February 12, 2015 — About eight million tonnes of shopping bags, bottles, food wrappers, toys and other plastic waste drifted into the world's oceans in a single year, says a new study that warns the amount could double over the next decade.
The unique research, published Thursday in the journal Science, suggests that between 4.8 million and 12.7 million tonnes of plastic entered the oceans in 2010 from people living within 50 kilometres of coastlines in 192 countries.
In the same year, those countries generated a total of 275 million tonnes of plastic waste, with much of it coming from mismanaged landfills and litter.
Kara Lavender Law, one of the report's authors, said she was stunned by the findings after determining that eight million tonnes is the equivalent of several shopping bags of plastic for every 30 centimetres of coastline.
"I've been out to sea and I've seen plastics in the middle of the open ocean, so I didn't think it was going to be a small number," she said in an interview from Portland, Maine. But, she said, the results were "pretty staggering."
The researchers found that countries with the highest populations, the largest amount of coastline and less developed waste management systems produced the most plastic garbage that was likely to blow into waterways.
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