Jenna Jambeck, the researcher who determined that eight million tons of plastic are thrown into the oceans each year, finally rewarded

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At 48, the American Jenna Jambeck, professor at the University of Georgia, has just received the 2022 prize from the Mc Arthur Foundation, a foundation which rewards work which does not fall into the Nobel category and which, however, in would deserve one.

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Which is precisely the case of Jenna Jambeck since the whole world, the media, governments, NGOs, the UN, repeat the figure that her data analysis produced: each year, eight million tons of plastic end up in the oceans. A dizzying figure but which allows us to measure the extent of the problem to be faced.

“VShas fascinated me since childhood, she said to washington post, as a child, I was fascinated by what could become of everything we threw away at home, everything we said ‘it goes to the landfill’“A good student, when it was time to study, she chose an engineer and her doctoral subject at the University of Florida imposed itself on its own: waste, and specifically marine waste. Except that no one is interested. At the time, in the year 2000, no institution agreed to fund his research.

Finally, it is an NGO, Ocean Conservancy, which is interested in his idea of ​​quantifying the mass of waste that lands at sea. For them, the link is obvious: the fish are suffocated by this pollution. However, billions of people on the planet depend on fishing for a living. It is therefore time to take an interest in plastics. In 2014, Jenna Jambeck offers what seems impossible: counting plastic waste and locating it on a map. For this, she created an application that anyone can install on their phone to indicate the presence of debris on a beach, a riverside, an estuary…

A hundred people downloaded it, then a thousand, then tens of thousands, which made it possible to collect an enormous mass of data and, therefore, to calculate this figure of eight million tonnes of plastic waste dumped into the ocean each year. This corresponds to one dumpster per minute. Jenna Jambeck is now struggling to stop the phenomenon by raising awareness among public authorities in the United States but also in India and China on the importance of acting at the source, not just to recycle, but to do without plastic.


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