Data-rich study on North Pacific Garbage Patch

Unless you live in bell jar, you have heard about the Garbage Patches floating in our oceans – huge collections of plastic garbage floating in the ocean like islands.

A recent study I found on BlueSky discussed multi-year data collection on the North Pacific Garbage Patch. As the non-scientist X-tech guy, the data collection and analysis seemed robust. While the results of their study are not surprising, they still hurt (like a gut punch).

Our results clearly show that the extent of plastic pollution in the NPGP between 2015 and 2022 has been increasing when considering the smaller size classes of debris: microplastics (0.5–5 mm) and mesoplastics (5–50 mm) for which both numerical and mass concentrations measured inside the NPGP hotspots have significantly increased over just seven years. Most concerning is that the amplitude of extreme values grew by an order of magnitude with hotspots of small debris (0.5–5 mm) reaching concentrations of over 10 million pieces per km² in 2022 as opposed to 1 million pieces per km² in 2015. 

IOP Science

Micro plastics are getting worse – materially. The researchers’ data is quite extensive and convincing.

I asked my favorite LLM AI to suggest which is worse, micro or macro plastic. The response was as expected.

Have you changed your behaviors wrt plastic? If not, when …

Featured image generated by MSFT CoPilot