Human Impact: Synthetic Sea "plastic in the open ocean"

Submitted by Midori 18/02/2008 0

Join PureGreen to vote for your favourite story!

Description:

Plastics, like diamonds, are forever. Plastic floating in the ocean is the number one source of pollution of the world ocean, and 80% of marine debris comes from urban run-off. The problem is many marine birds and fish confuse floating plastic particles with food.
Plastic does not biodegrade, it photo-degrades, or slowly breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, but still remains a polymer. And plastic has been proven to absorb toxins up to one million times background levels in ambient seawater, making the floating plastic a defacto poison pill. Because of their buoyancy and persistance, most of the debris that either entangles sea creatures or found in their stomachs, is made of plastic. The groundbreaking research has been conducted by the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, aboard the ORV Alguita under the direction of Captain Chales Moore.
Please visit www.algalita.org or www.plasticdebris.org for detailed information.
Produced and filmed by Bill Macdonald

Tags:

Debris issue marine plastic Pollution problems Sea Synthetic Watershed

More Info

More Videos

• 
  Walk Against Warming, Sydney 2007
• 
  Dennis Langley on E3 Biofuels
• 
  Recycling Plastic Cup
• 
  Ali G - Environment

• 
  5 10
• 
  6 9
• 
  4 6
• 
  4 4
• 
  0 3
• 
  0 3