19 Oceans
19.1 Ocean Plastic Pollution
A new study finds that 78% of ocean microplastic comes from tire dust, largely from rich countries.
Electric vehicles will not solve our ecological crisis. They will only prolong trends like this.
Comment by Tristan Cunha
This “fact” is completely wrong, it originate in a Yale Environment article that misquoted a study. Here’s the quote:
“Seventy-eight percent of ocean microplastics are synthetic tire rubber, according to one estimate.”
Here’s the study they got that from:… Show more
So it’s not microplastics in the ocean. It’s microplastics that enter the environment as particles in the 1 micrometer to 5 mm size. They don’t look at anything that’s smaller than that that enters the environment, and they don’t look at anything bigger than that that breaks down and then turns in to microplastics in the environment (which I believe basically every study has found to be the largest source of microplastics).
What the original study found was that there’s a relatively small number of ways that plastics that actually enter the environment as microplastics. And of those, 4 of them were large enough and easy to study that they looked at them. And that of those 4, one of them, tire particles, was clearly the largest contributor to this subset. But even then they don’t claim that all of that makes it in to the ocean.
19.2 Sea Use
Seaspiracy shows why we must treat fish not as seafood, but as wildlife. ((GeorgeMonbiot?))