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The oceans have become one giant refuse bin for all manner of plastics. Environmental and health concerns associated with plastic pollution are a long recognised international problem (Carpenter & Smith 1972). Whilst approximately 10% of all solid waste is plastic (Heap 2009), up to 80% of the waste that accumulates on land, shorelines, the ocean surface, or seabed is plastic (Barnes et al. 2009).
Plastics have an array of unique properties: they are inexpensive, lightweight, strong, durable, corrosion resistant, and with high thermal and electrical insulation properties. This versatility has revolutionised our life and not least made information technology and electrical goods far more readily available than would have been possible otherwise. They have also contributed to our health and safety (e.g., clean distribution of water and breakthrough medical devices), and have led to substantial energy savings in transportation. Unsurprisingly, with an ever expanding population and our standard of living continuously improving, plastic production has increased from 0.5 to 260 million tonnes per year since 1950 (Heap 2009), accounting today for approximately 8% of world oil production (Thompson et al. 2009b). Almost all aspects of our daily life involve plastics in some form or another: from hair dryers to shoes, to the car we drive and the wrap around lunch sandwiches. A scary thought considering that in the 1960s, less than 1% of our waste was plastic.
The key problem with plastic however is that a major portion of plastic produced each year is used to make disposable packaging items or other short-lived products that are permanently discarded within a year of manufacture (Hopewell et al. 2009). Well over a billion single-use plastic bags are given out for free every day.
Around 0.2 to 0.3% of plastic production eventually ends up in the ocean (Andrady & Neal 2009). Two of plastics' most touted advantages, their light weight and durability, also make plastic items a significant environmental hazard once seaborne. Close to half of plastics are buoyant and remain so until they become waterlogged or amass too muchepibiotato float. Plastics don't biodegrade. Through photodegradation and abrasion plastics only break into smaller and smaller pieces so "that they can be consumed by the smallest marine life at the base of the food web," according to a report...