More pieces of plastic in the oceans than stars in the Milky way

cocos (keeling) islands is a tropical small group of islands comprised of two atolls with a total of 27 coral islands about halfway between Australia and Sri Lanka in the Indian ocean.

the Islands, which are australian soil, is located where several ocean currents come together, but outside of the largest southeast asian waterways.

Now researchers have been able to observe that these small landskärvor with less than 600 inhabitants, is home to almost a million discarded shoes and 373.000 end-of-life toothbrushes.

in Total, there are 414 million waste items with a combined weight of 238 tons on the islands. A quarter is plastic. Over 90 percent of the garbage is not visible because they are hidden a foot under the surface.

the permanent residents it would take around 4,000 years to produce so much waste.

Skräpanalysen is made in a new study published in the scientific journal Scientific Reports.

cocos (keeling) islands as isolated islands, as these work well as a gauge of how polluted the oceans are: There are few local sources of pollution and little human influence, such as no strandbesökare and therefore no regular cleaning of the beaches.

The australian research team made their estimates after having collected the debris in selected areas of 7 of the 27 islands (corresponding to close to 90 percent of the archipelago's landmass) in 2017.

Plastskräpet in the oceans is one of the world's more troublesome environmental problems, because no one knows how it already ended up there to be able to be removed in any effective way. In addition, the broken plastic down extremely slowly. What happens over time is that it is atomized to very small particles.

in order to try to ”vacuum” the seas of plastic, for example, ”The Ocean cleanup”, but it is unclear how much the problem can be mitigated with current technology.

About 40 percent of all the plastics produced will be waste in the same year as it is produced.

Half of all plastic manufactured in the last 60 years have been manufactured since 2005.

throughout The world's oceans, it is estimated now to be 5.250 billion plastic items (most very small). It means that there are more pieces of plastic in the oceans than stars in the Milky way. It may not be a useful reference for all, but it can in any event establish that it relates to astronomical amounts.

Read more: the World's deepest garbage bag found in the Pacific ocean

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