Drowing in plastic

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Throwaway living took off the second half of the 20th Century. Disposable coffee cups, plastic stirrers, and plates that could be tossed in the bin, 'improsed' our lives. Global plastic production soared from 1.5 million tonnes in 1950 to nearly 200 million tonnes in 2002. Today, it's reached the 300 million tonne mark. Reports of ocean garbage patches suggest that much of that plastic eventually ends up in our seas. Take a boat out far enough and you'll witness bottles, toy figurines, roller balls from underarm deodorants and thousands of plastic sandals all floating around in the sea.

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A recent study by Marcus Eriksen, one of the co-founders of 5 Gyres, the organisation that studies plastic pollution in the seas,suggests that at least five trillion pieces of plastic,altogether weighing in at over 268,000 tonnes, are floating around near the surface of the sea. An incredible 92 per cent of the pieces are microplastics. According to Eriksen, we'll have to live with what's already out there. "It's going to sink, it's going to get buried, it's going to fossilize,"he says. "There's no efficient means to clean up 5km down on the Ocean floor."

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The student: Victoria Parra Milián. Greetings to all management, administrative staff, teachers and students of the Language Center-UNPRG-FACHSE for your 25 years of creation. This Language Center is an Academic unit and provides us with quality education excellence, rigid and concrete learning, aplying new methods with the world of virtuality, innotive technological techniques for the development of the university and the general public.

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1. The Ocean Cleanup project its floating platform is not effective in cleaning up tiny plastics, it only gave on larger plastics.

2. The scary threat in the pollution of the sea and oceans is the bacteria that accumulate in the plastics.

3. The chemist Alejandra Ter Holle and the marine biologist didn't reach an agreement for the reduction of plastics.

4. Mostly, the sea and the oceans are polluted by the dumping of plastic thrown by ships, people who don't solve the problem they originate.

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In May 2014, chemist Alexandra Ter Halle joined the Seventh Continent Expedition to the north Atlantic Ocean with the aim of analysing the gunk. She collected samples and is now analysing her data back at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France, to work out why some plastics attract pollution as they age. "The difficulty lies in the fact that there are so many plastics,of different colours, shapes and compositions, " she says. "It's difficult to extract a trend from all those pieces."

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To dramatically reduce the amount of plastic accumulating in the oceans, the 'loop' of producing and recycling plastics would have to become a closed one. This means that any material leaving the system as waste would enter it again as a renewable resource. One option is banning certain types of plastics for particular applications, such as the plastic microbeads used in facial scrubs and toothpastes. These tiny particles-often measuring less than 1 mm-wash straight down the sink and are too small to be filtered out at the waterworks. All plastic products would need to be designed with an end-of-life care package. In short, solving the plastic problem in the oceans means solving plastic pollution, full stop.

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No one really knows what damage all that stranded microplastic is doing, but the hope is that once it's mixed up with the sediment, it's doing less of it. Yet the clouds of microplastics swirling in the water column pose a problem. The debris is easy for marine life to swallow, but the gunk that the plastics collect-such as pollution and bacteria-are also a threat.

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Ter Halle believes the answer is prevention. She says that switching to biodegradable plastics could offer part of that solution. While the first generation of biodegradables just broke down into smaller pieces, the second generation may have some utility. Ter Halle suggests that they could, for instance, be handy for shopping bags.

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Yet Teacher Richard Tompson, a marine biologist at Plymouth University,believes that the very notion of biodegradable plastic is flawed. "The idea that you could build into a plastic a feature that would enable it to fulfil its life in service without deteriorating and then,the minute it becomes an item of litter,it somehow rapidly and harmlessly degrades...it kind of seems like you're aspiring towards the impossible," he says. He recently attended a workshop in Portugal involving over 50 people from around Europe, including scientists, policymakers and industry types eager to offer ideas for solving the problem. But there was a shortage of cutting-edge solutions. "From my perspective, there was nothing new from any of the participants," he says. "A range of solutions are known to us, but it's more about translating that into action."

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E-Bokk ''25 years of institutional life of the Language Center by the participants of the FACHSE Language Center''

Presented by: Victoria Parra Milián

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A project called The Ocean Cleanup has been testing floating platforms for collecting bigger bits of plastic, but they cannot deal with microplastics. Microplastics is the technical term for tiny pieces of plastic. They are so finely shredded by ocean currents that they're impossible to spot from a boat and are easily mistaken for food by sea creeatures.

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- <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2022-08-19/west-africa-is-drowning-in-plastic-who-is-responsible-video">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2022-08-19/west-africa-is-drowning-in-plastic-who-is-responsible-video</a>

- <a href="https://graphics.reuters.com/ENVIRONMENT-PLASTIC/0100B275155/index.html">https://graphics.reuters.com/ENVIRONMENT-PLASTIC/0100B275155/index.html</a>

- <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R02aBoIT2P0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R02aBoIT2P0</a>