classify plastic pellets as toxic substances, and Vanuatu is calling for better reporting of containers lost at sea.
The Sri Lankan authorities said this week that clearing the wreck and debris of the sunken ship would take four months. They have filed an interim claim for damages of $40m (£30m) with the operator of the X-Press Pearl.
A new WWF report says the fossil-fuel derived substance “has reached every part of the ocean.” The wildlife group is calling for creating an international treaty on plastics.
Wildlife group WWF said on Tuesday that plastic has infiltrated all parts of the ocean, calling for urgent efforts to create an international treaty on plastics.
According to a report published by WWF, 88% of marine species are affected by severe contamination of plastic in the ocean. The report said that many animals have ingested these plastics, including animals commonly consumed by humans.
WWF has indicated that at least 2,144 species suffer from plastic pollution in their habitat. Pictured are piles of garbage at Tanjung Burung Beach, Indonesia
What did the report say?
The report, which was written in collaboration with Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute, compiles data from 2,590 scientific studies on the topic. It measures the impact of plastic and microplastic in the ocean.
Gigantic “plastic islands,” made up of floating pieces of plastic, have been found in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
The report found that the fossil-fuel derived substance “has reached every part of the ocean, from the sea surface to the deep ocean floor, from the poles to coastlines of the most remote islands and is detectable in the smallest plankton up to the largest whale.”
WWF has indicated that at least 2,144 species suffer from plastic pollution in their habitat, and some of these species also end up ingesting these materials. This is the case of 90% of marine birds and 52% of turtles, according to the report.
WWF warned that plastic content has been found in shellfish like blue mussels and oysters, and a fifth of canned sardines contain these particles.
The report predicts that plastic production will double by 2040, which will cause a fourfold increase in plastic waste in the ocean. This will affect an area that is two and a half times the size of Greenland, according to WWF.
WWF said that some of the most threatened marine areas are the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea and the Mediterranean. These areas have already reached the limit of how much microplastic they can absorb.
Erik Lindebjerg said that the main factor in plastic pollution is the prevalence of single-use plastics
What is the cause of the pollution?
WWF expert Eirik Lindebjerg said that although fishing is a major contributor to marine pollution, the main factor is the prevalence of single-use plastics.
“Due to the fact that plastic has got cheaper, manufacturers produce large quantities of it and this has allowed them to develop single-use products that later end up becoming waste,” Lindebjerg said.
According to Lindebjerg, some places face a risk of “ecosystem collapse” that affects the entire marine food web.
Lindebjerg called for a massive decrease in plastic pollution, saying that the amount of plastic pollution marine ecosystems can absorb is limited.
“We need to treat it as a fixed system that doesn’t absorb plastic, and that’s why we need to go toward zero emissions, zero pollution as fast as possible.”
The WWF is calling for talks aimed at drawing an international agreement on plastics at the UN environment meeting, held from February 28 to March 2 in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. It wants a treaty to establish global production standards and real “recyclability.”
KALBA, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The hawksbill sea turtle lay belly-up on the metal autopsy table, its shell ashen and stomach taut.
A week ago, the adolescent turtle washed up on a beach in Kalba, a city on the east coast of the United Arab Emirates. Once unspoiled, the coast of mangrove trees is now fouled by piles of trash dragged from nearby landfills. Strewn across the shore are plastic bags, packages, bottle caps — and far too often, dead turtles.
At first, Fadi Yaghmour, a marine expert who has examined some 200 turtles for the first research on the subject from the Middle East, extracted typical fare from the carcass — squid beaks and oysters.
Then, a culprit for the creature’s demise became clear: shriveled balloons and plastic foam, some of the last things the turtle ate.
“It’s probably malnourished,” Yaghmour told The Associated Press last week as he worked. Plastic clogs turtles’ intestinal tracts, he said, and can cause them to starve.
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This turtle is one of 64 retrieved from the shores of Kalba and Khor Fakkan, in the wider emirate of Sharjah, to be analyzed in Yaghmour’s lab. His team of researchers have published a new study in the Marine Pollution Bulletin that seeks to document the damage and danger of the throwaway plastic that has surged in use around the world and in the UAE, along with other marine debris.
When discarded, plastic clogs waterways and chokes animals — not just sea turtles but whales, birds and all sorts of life.
A staggering 75% of all dead green turtles and 57% of all loggerhead turtles in Sharjah had eaten marine debris, including plastic bags, bottle caps, rope and fishing nets, the study found. The only other research from the region, published in 1985, found that none of the studied turtles in the Gulf of Oman had eaten plastic.
“When the majority of sea turtles have plastics in their bodies, you know you have a significant problem,” Yaghmour said. “If there’s ever a time to care about turtles, it is now.”
Turtles may have survived the mass extinction that killed off dinosaurs millions of years ago, but today they’re disappearing around the world.
Hawksbills are critically endangered, according to the World Conservation Union, and green and loggerhead species are endangered. The three species are found in the Persian Gulf’s warm, shallow waters, as well as the Gulf of Oman on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz.
Skyrocketing amounts of litter pollute the world’s environment, with a seminal study in Science Advances five years ago estimating that 12 billion metric tons will pile up by 2050.
That’s just one of the manifold threats that humans have created for sea turtles — including rising sea temperatures that bleach coral reefs, coastal overdevelopment and overfishing. But it’s perhaps the most visible, as shown by the gruesome scene in the Kalba lab.
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A massive amount of debris was found inside the dead turtles in Sharjah — 325 shards in one turtle, and 32 pieces of fishing net in another. They can cause deadly blockages, lacerations and gas to build up in the digestive tracts.
The study also found that green sea turtles were most inclined to eat drifting plastic bags and ropes, which resemble their diet of cuttlefish and jellyfish. Loggerheads ate bottle caps and other small pieces of hard plastic mistaken for tasty snails and other marine invertebrates. The youngest sea turtles, not as discriminating, ate the most plastic.
Conservationists in the UAE, including Yaghmour’s team and others at Sharjah’s Environmental and Protected Areas Authority, are seeking to protect the country’s turtles from the threats. Community officers respond to constant reports of turtles in distress, rescuing the sick reptiles for rehabilitation.
“If we lose these turtles, the ecosystem will die,” said Abdulkarim Vettan, Al-Qurum Mangrove Center’s operational manager, pointing to one turtle whose flipper veterinarians amputated because it became caught up in a net.
The environmentalists face a daunting task in the oil-rich federation that’s one of the world’s highest carbon-dioxide emitters and trash producers per capita. Over the past decades, plastic use and waste surged as the UAE transformed at warp-speed from a parched desert pearling towns into a super-modern business hub known worldwide for its culture of consumerism.
Carbon-intensive desalination has driven much of the growth. The construction of Dubai’s colossal artificial islands a decade ago dredged up sediment that destroyed the natural reef and turtle nesting sites along the coast, according to environmental studies from the time.
“Everything points toward major degradation and stress on the marine ecosystem of the Persian Gulf,” said Christian Henderson, a Middle East political ecologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “The development of car-dependent urban regions has been extremely fast, without any kind of environmental consideration at all.”
The UAE pledged last fall to have net zero carbon emissions by 2050, the first country among the oil-rich sheikhdoms to make the long-term commitment. The goal remains difficult to gauge and has met skepticism.
On Monday, Dubai announced it will begin charging a 25-fil (about 6 cents) fee on plastic bags, with the aim of outlawing them entirely in two years over environmental concerns.
“The image of piecemeal environmental interventions is important politically, culturally and socially to the UAE,” Henderson added. “But the kind of interventions that require genuine sustainability are not on the table because of the sacrifices that would be involved.”
Meanwhile, experts say, the trash crisis grows and turtles pay the ultimate price.
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Follow Isabel DeBre on Twitter at www.twitter.com/isabeldebre.
The report commissioned by the WWF reviewed 2,590 studies and found that by the end of the century marine areas more than two and a half times the size of Greenland could exceed ecologically dangerous thresholds of microplastic concentration.
The amount of marine microplastic could increase 50-fold by then, the wildlife charity warned.
Watch: Plastic pollution: China starts tackling colossal problem
This is based on projections that plastic production is expected to more than double by 2040 resulting in plastic debris in the ocean quadrupling by 2050.
Heike Vesper, Director Marine Programme, WWF Germany said, “All evidence suggests that plastic contamination of the ocean is irreversible. Once distributed in the ocean, plastic waste is almost impossible to retrieve.
“It steadily degrades and so the concentration of micro- and nanoplastics will continue to increase for decades. Targeting the causes of plastic pollution is far more effective than cleaning up afterwards.
“If governments, industry and society act in unison now, they can still limit the plastic crisis.”
The researchers warn that threatened species could be pushed towards extinction by plastic pollution.
Dr. Melanie Bergmann, Marine Biologist, Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research said: “Research acts like a flashlight with which we cast rays of light into the darkness of the oceans.
“Only a fraction of the effects have been recorded and researched, but the documented effects caused by plastic are concerning and must be understood as a warning signal for a much larger scale, especially with the current and projected growth in plastic production.”
Watch: Turtle travels from Maldives to Scotland after plastic pollution injury
The durable nature of plastic also means that the uptake of microplastic, and nanoplastic, in the marine food chain will only continue to accumulate.
The WWF called for countries to adopt a global treaty to limit plastic at the UN Environment Assembly 5.2 in February.
Ghislaine Llewellyn, Deputy Oceans Lead, WWF, said: “Without a doubt, unchecked plastic pollution will become a contributing factor to the ongoing sixth mass extinction leading to widespread ecosystem collapse and transgression of safe planetary boundaries.
“We know how to stop plastic pollution and we know the cost of inaction comes at the expense of our ocean ecosystems – there is no excuse for delaying a global treaty on plastic pollution. The way out of our plastic crisis is for countries to agree to a globally binding treaty that addresses all stages of plastic’s lifecycle and that puts us on a pathway to ending marine plastic pollution by 2030.”
Negotiators from around the world will start work this month on a treaty to reduce plastic pollution, in what diplomats say is the most ambitious round of climate diplomacy since the 2015 Paris agreement that focuses on global warming.
The discussions, which have the backing of the Biden administration, could reshape a world increasingly awash in plastics that take centuries to break down and millennia to decompose. Diplomats could agree to caps on plastic production that would forestall the exponential increases that are expected in the coming decades. They could also impose rules to make plastic easier and less toxic to repurpose, amid growing concern that only 10 percent of the material ever made has been recycled.
Talks are so preliminary that diplomats are still haggling over the issues they will and won’t negotiate. And few expect immediate breakthroughs. But officials say there is a window during President Biden’s current term in office to make a deal that would shake up the realm of plastics with the cooperation of the United States, the world’s biggest producer of plastic waste.
“Countries are increasingly seeing this as a top-level threat,” said Norwegian Environment Minister Espen Barth Eide, who is leading the effort to start work on a plastics deal at the U.N. Environment Assembly, which starts Feb. 28 in Nairobi. “There has been strong recognition around the world. This is one of the most stable materials we produce. Using it for a single use, it’s strange.”
Diplomats are still at the most preliminary phase of deciding what should even be subject to negotiation. At minimum, there is broad agreement that there should be a concerted effort to limit the flow of plastic debris into the world’s oceans. But a growing number of countries, including the United States, want to aim for more-ambitious targets.
Any agreement is likely to have the Paris climate accord as its basic model, diplomats say. That deal — which includes nearly 200 countries — came together only because countries knew they would be in charge of setting their own voluntary goals, then living up to them. Detractors say such systems are toothless and end up falling far short of what is necessary. Advocates say they get all countries to work together and move in the same basic direction. They also say that many countries would never agree to a system with more-stringent requirements.
As with the Paris agreement, one of the first issues a plastics treaty would address is the basic issue of counting: How much plastic is being manufactured? How much gets recycled? What kinds of chemicals are going into the plastic, and how are they being handled when the plastic is discarded? In much of the world, there aren’t reliable numbers.
The effort comes from a growing concern that the world has failed to grapple with a rapidly expanding plastics problem and that older attempts to address plastic waste — for example, by focusing mostly on recycling — can’t stand on their own.
“Our goal is to create a tool that we can use to protect our oceans and all of the life that they sustain from growing global harms of plastic pollution,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Nairobi in November. “It’s crucial that the agreement call on countries to develop and enforce strong national action plans to address this problem at its source.”
Activists and environmental policymakers around the world have called for a broad effort to address plastics pollution, which they say is as much a global problem as the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are fueling climate change. And, as with climate change, the least-developed countries have often faced the greatest burden of the problem. Rich countries such as the United States have been shipping much of their plastic waste elsewhere, first to China and more recently to African nations.
“The African region becomes the region that has to bear the brunt, especially because there is no infrastructure” for recycling, said Griffins Ochieng, a plastics expert at the Nairobi-based Center for Environmental Justice and Development. “But with the increased importation of plastic waste and near-end-life products, it literally becomes dumping, because these are all going to end up in landfills or dumpsites.”
Researchers who have tried to estimate the amount of plastic waste streaming into the world’s oceans have come up with astonishing figures. One high-profile 2015 study found that more than 8 million metric tons of plastic were probably entering global waters every year. That’s the equivalent of five grocery bags filled with plastic on every foot of coastline, all around the world, or a dump truck’s worth of plastic going into the ocean every minute.
“That was shocking,” said Jenna Jambeck, a University of Georgia professor who was the lead researcher on the study. She said that for her, the problem of plastic pollution really hit home a few years ago when she sailed across the Atlantic to study it. She was staring into the ocean on a beautiful beach on one of the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa.
“I walked up to the edge of the ocean where the waves were breaking on land, and it looks beautiful, and then I look down and every wave was full of plastic that I hadn’t seen, like confetti,” Jambeck said. “The ocean is literally spitting this material back at us. It made me almost sick.”
The plastic waste problem plagues all levels of the ecosystem. There are the familiar images of turtles choking on straws, or birds whose stomachs are filled with plastic debris. But there is also increasing concern about the pervasiveness of microplastics — particles smaller than a sesame seed that have been broken down by ocean currents. In fish, microplastics have been found to disrupt reproductive systems and suppress appetite, upending the balance of sea life. Microplastics are piling up on the ocean’s floor and collecting in eddies on its surface.
Plastics became widely available in the years after World War II, when wartime manufacturers shifted their production lines to the consumer market. Advertisements pitched at 1950s housewives praised the magic of serving meals on plastic plates and cups. (No cleanup!) And global plastic production is accelerating: More than half the plastic ever made has been produced since 2000, according to estimates from Jambeck’s lab.
Much of it comes from the United States, which topped the world at 287 pounds of plastic waste per person per year, according to a 2020 estimate by a team of U.S. researchers. Britain and South Korea followed.
The pandemic has worsened the problem, sparking a sharp rise in single-use plastic food containers, shipping materials and masks. In South Korea, plastic waste went up 19 percent in 2020 over the previous year, according to official figures.
South Korean student Daniel Lee recently came home to a “plastic epidemic” upon returning to Seoul from his college overseas, he said. During a mandatory 10-day quarantine, Lee was banned from stepping out of his apartment and ended up relying heavily on food delivery and e-commerce for his daily necessities, which resulted in a “pile of plastic waste.”
“It was inevitable during quarantine, but I found it hard to justify,” said Lee, 25.
South Korea has expressed its general support for a plastics treaty and has vowed to cut its plastic waste, but it has struggled to track the problem, something a treaty would help encourage, said Jang Yong-chul, a professor of environmental engineering at Chungnam National University.
“South Korea has a long way to go,” he said.
The exponential growth in plastic production looks set to continue. As the oil and gas industry searches for new markets as fossil fuels are phased out in the coming decades, it has fixed its hopes on plastics, which use many of the same raw materials. The plastics industry says its materials do everything from keeping food fresher to lightening cars and trucks to make them more fuel-efficient.
“Years ago, we were told to watch our carbon footprint. Now it’s, ‘What’s your plastic footprint?’” said Judith Enck, a former senior Environmental Protection Agency official during the Obama administration who now leads Beyond Plastics, an advocacy organization. “Well, it’s pretty big, because you’re not giving me any choices.”
The sharp growth path has environmentalists around the world crying out for limits. One major problem is that recycling, which the plastic industry has long promoted as a way to win the acceptance of consumers, can handle only a fraction of the plastic that is produced. Only some types of plastics are easily recyclable. Many recycling programs create toxins as waste products. China, which had been importing much of the world’s plastic waste for reprocessing, ended the practice in 2018, in part because of environmental concerns.
“Recycling plastics is actually recycling toxins back into the market,” said Bjorn Beeler, international coordinator at the International Pollutants Elimination Network, an advocacy and research group.
Beeler and other plastic-skeptic allies favor what they call a “life cycle” approach to a plastics treaty — an effort to cap the overall production of plastics; limit the chemicals that can be used to make them, so they are safer to dispose of and recycle; and promote product designs that are easier to reuse.
The plastics industry says it wants an agreement but one that it says would create more incentives for private businesses to come up with innovative ways to address plastic pollution.
Restricting and regulating the production of plastic “is a very shortsighted approach to take,” said Joshua Baca, vice president of plastics at the American Chemistry Council, the trade association for chemicals manufacturers, “because not only are we in the midst of a supply chain crisis where everything from raw materials to finished products are very difficult to get your hands on, we’re going to then on top of that put some massive regulation scheme that will be very difficult to implement and will probably result in further supply chain disruption when we least can afford it.”
Unlike efforts to combat climate change, fighting plastics pollution has found bipartisan support in the United States, since it is less politicized. A pair of senators, Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), have led congressional efforts, including the Save Our Seas 2.0 Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law in 2020.
“Our oceans are in trouble,” Whitehouse said in a statement. “My hope is that American negotiators in Nairobi can lead the world toward a global agreement that will cut down the amount of plastic reaching the oceans.”
Policymakers say they are hopeful about reaching an agreement, even if they need to discuss it for a year or two.
“I don’t think we will have all answers to this by the end of February, and that’s okay. The point is to start a process,” said Barth Eide, the Norwegian minister. He said he believed the effort could make a difference.
Head down to Sydney’s Manly Cove on a weekend, and you might see groups of people crouching diligently on the sand. They’re not searching for shells or bloodworms, but something just as visually striking, not least because it shouldn’t be there: coloured pieces of hard plastic, fragments of polystyrene foam and fibres from fishing line.
For the last three years, a group of volunteers has been surveying the beach each month for microplastics, as part of the Australian Microplastics Assessment Project.
Colloquially known as Ausmap, the citizen science project has collected more than 3.5m pieces of microplastic from more than 300 beaches around the country, ranging from Thursday Island in the north to Bruny Island, off Tasmania’s south-east coast.
Volunteers collect plastics between 1mm and 5mm in length; pellets, fibres and fragments are meticulously sorted and documented. “That’s what we can see easily in our sieves,” Ausmap’s program director, Dr Michelle Blewit, says.
“Microplastic doesn’t always refer to things that are microscopic,” she says. “Obviously it breaks up further and further … the smaller it gets, then there’s more chance of it being ingested by animals.”
Blewitt, a marine scientist, says more than 8,500 people have been involved in the project since its launch in 2018. Its goal is to quantify the scale of microplastic pollution across Australia, and help address the growing problem.
“There are actually more microplastics on the seabed floor than floating on the ocean surface,” says Dr Denise Hardesty, a principal research scientist at the CSIRO.
The presence of microplastics in aquatic environments doesn’t necessarily equate to harm to wildlife, Hardesty says. But there is a growing body of evidence showing that microplastics have negative impacts on at least some marine organisms.
“For a really small animal organism, it can block the gut, it can make it so that an organism doesn’t feed as efficiently,” Hardesty says. “It can affect its reproduction, it can affect its lifecycle and trajectory.”
Microplastics have been found to make mussels lose their grip, and to alter the behaviour of fish – one Australian study of damselfish found they were likely to take more risks and die earlier.
Also of concern is the accumulation of microplastics in animals further up the food chain. “We even find microplastics in plankton, which are really at the base of the food chain and help keep our oceans healthy,” Hardesty says. “We have everything from very small fish to very large whales that eat plankton.”
Plastics alone are one problem, but then there’s also the chemicals with which they interact. “Some of the plastics out there are quite porous,” Blewitt says. “Once out there in the environment, they can be attracted like a magnet to a whole bunch of other chemicals.”
“If an animal consumes these plastics, then they’re not only getting a dose of the plastic itself … but also whatever contaminants are attached to those plastics as well.”
Scientists are also concerned about interactions between plastic pollution and global heating on marine populations. A recent University of Sydney study found that fish grow slower when exposed to both the industrial chemical bisphenol A – a common compound used in plastics manufacturing – and higher temperatures.
“Discarded plastics – as they break down, they leach BPA that’s been used in their manufacture,” Prof Frank Seebacher, one of the study’s authors, says. “So wherever you have lots of manufacturing plants, lots of plastic pollution, you will find reasonably high levels of BPA.”
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‘In the dark’ on health effects
What effects microplastics have on human health is still contentious. “We obviously can’t feed plastic to humans,” Blewitt says. “Health implications will probably rear their ugly head in the years to come.”
Prof Andreas Suhrbier, who leads the inflammation biology group at QIMR Berghofer, says while microplastics have been found to damage human cells under lab conditions, compelling evidence to date has been scarce.
“There is no consistent common understanding of if and what microplastic consumption would affect human health,” he says.
Suhrbier believes new research of his may provide a clue. A recent study his team conducted in mice found animals that had ingested microplastics did not show any accumulation in internal organs, nor any significant changes in their microbiome.
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However, when they were exposed to a virus that resulted in arthritis, the mice who had eaten microplastics had joint inflammation for a significantly longer period. The team surmised that the microplastics activated immune cells that resulted in the inflammation.
The research squares with a separate study, published in December, which found significantly higher levels of microplastics in the faeces of people who had inflammatory bowel disease – Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis – than people who didn’t. The researchers also concluded there was a correlation between the concentration of microplastics in the gut and the severity of disease.
“Our emerging hypothesis is that plastic in the gut causes some level of inflammation,” Suhrbier says.
Less is known about the health effects of even smaller plastic particles, nanoplastics, at sizes ranging between 1 nanometer and 1 micron.
Dr Cheng Fang, a senior research fellow at the University of Newcastle, says in theory, nanosized particles can very easily “pass through the digestive system into the body, and can be transported by blood”.
His research has estimated that whipper snippers generate thousands of microplastics and billions of nanoplastics each minute when cutting grass. In January, scientists reported detecting nanoplastic pollution in polar regions for the first time.
“[We’re] really in the dark at this moment [about the health effects],” Fang says.
Tackling a big little problem
“Plastics and microplastics are ubiquitous,” Hardesty says. “They’re in our waterways, they’re in our stormwater drains, they’re being shed by tyres from cars, they’re being shed from carpet fibres in people’s homes.”
She emphasises the importance of prevention at the source, citing the need for reducing reliance on single-use plastic. “People focus on microplastics, but most microplastics start out as larger plastics,” she says. “It’s actually starting with changing some of our consumption behaviour, [and] plastics manufacturing all up.”
“We have power with what and how we choose to purchase,” Hardesty says. “Within Australia, we don’t need to buy bottled water.”
“Your can lobby your government … You can support buying in bulk and … speak up against some of the very hard to recycle items, like soft plastics, multi-layered laminates.”
By identifying microplastic hotspots, Ausmap is beginning to implement litter reduction strategies in certain coastal areas. They have installed nets to capture waste from stormwater outlets, “to identify which subcatchment is bringing down which kind of debris”, Blewitt says.
The project has identified Dee Why lagoon, in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, as a microplastic hotspot, with an estimated 3.1m pieces entering the area yearly. “We were able to identify that nurdles – which are the resin pellets, the basis of plastic when it gets made in its base form – were coming down on one particular catchment,” Blewitt says.
With support from the NSW Environment Protection Authority, Ausmap has developed a micro-litter reduction strategy, which it is piloting in three catchments, Blewitt says.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to use this framework to be able to help identify where those potential hotspots might be … and then how do they stop it within their local catchment before it lands in the waterways as well.”
Head down to Sydney’s Manly Cove on a weekend, and you might see groups of people crouching diligently on the sand. They’re not searching for shells or bloodworms, but something just as visually striking, not least because it shouldn’t be there: coloured pieces of hard plastic, fragments of polystyrene foam and fibres from fishing line.
For the last three years, a group of volunteers has been surveying the beach each month for microplastics, as part of the Australian Microplastics Assessment Project.
Colloquially known as Ausmap, the citizen science project has collected more than 3.5m pieces of microplastic from more than 300 beaches around the country, ranging from Thursday Island in the north to Bruny Island, off Tasmania’s south-east coast.
Volunteers collect plastics between 1mm and 5mm in length; pellets, fibres and fragments are meticulously sorted and documented. “That’s what we can see easily in our sieves,” Ausmap’s program director, Dr Michelle Blewit, says.
“Microplastic doesn’t always refer to things that are microscopic,” she says. “Obviously it breaks up further and further … the smaller it gets, then there’s more chance of it being ingested by animals.”
Blewitt, a marine scientist, says more than 8,500 people have been involved in the project since its launch in 2018. Its goal is to quantify the scale of microplastic pollution across Australia, and help address the growing problem.
“There are actually more microplastics on the seabed floor than floating on the ocean surface,” says Dr Denise Hardesty, a principal research scientist at the CSIRO.
The presence of microplastics in aquatic environments doesn’t necessarily equate to harm to wildlife, Hardesty says. But there is a growing body of evidence showing that microplastics have negative impacts on at least some marine organisms.
“For a really small animal organism, it can block the gut, it can make it so that an organism doesn’t feed as efficiently,” Hardesty says. “It can affect its reproduction, it can affect its lifecycle and trajectory.”
Microplastics have been found to make mussels lose their grip, and to alter the behaviour of fish – one Australian study of damselfish found they were likely to take more risks and die earlier.
Also of concern is the accumulation of microplastics in animals further up the food chain. “We even find microplastics in plankton, which are really at the base of the food chain and help keep our oceans healthy,” Hardesty says. “We have everything from very small fish to very large whales that eat plankton.”
Plastics alone are one problem, but then there’s also the chemicals with which they interact. “Some of the plastics out there are quite porous,” Blewitt says. “Once out there in the environment, they can be attracted like a magnet to a whole bunch of other chemicals.”
“If an animal consumes these plastics, then they’re not only getting a dose of the plastic itself … but also whatever contaminants are attached to those plastics as well.”
Scientists are also concerned about interactions between plastic pollution and global heating on marine populations. A recent University of Sydney study found that fish grow slower when exposed to both the industrial chemical bisphenol A – a common compound used in plastics manufacturing – and higher temperatures.
“Discarded plastics – as they break down, they leach BPA that’s been used in their manufacture,” Prof Frank Seebacher, one of the study’s authors, says. “So wherever you have lots of manufacturing plants, lots of plastic pollution, you will find reasonably high levels of BPA.”
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‘In the dark’ on health effects
What effects microplastics have on human health is still contentious. “We obviously can’t feed plastic to humans,” Blewitt says. “Health implications will probably rear their ugly head in the years to come.”
Prof Andreas Suhrbier, who leads the inflammation biology group at QIMR Berghofer, says while microplastics have been found to damage human cells under lab conditions, compelling evidence to date has been scarce.
“There is no consistent common understanding of if and what microplastic consumption would affect human health,” he says.
Suhrbier believes new research of his may provide a clue. A recent study his team conducted in mice found animals that had ingested microplastics did not show any accumulation in internal organs, nor any significant changes in their microbiome.
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However, when they were exposed to a virus that resulted in arthritis, the mice who had eaten microplastics had joint inflammation for a significantly longer period. The team surmised that the microplastics activated immune cells that resulted in the inflammation.
The research squares with a separate study, published in December, which found significantly higher levels of microplastics in the faeces of people who had inflammatory bowel disease – Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis – than people who didn’t. The researchers also concluded there was a correlation between the concentration of microplastics in the gut and the severity of disease.
“Our emerging hypothesis is that plastic in the gut causes some level of inflammation,” Suhrbier says.
Less is known about the health effects of even smaller plastic particles, nanoplastics, at sizes ranging between 1 nanometer and 1 micron.
Dr Cheng Fang, a senior research fellow at the University of Newcastle, says in theory, nanosized particles can very easily “pass through the digestive system into the body, and can be transported by blood”.
His research has estimated that whipper snippers generate thousands of microplastics and billions of nanoplastics each minute when cutting grass. In January, scientists reported detecting nanoplastic pollution in polar regions for the first time.
“[We’re] really in the dark at this moment [about the health effects],” Fang says.
Tackling a big little problem
“Plastics and microplastics are ubiquitous,” Hardesty says. “They’re in our waterways, they’re in our stormwater drains, they’re being shed by tyres from cars, they’re being shed from carpet fibres in people’s homes.”
She emphasises the importance of prevention at the source, citing the need for reducing reliance on single-use plastic. “People focus on microplastics, but most microplastics start out as larger plastics,” she says. “It’s actually starting with changing some of our consumption behaviour, [and] plastics manufacturing all up.”
“We have power with what and how we choose to purchase,” Hardesty says. “Within Australia, we don’t need to buy bottled water.”
“Your can lobby your government … You can support buying in bulk and … speak up against some of the very hard to recycle items, like soft plastics, multi-layered laminates.”
By identifying microplastic hotspots, Ausmap is beginning to implement litter reduction strategies in certain coastal areas. They have installed nets to capture waste from stormwater outlets, “to identify which subcatchment is bringing down which kind of debris”, Blewitt says.
The project has identified Dee Why lagoon, in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, as a microplastic hotspot, with an estimated 3.1m pieces entering the area yearly. “We were able to identify that nurdles – which are the resin pellets, the basis of plastic when it gets made in its base form – were coming down on one particular catchment,” Blewitt says.
With support from the NSW Environment Protection Authority, Ausmap has developed a micro-litter reduction strategy, which it is piloting in three catchments, Blewitt says.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to use this framework to be able to help identify where those potential hotspots might be … and then how do they stop it within their local catchment before it lands in the waterways as well.”
Coastal communities are tired of paying to clean up plastic and debris from the B.C. shellfish industry to protect the marine environment, stewardship groups say.
The amount of garbage being retrieved from beaches in areas where shellfish aquaculture is concentrated grows year after year, and there’s little apparent enforcement by Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) to deal with the issue, said Dorrie Woodward, chair of the Association for Denman Island Marine Stewards (ADIMS).
The association has organized beach cleanups for 18 years in the Baynes Sound area, a narrow channel between Denman and Vancouver islands where more than half the province’s shellfish production takes place, Woodward said.
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Last year, the stewardship group expanded the cleanup, with other community partners such as the K’ómoks Guardian Watchmen, to cover 180 kilometres of shoreline in the region after getting funding through the province’s Clean Coast, Clean Waters initiative.
Approximately 38 metric tonnes of garbage was hauled off the beaches over the course of a month and 90 per cent was related to the shellfish aquaculture industry, she said.
Plastic shellfish trays, buoys, shoreline predator prevention netting, rope, and Styrofoam used for float platforms that disintegrate into tiny irretrievable pieces are some of the greatest problems. The trash harms salmon habitat in estuaries, and poses entanglement risks to birds or other marine mammals, such as seals, sea lions and whales, Woodward added.
Much of the trash is the result of poorly secured gear from shellfish leases washing into the ocean, or a result of sloppy farming practices and maintenance, or derelict operations left to break up and float away, she said.
Ocean polluters should pay for cleanup
The vast majority of the plastic garbage pulled off the shores during a cleanup of Baynes Sound on the B.C. coast came from the shellfish sector, according to the Association for Denman Island Marine Stewards. Photo courtesy of ADIMS
Previously, the stewardship group raised the funds or got donations in kind to do the cleanup, but communities or taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill to deal with the shellfish industry’s mess, Woodward said.
“If this were an oil spill, the government wouldn’t be paying for this,” said Dorrie Woodward of the Association for Denman Island Marine Stewards on using tax dollars to clean up the ongoing flow of plastic debris from the shellfish industry.
The federal government committed $8 million to its ghost gear recovery program on the country’s coasts, and B.C. has dedicated $18 million to its shoreline cleanups.
“We’re fed up. Polluters should pay,” Woodward said.
“As a marine stewardship group, of course, we would totally like to see no more plastics in the ocean,” she said.
“But those putting plastic in the ocean should be responsible for getting them back out.”
It’s comparable to cleaning up after other environmental disasters caused by industry, Woodward added.
“If this were an oil spill, the government wouldn’t be paying for this,” she said.
A significant amount of the marine debris collected this year was diverted for recycling, but the system has limits, and a significant amount of waste is directed to landfills or left to accumulate on beaches.
It appears DFO is prioritizing the shellfish industry over the health of the marine ecosystem, she added.
Plastics and other marine debris from the shellfish industry can entangle birds and other sea creatures that share the marine habitat. Photo courtesy ADIMS
Shellfish growers association determined to address debris problem
Marine debris from the shellfish sector is an undeniable problem that needs resolving, said Nico Prins, the new executive director of the BC Shellfish Growers Association (BCSGA).
“The fact is, there is too much debris going into the water,” Prins said. “It’s something I don’t agree with and I don’t like, and quite frankly, it’s not necessary.”
There are a number of relatively easy measures growers can take immediately, such as putting up fencing on floating platforms to keep plastic gear from being knocked into the water by stormy weather or sea lions and other animals clambering around floating shellfish docks.
Or even better, excess equipment or trash could be stowed safely onshore.
The association, which represents 60 per cent of producers in the province, voluntarily launched a shellfish farm environmental program (SHEP) in March to curb the problem, he said.
In addition to having a significant environmental impact and being a source of conflict with neighbouring communities, the BCSGA board estimates it spends 50 per cent of its time dealing with debris issues.
The program’s goals include helping members meet a set of new rules by DFO to prevent marine debris that will come into force in stages by 2023. The regulations will act as some of the conditions necessary to obtain and operate a shellfish licence.
DFO enforcement of new rules critical
Shellfish operators will soon have to enclose any Styrofoam floats in a hard casing, inspect and dive beneath their platforms to retrieve debris annually, mark all their gear with identifying data, and self-report annually to demonstrate compliance or risk fines or the loss of their licence.
It’s always been a condition for a licence to keep debris out of the water, but the specific rules and making gear identifiable will hopefully make enforcement easier, said Prins.
The growers association pitches in during community cleanups, and plans to start a public access database with reports of equipment or debris, so the association can facilitate pick-ups and identify debris hot spots or problem operators.
By way of a carrot, the association is developing a sustainable certification seal for growers that meet the debris regulations.
The association doesn’t have authority to enforce the new regulations, but it will consider various sanctions, including ineligibility for BCSFA membership, Prins said.
But ultimately, the success of the new regulations is still dependent on DFO enforcement, he said.
“Our main goal is to assist our members to adhere to the condition of licence and solve their (debris) problems,” he said.
“But we do need the agency with the authority to go and enforce the conditions of licensing. And in fact, we welcome it.”
Abandoned shellfish farms a source of pollution
The 2021 coastal cleanup in the Discovery Islands found abandoned shellfish farms were a big source of garbage. Photo courtesy Spirit of the West Adventures
Plastics from the sector made up at least half of the 50 tonnes of debris pulled from the region’s beaches, said Breanne Quesnel of Spirit of the West Adventures, the tourism operation that secured funding for the cleanup.
Abandoned or derelict shellfish farms were a big source of debris on the shores of Quadra and Cortes islands, said Quesnel.
It was difficult to determine from provincial and federal websites who was responsible for a shellfish operation, and if it was active or not, she said.
DFO and the BCSGA did try to assist the cleanup operation, identifying leases and what cleanup crews could remove, she said.
“But some sites are showing as active leases in the government system, [and] there’s nobody really responsible for them,” Quesnel said.
“People have literally just completely left their operation, and walked away with docks and floats in the water and onshore.”
As a marine tour operator, Quesnel said her company must pay a deposit to use Crown land, which is forfeited and used to address problems if she doesn’t follow guidelines.
She’d like to see a deposit system or accountability measures in place to ensure cleanups take place if rules aren’t met by shellfish operations.
Many of the active shellfish farmers in the region are working to solve the plastic problem, Quesnel said.
“I don’t want to tarnish them all,” she said. “But a portion of folks aren’t engaged, and we’re finding stuff that’s definitely aquaculture materials coming from somewhere.
“And DFO doesn’t seem to be stepping up.”
Balance must be struck between industry and environment
MP Lisa Marie Barron, NDP critic of fisheries, agreed a fix is necessary.
The sector produced nearly 6,700 tonnes of shellfish valued at $20 million in 2020.
“It’s an important industry for many of our coastal communities,” said Barron, who represents Nanaimo-Ladysmith on Vancouver Island
“But we also have to balance that with protecting our oceans, in particular when it comes to plastic pollution.”
The new regulations and government funds for cleanups are a good step, but more accountability is still needed to stop the flow of debris into ocean waters.
“Organizations that do this front-line work want to see a process in place where we’re not having to be so reactionary,” she said.
There also needs to be more exploration of alternatives for plastics in the sector, she added.
“We need to be pushing the government to work with industry and those on the ground in our coastal communities to help this industry become waste-free,” she said.
Plastic debris from the shellfish industry, pictured here on Quadra Island, regularly washes onto the shores of coastal communities during winter weather. Photo by JP Wieghardt
Marine debris a federal priority
Reducing plastic waste and marine debris as well as protecting and regenerating Canada’s oceans are priorities for the federal government and Fisheries Minister Joyce Murray, said Murray’s press secretary Claire Teichman in an email.
DFO’s ghost gear program has successfully removed 739 tonnes of abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear from the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, Teichman said.
Under the same initiative, the BCSGA got $350,000 in 2020 to conduct dives to retrieve accumulated debris from the seabed under floating shellfish operations, resulting in the cleanup of 27 sites and the removal of 27 tonnes of garbage to date.
The association also received $1.1 million for the wide-scale replacement of Styrofoam floats on shellfish platforms with more environmentally friendly alternatives through the Fisheries and Aquaculture Clean Technology Adoption Program — which also funds aquaculture operators to test late-stage clean technologies, systems or processes.
However, Murray’s office did not clarify if DFO plans to dedicate more resources to inspections or enforcement of pending regulations in addition to subsidizing the industry’s cleanup.
DFO has failed to monitor or penalize problem shellfish operators for decades, Woodward said, noting repeated beach cleanups are just Band-Aid solutions.
Paying producers to deal with their trash on the public dime without any significant enforcement will only perpetuate the pollution problem, she said.
“It’s just a new revenue stream for the industry,” Woodward said.
“Why should our community be picking it up just because we don’t want to be stumbling over their debris on the beach, and because we care about all the other creatures that live here, too?”
Rochelle Baker / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer
Researchers used remote sensing to spot plastics on the coast
Plastics can be detected despite ‘shape, color or condition’
Plastic debris is a ‘globally relevant environmental challenge’: Researchers
A team of scientists utilized satellite technology to find plastic pollution in coastal areas. Their method helped detect plastic that cannot be visibly seen in satellite images.
Plastic debris in the marine environment is a “globally relevant problem,” with an estimated eight million tons of debris entering the waters each year, noted the researchers of a study published in Remote Sensing.
“At the moment, plastic debris are tracked by passing vessels notifying authorities,” Jenna Guffogg, the study’s lead author and Ph.D. Candidate at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) University, said in a university news release. “Using satellites will allow more frequent and reliable observations.”
According to the researchers, most research using remote sensing to detect debris focus on the ones that are floating in the open water. However, plastics floating on water or are partially submerged tend to have “low reflectance.” Beaches, on the other hand, also “present challenges that are unique from other parts of the marine environment.” It’s also easier to remove the debris on beaches than in the oceans, Guffogg said.
Remote sensing is the process in which the physical attributes of an area are detected by measuring the reflected and emitted radiation from a distance, such as via a satellite or an aircraft. For their work, the researchers used sensing equipment on the beaches of Australia’s Cocos (Keeling) Islands to determine how different types of plastic reflect infra-red light, RMIT noted.
“On the beaches of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Henderson Island, in the Indian and Pacific oceans, respectively, a variety of consumer and industrial plastics are found in high concentrations: single-use plastic bottles, containers, unidentified fragments of hard plastics, foams, soft plastic films and industrial fishing debris,” the researchers wrote.
They used “spectral library plots” to compare the “reflectance” of weathered and virgin plastics and found “little difference” in the results. According to the university, this means that plastics can be detected remotely “despite the shape, color or condition of the plastic.”
The researchers found that about 2-8% of an area must be covered in plastic, depending on the polymer, before it can be “spectrally separated” from an area that only contains sand. Through the method that they used, the researchers were able to spot the plastic waste on beaches that aren’t visible on typical satellite images, the university noted. By knowing where the plastic waste is, efforts can then be focused on those areas to clean them up.
In the coming years, satellites with better remote sensing capabilities are set to be launched, Simon Jones of RMIT, the study’s co-author, said in the news release. These could then help improve the technology for better, perhaps global, detection.
“We’re developing ways to use these new satellites in the fight against marine waste,” Jones said.
“Stopping plastic from entering the ocean is a global challenge,” Guffogg added. “But if we can find and remove them quickly, it’s the next best thing.”
By some estimates, people have discarded 4,900 million tonnes of plastic have into the environment. Once in nature, that plastic starts to degrade, fragmenting into microplastics about the size of a sesame seed, which are inadvertently ingested by humans and animals through eating them in seafood and drinking them in water. Some reports suggest that we all consume five grams a week–about the weight of a bottle cap.
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But, we may be taking more plastics into our systems through our respiratory systems. There’s been less investigation of nanoplastics: particles smaller than microplastics, so small that they can move huge distances in the air and be more easily inhaled into the bloodstream. A new study looks at the travel of those lighter particles, finding them abundant in the atmosphere, and carried, via aerosol transmission, even to remote areas. As far as the scientists know, it’s “the most accurate record of air pollution by nanoplastics ever made.”
These nanoplastics—smaller than 200 nanometers in size—are microplastics that have broken down even more over time, as well as tiny particles that our everyday plastics, like clothing, shed into the atmosphere. At that microscopic size, the plastics become airborne. “They are so small that they can be transported like normal aerosols in the air,” says Dominik Brunner, a researcher at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, and an expert on atmospheric transport modeling.
The team, from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who Brunner assisted with the transport modeling, designed a technique for measuring the concentration of nanoplastic particles in a sample of material—in this case, a clump of snow—which is often a mixture of many different particles, from Sahara sand to shedded brake pad material.
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They chose a remote location in the high Austrian Alps and then used their technique to find and analyze the nanoplastics they found there. They knew that plastics are present in urban areas, but how far could they travel? Their base was atop the Hoher Sonnblick mountain in Hohe Tauern National Park in Austria, home to a meteorology and geodynamics observatory, 3,106 meters in altitude. Every day for a month and a half, they took a chunk of a top level of snow and analyzed its mass spectrometry, essentially thermally releasing the collected material, then using a machine to measure the sample’s molecules. Once identified, they matched them with known types of plastics, such as polyethylenes and polypropylenes.
Then, using a widely employed particle dispersion technique, and European weather service models, they traced back where those particles originated, following individual air parcels back in time. They found that the plastic particles mainly came from densely populated urban areas, but 30% came from more than 100 miles away, including major cities like London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Munich.
The urban sources did not surprise the scientists, but the distances traveled did. “Because they are so small, they are transported by wind over large distances,” Brunner says. Some traversed even farther distances: 10% came from more than 1,000 miles away, including some from the Atlantic Ocean, suggesting that some of the lighter plastics accumulated at the surface of ocean can return into the atmosphere.
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This also means that you are breathing in nanoplastics from the air around you. The smaller the particles, the larger the risk of inhalation. The scientists judge that those smaller than one micrometer (0.000001 meters) in diameter can “penetrate deep into the lungs,” versus those larger, more than 10 micrometers, which “are likely filtered out by the upper respiratory system.”
While nanoplastics are probably not more toxic to the body than microplastics, it’s the size of the molecules that pose the concern, and the fact that they’re present in large quantities even in remote areas: The amount of nanoplastics deposited per square meter of surface snow each week high in the Alps was 2.8 times more than depositions of microplastics found in the French Pyrenees in a study from 2019.
