After a visit to our local beach La Vall in which we had a very lovely walk, a little bit windy but still very calm, collecting a bit of drift wood and generally looking out for our lovely friend Mr Plastic, we came away with a carrier bag full of enemy no 1.
We were only there for about an hour and this is what we collected:
As you can see there was a nice little assortment of goodies in the bag, I was very surprised to come across plastic straws, but I shouldn´t have been because the awful things get everywhere.
There was also what appeared to be parts of a motorbike or scooter, there was a nice little green light cover and various black plastic pieces too!
The haul mainly composed of plastic bottle tops, the actual bottle was nowhere to be seen, which makes me wonder where the tops came from!
What we did notice was the very small pieces of hard plastic, hidden in the sand, it had obviously been hammered by the sea, but it is quite alarming to see how much of it there was. I have no idea how these small pieces can be removed from the sand before being swept back out to sea.
Information I found on the National Geographic Website is very interesting, here is some of it!
In the last decade, beach cleanups have grown into a global phenomenon, with volunteers gathering at regular intervals for the enormous task of cleaning up plastic rubbish. Now, new research on a remote Australian island chain suggests that beach cleanups can inadvertently mask the full scale of plastic pollution, much of which lies below the sand’s surface.
The look at isolated islands also provides a disturbing glimpse of what beaches in populated places might look like if they were never cleaned up and plastic simply accumulated year upon year, breaking down ultimately into smaller and smaller pieces: microplastics.
The Ocean Conservancy began conducting beach cleanups on a single Texas beach in 1986. It now directs such operations in more than 100 countries that over the decades have collected some 300 million pounds of rubbish.
Whose rubbish?
More than 80 percent of the 8 million tons of plastic trash that end up in the world’s oceans every year originates on land. But remote, uninhabited or sparsely populated islands offer scientists a unique window into the consequences of global waste and its movement around the world because little or none of it is generated locally.
The Cocos (Keeling) Island group, an isolated chain of 27 small atolls in the Indian Ocean 1,300 miles northwest of Australia, is home to fewer than 600 people. Almost everyone lives on the two largest islands. Essentially all of the trash that ends up on Cocos beaches is carried by ocean currents and washes ashore.
The islands are advertised as “Australia’s last unspoilt paradise.” Levers and her team arrived in 2017 to take samples of beach trash from 25 beaches on seven islands. They collected wood, glass, metal and plastic from the surface areas of beaches and the overgrown areas directly behind beaches where waste that washes ashore also accumulates. They also collected microparticles buried about four inches below the surface. Ninety-five percent of the materials were plastics.
Based on the sampling, Lavers estimated that the string of islands contained 414 million pieces of debris, weighing 238 tons. Microparticles buried in the sand comprised 93 percent of the estimated count.
“What you can see on the surface is the absolute tip of the iceberg,” Lavers says. “What is actually there is completely hidden from view.”
Among the larger items, 25 percent included straws, plastic bags, toothbrushes, and shoes. Only 2 percent of the beach trash was fishing gear, evidence that most of the fishing around the islands is small-scale and not industrial, Lavers says.
Microplastic’s effects
The finding that the majority of the Cocos beach plastics are microplastics embedded in sand is a logical outcome, given how plastics break down into smaller and smaller pieces as they are exposed to sunlight and wave action, said Kara Lavender Law, a research oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts,
“I’m glad people are doing this kind of field work to look in more detail about the kind of debris, including the sizes found on beaches and how,” she says. “We don’t know the full extent of contamination of beaches.”
Nearly a decade ago, scientists in Hawaii found that microplastics embedded in beach sand made it easier for water to flow through the sediment, which in turn affected how fast sand dries out. As microplastics accumulated, they acted as an insulator, preventing heat from reaching deeper layers of beach, affecting the temperature of sand. That in turn had affected the sex of turtle hatchlings, which is determined by the temperature of eggs during incubation.
“Colder nest temperatures mean longer incubation times and can shift the sex ratio of turtles, with more males being born,” says Steven Colbert, a marine scientist at the University of Hawaii, one of the authors of the 2011 study.
Lavers says the Cocos research—along with her 2017 study of plastic trash on isolated Henderson Island in the South Pacific’s Pitcairn Islands, where she found the world’s highest density of plastic pollution—provide a new platform to move this kind of beach research forward.
“This is the million-dollar question: What does plastic do to the functionality of beach sediment? You can’t keep adding to the beach and not have it change,” she says. “At some point, it will change the temperature of the beach, the chemistry of the beach, how the beach absorbs or evaporates water. All of these things will be altered and all of the animals that live on the beach will be affected.”
Lavers, the last scientist to visit Henderson, plans a 16-day return trip to the uninhabited island to collect data on temperature, humidity, and water content. She leaves June 1.
George Leonard, the Ocean Conservancy’s chief scientist, said he is dubious of the idea that California beaches might look similar to the Cocos beaches if California beach cleanups stopped.
“You can’t make that leap,” he says. “Habitats are different. The oceanography is different. But the fact that plastic goes to places untouched by humans and leaves such a ghastly footprint of our plastics obsession is pretty terrifying. It’s a call for a global effort
National Geographic is committed to reducing plastics pollution. Learn more about our non-profit activities at natgeo.org/plastics. Learn what you can do to reduce your own single-use plastics, and take your pledge.
Has a way been found to safely remove the microplastics from the ocean? Read below!
A teen from Ireland may have found the solution to rid world's oceans from the microplastics that are near impossible to remove.
Fionn Ferreira, 18, designed a new method for the extraction of microplastics, or particles of plastic less than 5 millimeters in diameter, as part of the Google Science Fair, an online competition open to students between the ages of 13 and 18.
The procedure, inspired by an article written by physicist Arden Warner, involves using non-toxic iron oxide to clean up oil spills, according to Ferreira's project study. When he tested the method on water containing a known concentration of microplastics, the plastic particles migrated into the oil phase, and the fluid was able to be removed using strong magnets, he wrote in his project synopsis.
He first produced microplastics to remove from the water and then extracted them using his method. Ten of the most common microplastics were used for the experiment.
Ferreira concluded that his extraction method would remove 85% to 92% of microplastics in samples. The next step would be to scale the project up to an industrial level, he said.
"From this I can conclude that using magnetite with a minimum of oil forms a viable method for the extraction of microplastics," he wrote.
Ferreira was inspired to launch the project after growing up near the shore in West Cork, Ireland, where he became "increasingly aware of plastic pollution of the oceans," he said.
"I was alarmed to find out how many microplastics enter our [wastewater] system and consequently the oceans," he wrote. "This inspired me to try and find out a way to try and remove microplastics from water before they even reached the sea."
Because he lives in such a remote area, he had to build his own equipment and lab to conduct tests and experiments, he said. On his website, Ferreria describes himself as not only a scientist but a musician, gardener, educator, entrepreneur and innovator.
I think that is really great! But just because we have potentially found a way to remove the microplastics it doesn´t change the fact that we should be using less plastic.
The blog song for today is "BlockBuster" by Sweet
TTFN
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