Marine Plastic Pollution

 🔆MARINE PLASTIC POLLUTION

✅ Every year, humans produce 300 million tonnes of plastic waste including 11 million tonnes of plastic waste that eventually wind up in the ocean. In fact, by 2050, there could be more plastics than fish in the ocean. 
✅Most plastics never disappear instead, it becomes smaller, with particles being swallowed by fish and eventually consumed by Humans in their food and tap water.

▪️Sources of Marine Plastic Pollution :

✅Land-based sources : plastic waste entered the ocean from coastal populations living within 50 km of the coastline.
✅Ocean-based sources : Plastic waste can also enter the ocean directly from ocean-based sources such as the fishing industry, commercial and recreational shipping, and offshore platforms.

▪️Marine Plastics Survey in India : 

✅Under the Coastal Ocean Monitoring and Prediction System (COMAPS) programme by the National Centre for Ocean Research of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, accumulation of marine debris was reported along the coast of Great Nicobar Island, Andaman. 
✅It is reported that 8% of the total solid waste produced is plastic waste and the top three cities that contribute most to pollution are Delhi, Kolkata, and Ahmedabad.
✅Plastic production in India increased by 39.7% and now stands at 9.46 million tonnes of plastic waste per year when five years ago it was 5.7 million tonnes per year.
✅However only 15% of the plastic waste produced is recycled in India and the rest is sent to landfills, incinerators, or dumped into the oceans and rivers. 
✅0.6 million tonnes of plastic waste end up in oceans from India alone via rivers, surface run-off etc. The Ganges discharges about 105000 tonnes of plastic waste into the Bay of Bengal every year.

▪️Gulf of Mannar Biosphere

✅It is situated in Tamil Nadu and extends from Rameswaram to Kanyakumari. 
✅Horst- Graben structure, the 
prevalence of monsoon, two courses of drift in water currents, Cenozoic sedimentary functions and riverine processes make the Gulf of Mannar biosphere ideal for a lot of marine biota and stable marine ecosystems.

▪️Challenges

✅Abandoned, Lost, or Discarded Fishing Gear (ALDFG) is a serious problem worldwide. Most of these wastes are due to shipping or fishing accidents, bad weather, etc.
✅While most of the lost gears are retrieved by the fishers, the little that remains causes serious problems to the marine ecosystems. A lot of species are killed by these wastes, and since they do not decompose easily, they keep killing various organisms throughout their lifetime.
✅About 20% of all the plastic debris in the oceans is from ALDFG according to UNEP.

▪️Microplastics

✅Microplastic is about 5mm in diameter and is always disposed into the environment through anthropogenic sources.
✅They are particularly hard to locate, track and study as they are smaller. Another major issue with microplastics is that they show a high affinity to other toxicants, making them more dangerous to the ingesting them. 
✅One of the main plastics, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), is found in clothes and when these clothes are washed small plastics known as microplastics are released.

▪️Swachh Sagar, Surakshit Sagar

✅Commemorating the 75th year of India's independence, a coastal cleanup drive was carried out at 75 beaches across the country for 75 days over 7500 km long coastline. 
✅This unique first-ever national campaign culminated on "International Coastal Clean-up Day" on 17 September 2022.

▪️Conclusion

✅ Many industries employ plastic in various products due to its nature and ease of production. They have certainly helped us enhance the efficiency of products.
✅The major challenge, however, is the segregation and re-aggregation of plastic waste stream such as packaging 
waste, including laminated plastic.

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Source yojana