Study: Stunning amount of plastic waste in the oceans

How much plastic waste is making its way from land to ocean has been a decades-long guessing game. Now, researchers at the University of Georgia (UGA) in the US have put a number on the global problem.
Their study, reported in the journal Science, found between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric tons of plastic entered the ocean in 2010 from people living within 50 km. of the coastline. That year, a total of 275 million metric tons of plastic waste was generated in those 192 coastal countries. But knowing how much plastic is going in is just one part of the puzzle, researchers are only finding between 6,350 and 245,000 metric tons floating on the ocean's surface (News Item UGA, 13 February 2015).
Click here for the news item.
Click here for an abstract of the published article.

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