By Tripti Chanda
Since the advent of plastic in the market, its production has increased exponentially. True to its introduction as a use-and-throw material, with the exponential increase in production, there has been an exponential increase in its disposal too. With its life cycle measuring in thousands of years, even after disposal it is not possible for us to completely destroy it. Recognising an impending scarcity of land, we have moved to dumping the tonnes of plastic discarded into the ocean, poisoning the water bodies instead.
The extent of destruction that this incessant dumping has caused has not been realised fully until now. An item which did not exist on the surface of the Earth a hundred years ago is slowly choking the life out of it without us doing much to stop it.
The report
A report has been published regarding this by Professor Richard C, Thompson as a part of the United Kingdoms Foresight Future of the Sea Project. It talks about the plastic pollution in the ocean. In its summary itself, we find the harsh truth: production of more than 300 million tonnes of plastic waste globally, annually. The accumulation of plastic in oceans is enough for it to be recognised as a threat by the United Nations Environment Assembly. The report goes on to discuss the types of plastics, macro plastic and microplastic. The plastic items which have at least one dimension less than 5mm, then it is called microplastic.
The report talks about the sources of both these plastics in the waste dumped and the effect of each. It ventures on to prove the existence of the high amount of plastic in the oceans. It uses data from its own shores and surrounding territories and the data available worldwide for the rest of the countries. Working on this data collected and calculating, they found out that by the year 2025, the amount of plastic in the ocean would have tripled. It goes on to say that dumping plastic waste in the ocean is avoidable and it possible for us to reap the benefits of using plastic while at the same time not cause accumulation of plastic and degradation of the environment.
Plastic future
The marine organisms directly interacting with the plastic emissions are affected the most. More than 700 species are in danger because of this phenomenon. The most common problem that occurs is ingestion of the plastic which affects the entire food chain beyond that amplifying at each trophic level. The possibility of ingestion increases with microplastics as smaller organisms can now ingest it, and it is much easier to mistake for food.
Apart from that, ghost fishing and entanglement is a very common effect and mostly leads to the death of the organism trapped. The report last year predicted that by the year 2050, there would be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Studies performed on beached whales found that more than 40% of them had ingested plastic while a data set at Northern Fulmar showed that nearly 95 percent of the individuals had some amount of plastic in their system. It is not just the marine life affected but also the maritime industries dependent on the organisms. From, entanglement of the fishing equipment to the contamination of the stock collected which are being faced by fishing trawlers everywhere. Along with the maritime industry, the tourism industry will also be affected.
The scale of the problem can be realised by looking at a hulking monster in the Pacific Ocean. Two times the size of Texas, this floating island of garbage has 1.8 trillion pieces of the plastic dumped in the ocean and it is growing every day. Nearly half of this plastic is fishing gear and large nets which cause clumping of all the plastic together. Since this gear is predatory in nature and meant to hunt, once abandoned they become deadly to entire marine life and ecosystems. There is six times more plastic than plankton in these garbage patches.
These ginormous dumps of plastic waste are called the Pacific Trash Vortex, one of the ocean gyres. At least five such patches of garbage have been recognised around the globe: North Pacific, Indian Ocean, South Pacific, North Atlantic and South Atlantic (sorted according to size). The 5Gyres project launched in 2010 was responsible for discovering these. A drive called the Ocean Clean-up is predicting a 50% clean-up of the Pacific Ocean gyre within five years after the complete development of its systems.
Curbing methods
Waste control has been on the minds of world leaders and policymakers for some time now. There have been many conventions and conferences on the same, like the United Nation Convention on the Law of the Sea and the OSPAR convention among many others. The fact that these exist and policies are already in place suggest that what we are doing is not enough and much more effective and swift action is required. The issue here does not seem to be the fact that this large amount of plastic is produced, it is the fact that most of it is one-time use only. If the product cycle was changed from its conception itself, most of the problem would be solved.
If changing the life cycle is not possible, we can recycle as much as possible. The goal should be zero waste production and not somewhere close to it. Once dumped, there is a lot of difficulty in collecting the litter in the ocean mechanically. Even with extensive citizen volunteer programs, it would not be feasible to transport the citizens to the waste collection site in the middle of the ocean. Rather, a research development of a bio-plastic which is less carbon-based and more organic which in turn degrades faster would be much more appropriate. This would be solving many problems at once.
In India
India is ranked 12th among the top 20 countries that dump nearly 0.6 tonnes of plastic waste in the ocean annually as reported by United Nations Environment Programme. With non-availability of real-time data from the rural coastlines, it is entirely possible that this data is heavily under-reported. This is not actually a shocking revelation. These 20 countries account for nearly 83 percent of the mismanaged plastic dumped in the oceans.
The Swach Bharat Yojna launched by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi focused on getting the country clean through various methods. But the country is finally looking outwards. In 2018, India is all set to have an automated ocean pollution observation system. Instead of manually gathering data, the new system uses automated moorings making it very easy to monitor the levels of pollution by tracking the quality of water. The investment for this project is nearly ?100 crore and it is expected to be operational by April.
Working to curb the production of plastic waste at its source, the Indian government has introduced stricter norms on its usage as of March 2018. There is a planned phasing out of multi-layered plastic and other non-recyclable materials. The industries involved in the production of the same are to be held responsible for their usage.
The way forward
While most of this is alarming, this is not the end. Though the predictions of these gyres were made in 1988, it was not until much recently that their existence has even been proved. This could serve as a resounding wake up call for all of us. The damage that the plastic in the ocean was going to do, it has already done it and most of it is at the end of its life cycle. We can stop all of this from getting much worse and save the marine life. The amount of money spent in looking for life outside would be much better spent in looking after the life already surrounding us. After all, we do not have a plan B for our planet.