Plastic Pollution in the Global Ocean: Where has all the Plastic Gone?

There’s more plastic floating around the ocean than any other type of marine debris—that we know. What’s harder to figure out is just how much is out there. A recent survey of marine plastic debris found something surprising: Nearly 99% of it was missing. + “We were expecting values in excess of one million tonnes [1.1 million tons] of plastic, and only found between [10,000] and 30,000 tonnes [11,000-33,000 tons] of plastic,” Carlos Duarte, director of the University of Western Australia Oceans Institute, recently said in a presentation. ”This doesn’t mean plastic isn’t being produced and released, it means plastic is being lost somewhere.” + Where might it have gone? A lot of it’s going into the stomachs of a lanternfish, according to Duarte’s presentation (the discussion of the lanternfish starts at about 32:00

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