Scientists believe there are more pieces of plastic in the ocean than stars in the Milky Way.
Almost 1 million shoes and hundreds of thousands of toothbrushes are among the millions of pieces of plastic waste that have washed up on the beaches of a remote island in the Indian Ocean, a study claims.
“Small, buried items pose considerable challenges for wildlife, and volunteers charged with the task of cleaning-up, thus preventing new items from entering the ocean remains key to addressing this issue,” the authors warned. As the researchers collected samples down to a depth of 10 centimeters on the beach, and were unable to access some debris “hot spots,” the estimate is likely to be conservative, explained Jennifer Lavers, the lead author of the study and a research scientist at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania, in Australia.
In 2017, Lavers in a separate study showed that the beaches of Henderson Island in the South Pacific had the world’s highest density of plastic garbage, at an estimated 38 million pieces. "The scale of the problem means cleaning up our oceans is currently not possible, and cleaning beaches once they are polluted with plastic is time consuming, costly, and needs to be regularly repeated as thousands of new pieces of plastic wash up each day.
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