if you throw A polyester sweatshirt in the washing machine and it didn’t come out the way it used to. All that agitation breaks loose plastic microfibers, which your machines flush down to wastewater treatment facilities. Any particles that are not filtered out are pumped into the sea. Like other forms of microplastics (broken bottles and bags, paint chips, and particles called nurdles), microfiber pollution in the oceans reflects an exponential increase in plastic production: Humans now produce 1 trillion pounds of plastic each year. Production could triple by 2050 from 2016 levels, according to the World Economic Forum.
A new analysis provides the broadest quantification yet of exactly how much of this stuff is polluting the ocean’s surface. An international team of researchers has calculated that there are between 82 and 358 trillion plastic particles floating around the world—a total weight of 2.4 to 10.8 billion pounds…and that’s just at the surface.
That’s also only counting the pieces to a third of a millimeter long, although microplastics can get very, very small, and they’ll multiply as they do so. (Microplastics are defined as particles less than 5 millimeters long.) Scientists are now able to detect NanoPlastics in the environment, measured on the scale of one millionth of a meter, are small enough to penetrate cells — though counting them remains difficult and costly. If the new study considered the tiniest plastics, ocean particles would no longer number in the trillions.”We’re talking about maybe quintillions, if not more, out there,” said Scott Coffin, a research scientist with the California Water Resources Control Board and co-author of the study, published today in the journal PLOS One.
“That’s the elephant in the room,” agrees Marcus Eriksen, co-founder of the 5 Gyres Institute and lead author of the study. “If we’re going to talk about the number of particles out there, we’re not even thinking about nanoscale particles. That really fits in with all the research on human health effects.” It easily travels through the body, showing up in our blood, internal organs, lungs, placenta, and even a baby’s first stool.
Eriksen and Coffin quantified it by collecting extensive previous data on plastic samples from oceans around the world. They combined this with data they collected on their own ocean expeditions. All in all, the researchers used nearly 12,000 samples of plastic particle concentrations spanning the period 1979 to 2019. This allowed them to calculate not only how much might be present, but also how those concentrations changed over time.
They found that between 1990 and 2005, the number of particles fluctuated. This may be due to the effectiveness of international agreements, such as the 1988 regulations limiting plastic pollution from ships. “This is the first time we have any kind of evidence that these international plastic pollution treaties are actually working,” Coffin said.
