Plastic as a Persistent Marine Pollutant
By Boris Worm, Heike K. Lotze, I. Jubinville, C. Wilcox, J. Jambeck. 2017
638 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Synthetic organic polymers—or plastics—did not enter widespread use until the 1950s. By 2015, global production had increased to 322 million metric tons (Mt) year−1, which approaches the total weight of the human population produced in plastic every year. Approximately half is used for packaging and other disposables, 40% of plastic waste is not accounted for in managed landfills or recycling facilities, and 4.8–12.7 Mt year−1 enter the ocean as macroscopic litter and microplastic particles. Here, we argue that such mismanaged plastic waste is similar to other persistent pollutants, such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) or polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which once threatened a “silent spring” on land. Such a scenario seems now possible in the ocean, where plastic cannot be easily removed, accumulates in organisms and sediments, and persists much longer than on land. New evidence indicates a complex toxicology of plastic micro- and nanoparticles on marine life, and transfer up the food chain, in...
Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/faab760d32684717471d27d956e0c27c45f20b2e
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Citations in the corpus
- The Concept of the Anthropocene (2017, background): “These include the abundance of pure elemental aluminum (98% of all production of aluminum has been since 1950), concrete (which was invented by the Romans but only became a prime building material since World War 2; in the past 20 years the volume produced is equivalent to 1 kg m−2 of land surface),”