The Plastics In Sea Can Out-Number The Population Of Fish! Let There Be A Halt.

 

By D N Singh

Human greed and intentional neglect towards the environment has weighed down on it so much that, now it might take the time of generations to heal the damage.

Besides the land area human invaded into the seas and caused incalculable damage to the sea to which an untold number of floras and faunas are linked to for survival.

It can be seen at the shores how plastics waste are driven into the ocean day in and day out leading to a state of clogging now seems irreversible. Several campaigns in the recent past were launched but nothing much could be done to relieve the ocean of such plastic waste.

According a recent assessment study by several environmental bodies, there are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic waste estimated to be in our oceans. Of which, 269,000 tons float and a whopping 4 billion microfibers per km2 remain below the surface.

It has become a customary practice that, each year we hear about deadlines on ban on manufacturing or use of plastics in which the goods such as polythene carry bags are prominently the eyesores.

Anytime and everywhere, a piece of plastic is omnipresent, as if.

A statistic shows that, each year more than 300 million tones of plastic are being created and ‘this weighs the same as human population’. An estimated 8 Million tons of plastic enters our oceans every year.

The debris we see on the surfaces 70 % of it ultimately sink into the eco-system of the oceans of which some float and rest can be seen strewn on the beaches.

What happens? The flora and fauna have already come under severe pressure and the days are not far when, by another two decades, the plastics would outnumber the fish population.

As plastic decomposes over 100’s of years, it breaks into micro pieces and can spread all over the planet. Other than incinerated plastics, the entire volume we ever created is still on our planet in some form.

In the last decade, researches spent a great deal of time analysing the waste in the water around some 57 large rivers that flow into our oceans. From studying the river and surrounding landscape, they were able to estimate that 10 rivers are the hosts of 90% of the plastics getting dumped into the oceans.