Where Does All the Plastic Go?
By Carolyn Kormann for the New Yorker, September 16, 2019.
Roughly one per cent of all the plastic that has ever gone into the ocean is floating on its surface. What happened to the rest of it? It is likely that marine debris kills hundreds of thousands of sea birds, turtles, and marine mammals each year. Every year, an estimated eight million metric tons of land-based plastic enters the world’s oceans. But when marine researchers have measured how much of this plastic is floating on the water’s surface, swirling in offshore gyres — most notably…