On the Danish beaches you can’t avoid seeing plastic lying om the beach. Something can be left on the beach, but a lot has been washed out from the sea. Over the past 50 years, the production of plastic has doubled, and today more than 300 million tons of plastic are produced annually.
Every year, 8 million. tons of plastic ends as waste in the sea worldwide. It is 19 tons per minute and the quantity is expected to double within 10 years. These are, for example, plastic bags, bottles and canisters, six-pack holders, cord and rope. It can be very damaging to animals and birds. Plastic in nature has great consequences for wildlife both on land and in the sea, where animals consume plastic or are entangled in it in search of food.
At least 90% of the plastic waste that flows around the oceans ends up in the ocean via river systems. And virtually all plastic pollution comes from only ten major rivers, eight are located in Asia. The three rivers that transport the most plastic waste and microplastic into the sea are the Yangtze River in China, the Indus River in Pakistan and the Yellow River in China. Common to all the ten most polluting rivers is, that they run through densely populated areas where hundreds of millions of people live, whose consumption of plastic is the reason for almost all the plastic ending up in the oceans.
Did you know that:
Cigarette filter is made of a non-degradable plastic material and is one of the great challenges for the sea. A cigarette filter can take up to five years to break down, and so does chewing gum.