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Apr 22, 2024 · Loji Beach, nestled in a bay in West Java, is especially prone to plastic pile-ups. Ocean currents sweep the waste into the bay where it gets trapped in and ends up on the sand.
Mar 8, 2023 · More than 171 trillion pieces of plastic are now estimated to be floating in the world's oceans, according to scientists. Plastic kills fish and sea animals and takes hundreds of years to break...
Sep 16, 2023 · Beach cleans rapidly and dramatically reduce plastic fragments released into the environment, according to the first scientific evidence of its kind.
See top polluting countries and rivers, ocean gyres, ocean currents, and more. A 2019 study estimated that 67% of all buoyant macro plastic (bigger than .5 centimeters) has accumulated along shorelines, approximately 110 million tons.
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What items retrieved from beaches tell us about trash.
In partnership with the National Geographic Society.
Every year, tens of thousands of people worldwide volunteer for the Sisyphean chore of picking up trash from beaches. The largest effort is conducted every September by the Ocean Conservancy, which in 30 years of cleanups has collected 300 million pounds and more than 350 types of items.
New trash inevitably appears. Sometimes it takes only minutes. Nicholas Mallos, who directs the Ocean Conservancy’s Trash Free Seas program, has watched that in amazement.
“I have been on beaches in Hong Kong, Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, and Indonesia where you can watch plastics and debris in the barrel of each wave crash onto the beach. Literally, the trash starts getting replaced as soon as you pick it up,” he says.
So why bother?
They also add to the growing body of knowledge about where and how plastics travel across the seas and where they end up in the greatest abundance. Documentation of what cleanup volunteers collect and its density from location to location and what items are most and least abundant helps identify hot spots. Some of what’s learned can make a difference.
“It adds another layer of granularity to identify these leakage points around the world,” Mallos says.
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A whale shark swims beside a plastic bag in the Gulf of Aden near Yemen. Although whale sharks are the biggest fish in the sea, they're still threatened by ingesting small bits of plastic.
A whale shark swims beside a plastic bag in the Gulf of Aden near Yemen. Although whale sharks are the biggest fish in the sea, they're still threatened by ingesting small bits of plastic.
Photograph by Thomas P. Peschak, Nat Geo Image Collection
On isolated Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, mid-way between Brazil and Namibia, Ocean Conservancy volunteers discovered “an exorbitant number” of plastic bottles on one beach, Mallos says. An audit of the brand names on the bottles revealed that none of them were sold on the island, but came from Asian countries thousands of miles away. Piecing the story together, the group concluded the bottle trash had not leaked from poor waste practices on the island, but rather more likely came from traveling fishing fleets working nearby waters.
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This Community in the Philippines Converts Plastic Fishing Nets to Carpet
Greenpeace, in partnership with a consortium of environmental groups known as Break Free From Plastic, has begun cataloguing items gathered in cleanups by brand name. The approach was tested on a beach in Manila Bay in 2017 and expanded this year to include 236 beach cleanups in 42 countries that yielded more than 187,000 pieces of plastic trash. The most recent cleanups were conducted primarily on ocean beaches, but also included riverbanks, city parks, and streets.
An audit of the items collected found that the brands most commonly retrieved belong to three multinationals: Coca Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestle.Together the three companies accounted for 14 percent of the branded items collected worldwide for the audit. Seven other multinationals were included in the audit, with smaller amounts documented. The report did not rank brands produced by local or regional companies.
Law says the results are not surprising. Coke is the world’s largest producer of bottled drinks and manufactures 128 billion bottles of soft drinks and its bottled water, Dasani, a year, according to figures supplied by Coke. Nestle, which operates in 189 countries worldwide, is the world’s largest food and beverage producer. PepsiCo, with six global divisions, has a worldwide reach.
Identifying global brands doesn’t necessarily advance the science, Law says. “Unless you are looking at a geographically limited company that you can trace, I think it’s more a matter of trying to engage the people producing the products.”
All three companies have pledged to reduce plastic waste by redesigning products to make them more recyclable, reducing unnecessary plastic packaging, and increasing the amount of recycled material used to manufacture their plastic products. Each company has set targets for those goals that range from 2020 to 2030.
“Nestle is committed to achieving its vision that none of its packaging, including plastics, ends up in a landfill or as litter,” says Rumjhum Gupta, a company spokeswoman. “Greenpeace’s report highlights the challenges we face as a society in tackling the issue of packaging and plastic waste. As the world’s largest food and beverage company, we recognize the issue and we are working hard to eliminate non-recyclable plastics.”
Ben Jordan, director of Coke’s environmental policy, says Coke “shares the Greenpeace goal of eliminating waste from the ocean. We believe that all of our packaging material has benefits. What we have to do is manage it properly. We need better collection, more use of recycled content, complete recycling, whether a plastic bottle or aluminum can.”
Coke partners with the Ocean Conservancy to sponsor the group’s annual beach cleanups, and Jordan says the information documented at them can be helpful in the effort to reduce marine debris.
“If it only tells you who sells what in what markets, it’s not that surprising,” he says. But if we can learn something about our waste ending up in surprising places or litter being a bigger problem in one market versus another market, then absolutely, more information is better.”
PepsiCo, in a statement, says it has invested in product redesign and is working to “bring the latest sustainable packaging advances to market. We don’t have all the answers yet, and we will continue to collaborate with a number of leaders in this area to learn and share the latest science and practical solutions.”
Eduardo Leal’s Plastic Sea raises awareness about plastic pollution by focusing on hundreds of pieces of plastic that wash ashore at a remote beach in Colombia. The problem of plastic in nature, particularly in our oceans, is a global crisis.
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Oct 13, 2022 · The challenge of ocean plastic pollution is immense, with millions of tons of plastic contaminating our seas. While cleanup efforts are commendable, they are not a panacea. The real solution lies in systemic change—reducing single-use plastics, promoting recycling, and fostering sustainable practices.
