I started working on ocean plastic pollution one year after Jambeck and colleagues published the modestly titled ‘Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean’. But this paper was anything but modest. It was the first estimate on a global scale that gave the world an idea of how much anthropogenic junk we were leaking into our oceans.
And the number wasn’t pretty. 4 to 12 million tons a year based on 2010 production and waste management data. Famously translated to “one garbage truck every minute”. Yikes.
But as my career in ocean plastic continued, so did the science. That original estimates were found to be too high for some areas, too low for others. And microplastic research entered the scene in a BIG way, these insidious, tiny particles act very differently than big plastic pieces… sinking, clustering, being eaten by animals. The list goes on.
In my latest article for Plastic Odyssey, we trace a decade of ocean science research, outlining what we know and what we are still trying to figure out.
Read the full article on Plastic Odyssey » How much plastic is really entering the ocean?
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