Latest news with #GreatPacificGarbagePatch
Atlantic
9 hours ago
- General
- Atlantic
Oceans Awash in Plastic Waste
An estimated 11 million metric tons of plastic enter oceans each year, according to the U.S. State Department—and some of it accumulates in highly visible ways. Şebnem Coşkun / Anadolu / Getty Turkish free diver Şahika Ercümen dives amid plastic waste on the Ortaköy coastline to raise awareness of plastic pollution in the oceans, and to observe the conditions in the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, Turkey, on June 27, 2020. Nhac Nguyen / AFP / Getty A Vietnamese woman gathers shells in a coastal forest littered with plastic waste that stuck in branches after it was washed up by the rising tide, in Thanh Hoa province, about 150 kilometers south of Hanoi, Vietnam, on May 18, 2018. Nina Gomes recovers a discarded plastic bag from ocean waters near the Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on March 19, 2024. Bags of plastic waste and garbage recovered from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are unloaded at the Port of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, on July 23, 2024. The Ocean Cleanup is a nonprofit organization founded in 2013 that develops and deploys technologies to rid the world's oceans of plastic. A plastic ball floats in the Strait of Gibraltar, about 6.8 miles (11 kilometers) away from the nearest shore, near Barbate, Spain, on July 31, 2018. Bhushan Koyande / Hindustan Times / Getty Children walk through tons of plastic waste on a shallow shoreline near Badhwar Park in Mumbai, India, on June 4, 2025. Raşid Necati Aslim / Anadolu / Getty A giant 11-meter-long whale sculpture called Whale on the Wharf , made of recycled plastic waste, is placed in London's Canary Wharf area on April 15, 2025, to draw attention to plastic pollution in the oceans. In this photo taken on October 22, 2019, plastic and other debris sit on a beach on Midway Atoll in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands. According to a study released in 2020, more than a million tons a year of America's plastic trash isn't ending up where it should. The equivalent of as many as 1,300 plastic grocery bags per person is landing in places such as oceans and roadways. In this photo from October 22, 2019, small pieces of plastic waste are shown in the decomposed carcass of a seabird on a beach on Midway Atoll. In one of the most remote places on Earth, Midway Atoll is a wildlife sanctuary that should be a safe haven for seabirds and other marine animals. Instead, creatures here struggle to survive as their bellies fill with plastic from faraway places. Josep Lago / AFP via Getty This photo taken on January 12, 2024, shows plastic nurdles at La Pineda beach in Tarragona, Spain. Cem Ozdel / Anadolu / Getty Modou Fall, a Senegalese environmental activist also known as 'Plastic Man,' is raising awareness about environmental pollution with his costume made of hundreds of plastic bags. He's shown here in Dakar, Senegal, on March 27, 2025. The 55-year-old Plastic Man organizes discussions and various events to educate the public about environmental pollution and climate change. Wearing his plastic outfit and carrying a note on his chest reading Africa is not a trash can , he walks the streets and beaches of Dakar to highlight the impact of plastic use on the environment. Olivier Morin / AFP / Getty This photo shows several dead herring trapped in a plastic packaging net on May 3, 2023, near Pietarsaari, Finland, as the late spring's sea ice was melting slowly. Benson Ibeabuchi / AFP / Getty A view of a canal that empties into Lagos Lagoon, clogged with rigid foam and single-use plastic, at Obalende in Lagos, Nigeria, on January 23, 2024. Agung Parameswara / Getty Small pieces of plastic that washed ashore on Kedonganan Beach and were collected in Kedonganan, Bali, Indonesia, shown on February 2, 2021. In Bali, known for its beaches and sunsets, the northwest monsoon brings vast amounts of plastic waste to its world-famous shores. Volunteers from a nongovernmental organization hold hands after cleaning the São Conrado beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on June 8, 2023, as part of World Oceans Day. Tahsin Ceylan / Anadolu / Getty Divers from the Turkish Underwater Sports Federation and Kas Underwater Association team carry out underwater cleaning operations off the coast of Antalya's Kas district on May 4, 2025. During the sea-cleaning operation, a large variety of items such as cellphones, plastic chairs, plates, forks, hats, glass, and plastic bottles were removed. Mladen Antonov / AFP / Getty A wave carrying plastic waste and other rubbish washes up on a beach in Koh Samui in the Gulf of Thailand on January 19, 2021. Li Xinjun / Xinhua / Getty Primary-school students clean up garbage at Binhai Park in Rongcheng City, in east China's Shandong Province, on June 4, 2025.
Time of India
5 days ago
- Health
- Time of India
Sabuj Mancha on plastic pollution threat to rivers
1 2 Kolkata: Physical surveys conducted across districts of Bengal by Sabuj Mancha reveal that riverbeds in the region are choked with plastic waste, putting freshwater aquatic biodiversity under severe existential threat. If these riverbeds continue on this trajectory, they risk turning into dead zones—akin to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—spelling disaster for Bengal's freshwater ecosystems. "Almost every day, tonnes of plastics are being dumped in the rivers, much of which is flowing into the sea. The microplastics are easily entering our food chain through fish. However, the riverbeds, which are the greatest aquatic biodiversity zones, are fast turning into dead zones. It is high time citizens take action and hold both rural and urban local bodies to task," said Naba Dutta, secretary, Sabuj Mancha, an umbrella organisation for environmental groups and individuals. Dutta said that no water body is spared from plastic pollution, be it a pond, canal, or lake. The main reason is that none of the 128 municipal bodies have adopted the Waste Management Rule, 2016, in its totality. Moreover, the steps against the manufacturing of single-use plastic are not only slack but non-existent in most places.
CBS News
27-05-2025
- General
- CBS News
Large sailboat docked at Oakland estuary sinks; crews attempt salvage operation
Salvage crews on Monday were trying to refloat a large sailing ship that sank Sunday night while docked at the Oakland Estuary. The boat, part of an ocean cleanup project, is now presenting a cleanup problem of its own. The ship - called The Kaisei, Japanese for "sea star" - is a 150-foot-long, two-masted ship called a brigantine which has been sailing since 1987. It has most recently been the property of the Ocean Voyages Institute, headquartered in Sausalito. The group bought the boat to conduct the Kaisei Project, a month-long expedition in 2009 to survey and study the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a huge mass of floating plastic in the ocean. The has also been used for various educational cruises, but lately, it's been moored next to the Nob Hill Foods store in Alameda. And now it looks like it's not going anywhere anytime soon. "It's been there about five years," said Alameda resident Zoe Corsi. "It's a steel-hulled boat, the kind you can take around the world. But it's been sitting there for five years. It has NOT moved in five years. My partner says, 'They're never going to move that thing, it's going to sink someday.' And here we are." On Sunday night about 6 p.m., the ship began to take on water and sink. Alameda resident Zph Biggs watched it as it slowly went down. "I was parked right there," said Biggs, "And it was sinking when I got out. So, I took pictures of it, like, wow. That's interesting!" The ship now sits on the bottom, fully submerged, its heavy masts slanting toward the shore, which is why the public is being kept away. "The vessel seems to be fairly stable at the moment," said Lt. Jason Rogers with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. "However, due to the area we're in, with tidal movement going up and down and back and forth through here, it could move at any time." A diver spent the day assessing the situation despite near-zero visibility, looking for a way to offload the 400 gallons of diesel fuel that may still be aboard. Just in case, a floating boom has been placed around the ship to try to contain any leaks. "I think it's lost a little bit of fuel, but the majority of it is sealed up," said standby diver Courtney Jensen. "So, we just have to get access to it, not allow any more out. Get that pumped out, that's the priority. Yeah, we have ways of doing it." Jensen works for Power Divers, the company brought in to handle the operation of getting the Kaisei back on an even keel. "If you want to get it up and out of here, you'd bring in a crane barge," said Jensen. "And then you'd run rigging up and underneath the sailboat, and then you lift it up freeboard, enough to where you can pump the water out and get it refloating again, basically. This is a really big vessel. This is a 100-foot sailboat with a steel hull. Weighs a lot. It's big." So how long might it take? "It just depends," said Jensen. "It could be a couple weeks, could be a couple days." The U.S. Coast Guard says it is not involved since the ship is not threatening navigation in the channel. But the Coast Guard will be reviewing the salvage plan to make sure it follows regulations. So far, there is no indication of why the ship sank. The Coast Guard says the responsibility for determining that and raising the ship lies with the boat's owner and the salvage company hired to conduct the operation.
Vancouver Sun
15-05-2025
- General
- Vancouver Sun
One old gillnet, piles of bones from dead sea creatures: B.C. group targets dangers of marine 'ghost gear'
Commercial diver and part-time conservationist Bourton Scott has made a passion project out of searching out and cleaning up the unseen threat posed by 'ghost gear,' the commercial nets and traps lost or abandoned off B.C.'s coast over the decades. Lost overboard in bad weather, caught up on reefs and rocks or with the nets of other fishermen during frantic openings for fishing, Scott said the equipment doesn't disappear, but keeps wreaking havoc by continuing to trap fish, seals, birds and sometimes even whales. However it's lost, though, such ghost gear in open waters pose a bigger threat to marine ecosystems than the single-use plastic straws, cups and bags that show up in urban shoreline cleanup efforts, according to conservation groups and the Fisheries Department. Get top headlines and gossip from the world of celebrity and entertainment. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sun Spots will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. And the group Scott co-founded, the Emerald Sea Protection Society, is among those trying to bring awareness and public support for cleaning up the problem. Gillnets, made from clear monofilament fishing line with openings just wide enough to catch target fish behind their gills, 'are probably the most harmful,' he added. 'They're the hardest to see in the water, they're often suspended in the water column, which makes them a much more dangerous hazard for those animals living in those areas,' said Scott, who lives in Ladysmith. 'Under every gillnet that I've found, there's always a bone pile, so evidence of its 'ghost fishing' for however it's been in the water.' During a cleanup of ghost gear at Alert Bay off of Northern Vancouver Island last fall, Scott said he found one gillnet with 15 live crabs caught up in its strands along with the skull of a sea otter and the skeletons of several sea birds, 'and I think we removed something like 15 from that area.' Scott's Emerald Sea crew embarked on that cleanup with the support of the Namgis Nation and backing from the NGO Ocean Conservancy's global ghost gear initiative cleanup effort. 'Nobody wants to lose their gear,' said Joel Baziuk, associate director of the Ocean Conservancy's ghost-gear initiative. However, it's often too dangerous to recover gear in bad weather or tough currents, so 'this is an unfortunate side-effect of that type of thing,' Baziuk said. Globally, Baziuk's conservation group points to studies that estimate ghost gear makes up 70 to 90 per cent of floating plastic in the gyres of garbage that collect on the open ocean. One study reconned that the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the accumulation of marine debris floating around the Pacific between California and Hawaii, is made up of ghost gear. Canada is one of the countries taking the problem seriously in its waters with an active 'ghost gear action plan' that has been in place since 2019, which makes it 'one of the top two or three in the world leading on this issue,' Baziuk added. The Fisheries Department refused to make anyone available for an interview Wednesday citing the transition period following the last federal election. On its website, however, the DFO said it spent $58 million on 143 projects to clean up ghost gear between 2020 and 2024. DFO regulations require commercial fishermen to report lost gear. Between 2020 and 2024, the DFO received 288 lost-gear reports on the West Coast, about 1.43 per cent of reports on all of Canada's coasts. The objective of the DFO's ghost gear program is to develop a 'prevention focused strategy' to meet government's commitment to achieve 'zero plastic waste by 2027,' according to the department's website. However, it's difficult to tell how much of the problem is being fixed because 'it is impossible to know how much ghost gear is in the ocean,' said researcher and educator Jackie Hildering, co-founder of the Marine Education and Research Society. Hildering, in an email response to Postmedia News questions, said researchers have observed that half of humpback whales off of B.C.'s coast have scars showing they've been caught in some kind of gear, though she added that researchers don't know how many entanglements are with ghost gear or shellfish traps being actively fished. Scott noted that trying to survey the extent of the lost-gear problem is a mammoth task on B.C.'s 20,000-kilometre coastline. depenner@
