Write An Essay On Marine Littering

Introduction

There are many definitions of what constitutes marine litter. But they all boil down to essentially the same thing. Marine litter or marine debris as it is also known is “any persistent, manufactured or processed solid material discarded, disposed of or abandoned in the marine and coastal environment…” (Galgani et al, 2010). Marine litter is human created waste and includes everyday items such as plastic bags, balloons, rope, medical waste, glass and plastic bottles, cigarette lighters and beverage cans as well as thousands of other products. Marine litter is becoming a major environmental concern and is causing a significant threat to marine life around the world. Some of the primary sources of this debris are storm water discharges,

Plastic is extremely slow to breakdown and because it is of a low density it tends to stay floating in the oceans and can be carried huge distances. Plastics form a massive part of our everyday lives and are part of nearly everything we manufacture and have thousands of uses. As technology advances plastics are becoming more and more important to us. It is said that in the first ten years of this century we have produced more plastic than in the entire century previous. As well as this all of the plastic that has ever entered the environment still remains either as whole items or as fragments. Some of the plastic items found at sea include raw plastic pellets (about the size of wheat grains, from which larger items are manufactured), plastic bags and sheeting, cotton bud sticks, monofilament fishing nets, and ties for multi-pack drink-cans. Floating plastic can be blown by the wind or carried by ocean currents, often ending up in the middle of oceanic gyres where currents are weakest. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an example of this. It comprises a large area of the North Pacific Ocean. It is estimated to be double the size of Texas and contains more than 3 million tons of plastic. The gyre is estimated to contain six pounds of plastic for every pound of

The easiest thing of course is to stop using materials that are not easily biodegradable. This however is by no means practical. So what we must do is try to minimise the effect these materials can have on the environment and improve our waste management system. By simply improving people’s attitude and habits to the way in which they manage their waste can have a large effect in reducing the amount of litter that ends up in our oceans. By implementing the 5Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Recover and Redesign we can ensure that we minimise the amount of needless waste that we produce. This type of education should be thought in schools from as early an age as possible so that people don’t form any of the bad habits that adults find difficult to break and so that proper waste management is seen as an everyday thing. Unfortunately education is not always enough to get people and especially large industry to change their practices and there is definitely a need for legislation and laws against pollution and litter. These can consist of bringing in small taxes on once off items such as plastic bags, balloons and other items which can cause huge damage but where other eco-friendly alternatives are available. The plastic bag levy was a massive success in Ireland and it took very little for people to change their habits even