Viewpoint – Ocean Plastic Pollution: a convenient but distracting truth?

By Richard Stafford, Peter J. S. Jones. Marine Policy, 2019

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ocean plastic is a contemporary focal point of concern for the marine environment. However, we argue there are bigger issues to address, including climate change and overfishing. Plastic has become a focus in the media and public domains partly through the draw of simple lifestyle changes, such as reusable water bottles, and partly through the potential to provide ‘quick fix’ technological solutions to plastic pollution, such as large scale marine clean-up operations and new ‘biodegradable’ plastic substitutes. As such, ocean plastic can provide a convenient truth that distracts us from the need for more radical changes to our behavioural, political and economic systems, addressing which will help address larger marine environmental issues, as well as the cause of plastic pollution, i.e. over-consumption.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/84286406e3e07b56ea2e04d5335cb83927142293

Citations in the corpus

• A Global Perspective on Microplastics (2020, unknown): “For example, Stapleton et al. (2005), detected flame retardant additives and triethyl phosphate (a polymer resin modifier used in unsaturated polyesters) in clothes dryer lint. Schreder and La Guardia (2014) detected several polymer additives not used in clothing (e.”