Earth Protect Blog

It may be time to sound the alarm and possibly try and find a cleaning solution. A recent study shows that there is much more plastic polluting the world’s oceans than researchers have previously estimated. And the number is staggering.   In what is being described as the most comprehensive m...

A major new study of the world's oceans has reached a shocking conclusion: Thanks to humans, there are now over 5 trillion pieces of plastic, weighing more than 250,000 tons, floating in water around the world. With a global population of about 7.2 billion, that's nearly 700 pie...

Who's flushing plastic pollution into the oceans, creating tiny time bombs that kill fish, birds and sea turtles ingesting what they think is food? That question has been around since 1997, when the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" was discovered, and a new mathematical model could provide the tool nee...

Some Norwegian participants in last week’s oceans conference in the U.S. said international policymakers demonstrated a commitment to ocean health but more research is needed to show how emerging Arctic industries affect nearby water ecology.  The two-day “Our Ocean” conference ...

Earth now has five or six major ocean garbage patches, and new research suggests they'll continue growing for 'at least the next thousand years.' After a yacht captain stumbled across the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the late 1990s, scientists soon began finding similar patches of plast...

    Global plastic production has increased from 1.5 million tonnes per year in 1950, to 245 million tonnes in 2008, reveals MEP The European Commission recently presented a green paper on plastic waste. Plastic has become a symbol of our throw-away society. The use of plastic has sky...

When that plastic water bottle that you brought to basketball practice was empty, you probably recycled it. But lots of plastics don’t end up in the recycling bin. (Think deli containers and straws.) So where do they go? One place is the Pacific Ocean, in an area that has been called the Great Paci...

Plastic waste, such as plastic bags, bottles, and containers, are littering the world’s oceans and causing harm to marine animals. Birds often mistake small pieces of plastic for food and swallow them, but because birds are unable to digest plastic, the plastic pieces fill up their stomachs and proh...

Plastic pollutants circulate in pockets of the Great Lakes at concentrations higher than any other body of water on Earth, according to a recent State University of New York study.   The study is the first to look at plastic pollutants in the Great Lakes. It is part of a larger global endeavo...

Promises made at previous summits have not delivered enough protection for the oceans — campaigners are pushing for better results from Rio+20, writes Prime Sarmiento.   This month, scientists, campaigners and many developing nations are optimistic they will set in motion a deal on the conser...

Body of a dead humpback whale is seen in Omonville-la-Rogue, north-west France, a rare species to the Channel. A French fishermen brought the whale back in his nets, saying that it was already dead when it was caught in the nets. Entanglement in plastic bags and fishing gear have long been identifie...