Weather & Science
171 Trillion Pieces of Plastic Trash Now Clog the World’s Oceans
A global study finds a sharp rise in marine plastic pollution since 2005, with no signs of slowing down.
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There are more than 170 trillion tiny plastic particles — or 2 million tons of them — floating on the surface of the ocean, and many of them got there after 2004, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.
The peer-reviewed paper is by Marcus Eriksen of the 5 Gyres Institute, a California-based nonprofit focused on plastic pollution, and researchers at other organizations and universities. There was a previous attempt to estimate the amount of plastic afloat on ocean currents back in 2014. The updated paper relies on data from a greatly expanded set of samples, nearly 12,000, from oceans across the globe.