WWF calls for early commitment to a plastics treaty. This pollution has reached “all parts of the oceans” and threatens marine biodiversity “from the smallest plankton to the biggest whale”alerts the organization, Tuesday February 8, while opens Wednesday in Brest (Finistère) the “One Ocean” summit which will bring together scientists, NGOs, politicians and entrepreneurs to discuss several crucial international issues around the seas. Based on a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature on the impacts of plastic pollution on the oceans, biodiversity and marine ecosystems, WWF is sounding the alarm: this contamination is found everywhere, “from the surface to the deep seabed, from the poles to the coasts of the most isolated islands, and is found from the smallest plankton to the largest whale”, summarizes the WWF.
It is estimated that between 19 and 23 million tonnes of plastic enter the world’s waters each year, much of it ending up at sea. In this context, WWF calls for the early start of talks to develop of an international agreement on plastic, on the menu of a UN meeting on the environment, from February 28 to March 2 in Nairobi.
According to the WWF, this agreement should at least lead to world standards of production and “recyclability“real. “And which could also lead to the disappearance of certain products that we do not need”wants to hope Eirik Lindebjerg, responsible for the plastic file at the WWF.
Single-use plastics constitute 60% of marine pollution. However, according to estimates cited by the WWF, the production of plastic in the world should double by 2040, warns the organization, which recognizes a lack of data on the possible repercussions on humans of this presence of products with components chemicals. For Eirik Lindebjerg, “we are reaching a saturation point for marine ecosystems which poses a threat not only to specific species, but affects the entire ecosystem (…). What we show in this report is that there is a limit to the pollution that our ecosystems can absorb,” continues the expert.
Limit already reached on the microplastic side in several points of the globe points out the WWF, in particular in the Mediterranean, in the Yellow and East China Seas (between China, Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula) and in the Arctic sea ice.
“We have to look at the issue as a finite system that does not absorb plastic and that is why we have to move towards zero emissions, zero pollution, as fast as possible,” insists Eirik Lindebjerg, comparing the situation to the climate crisis and its “carbon budgets”, the maximum amount of CO2 that can be released into the atmosphere before certain consequences. Because seeking to clean up the oceans is “extremely difficult and expensive” and it is much less costly and effective to act upstream.
A 2021 study listed 386 species of fish that ingested plastic out of 555 tested. According to other scientists, examining one of the major commercial fishing species, up to 30% of a sample of cod caught in the North Sea had micro-plastics in the stomach. On the herring side, a study found microplastics in 17% of a sample caught in the Baltic. Birds are also on display. In the Northwest Atlantic, 74% of seabirds examined by one study had eaten plastic. 69% according to another study in Hawaii.
Finally, plastics degrade as they stay in water, becoming smaller and smaller, until “nanoplastic” of a size less than one micrometer (thousandths of a millimeter). So that even if no more plastic arrived in the ocean, the number of microplastics should double there by 2050.