How Many Animals Die From Pollution Each Year

Ocean PLASTICS POLLUTION

A Global Tragedy for Our Oceans and Sea Life

Plastic accumulating in our oceans and on our beaches has become a global crisis. Billions of pounds of plastic can be found in swirling convergences that make upward about 40 percent of the world'due south sea surfaces. At current rates plastic is expected to outweigh all the fish in the sea by 2050.

Plastics pollution has a directly and deadly effect on wild animals. Thousands of seabirds and sea turtles, seals and other marine mammals are killed each year after ingesting plastic or getting entangled in information technology. Endangered wildlife similar Hawaiian monk seals and Pacific loggerhead sea turtles are among most 700 species that consume and go caught in plastic litter.

It's time to become at the root of this ocean crunch. The Centre has petitioned the Ecology Protection Agency to begin regulating plastics as a pollutant and is working to end plastic pollution at the source, earlier it ever has a hazard to reach the sea.

THE PLASTIC Trouble

We're surrounded by plastic. It's in the single-use packaging we discard, the consumer goods that fill our stores, and in our vesture, which sheds microplastic fibers in the wash.

In the first decade of this century, we made more than plastic than all the plastic in history upwards to the year 2000. And every year, billions of pounds of more plastic end upwardly in the world's oceans. Studies guess at that place are now fifteen–51 trillionpieces of plastic in the globe's oceans — from the equator to the poles, from Arctic water ice sheets to the ocean floor. Not one square mile of surface ocean anywhere on globe is free of plastic pollution.

The problem is growing into a crunch. The fossil fuel manufacture plans to increase plastic production by twoscore percent over the next decade. These oil giants are rapidly building petrochemical plants across the U.s.a. to plough fracked gas into plastic. This means more toxic air pollution and plastic in our oceans.

We demand urgent action to address the global plastic pollution epidemic.

Unfortunately, plastic is so durable that the EPA reports "equally of plastic ever fabricated yet exists." All five of the World'southward major body of water gyres are inundated with plastic pollution. The largest one has been dubbed the Nifty Pacific Garbage Patch.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The Slap-up Pacific Garbage Patch is a gyre of plastic debris in the northward-key Pacific Ocean. Information technology'due south the largest accumulation of plastic in the world. Just how big is it? Using the map beneath, click and drag effectually the garbage patch (shown in ruddy.) If you're on mobile, zoom in and use ii fingers to drag more hands.

Map source

A HEAVY Toll ON WILDLIFE

Thousands of animals, from small finches to bluish whales, die grisly deaths from eating and getting defenseless in plastic.

• Fish in the North Pacific ingest 12,000 to 24,000 tons of plastic each twelvemonth, which can cause abdominal injury and death and transfers plastic upwardly the food concatenation to bigger fish, marine mammals and human being seafood eaters. A recent study found that a quarter of fish at markets in California contained plastic in their guts, mostly in the form of plastic microfibers.
• Ocean turtles can mistake floating plastic garbage for food. They can choke, sustain internal injury and dice — or starve by thinking they're full from eating plastic. Tragically, enquiry indicates that half of sea turtles worldwide take ingested plastic. New studies find plastic pollution is so pervasive on many beaches that its affecting their reproduction.
• Hundreds of thousands of seabirds ingest plastic every year. Plastic ingestion reduces the storage volume of the stomach, causing starvation. It's estimated that 60 percent of all seabird species have eaten pieces of plastic, with that number predicted to increment to 99 per centum by 2050. Dead seabirds are often found with stomachs total of plastic, reflecting how the amount of garbage in our oceans has apace increased in the past 40 years.
• Marine mammals ingest, and become tangled upwardly in, plastic. Large amounts of plastic debris have been constitute in the habitat of critically endangered Hawaiian monk seals, including in areas that serve as pup nurseries. Entanglement in plastic debris has also led to injury and mortality in the endangered Steller sea lion, with packing bands the most mutual entangling material. Expressionless whales accept been found with bellies full of plastic.

FIGHTING Bounding main PLASTIC POLLUTION

The Center for Biological Diversity is tackling this trouble on multiple fronts. We've petitioned the U.South. Ecology Protection Bureau asking the government to regulate plastics equally a pollutant under the Make clean Water Human activity and will go along pushing for plastic pollution to be treated equally the hazardous waste that it is.

We've sued companies that plow plastic into consumer appurtenances to better control their runoff. We're challenging the permits needed to build those new ethane cracker plants and organizing grassroots resistance to terminate them

In that location's still a lot of work to do, but nosotros're committed to the long struggle to reduce body of water plastic pollution.

Source: https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/ocean_plastics/

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