Plastic waste is one of the common components of oceans today: floating or lying on the bottom of the ocean. Even the Mediterranean cannot escape this trend. Costas Tsiaras of the Hellenic Center for Marine Research and his team have calculated how much plastic enters the Mediterranean Sea on average and how much of it floats in the ocean. They present their results in “The Frontiers in Oceanography”..
On an average more than 3750 tonnes of plastic waste is continuously floating in the water, while the annual input is about 17 600 tonnes. About 80 percent quickly end up on land again, where they pollute beaches, while the rest flow into the ocean and eventually drown or are eaten by animals. For their study, the scientists tracked plastics from sources on land, such as cities or rivers, and observed how these were affected by currents or decay. A simulation developed by Tsiaras & Company modeled the growth over a period of several years between 2010 and 2017.
This enabled the working group to identify some of the hot spots where particularly large amounts of plastic waste flows, sinks or is washed ashore. In 2019, for example, there were reports of a large plastic island floating in the ocean between Corsica and Elba. Bags, Styrofoam sheets and other focal points of this so-called macroplastic made from everyday objects are also found around the mouths of rivers from Algeria, Albania and Turkey, around metropolises and on the densely populated coasts of Italy. Spain and France. On the other hand, microplastics are also circulating in the sphere of influence of large cities with sewage treatment plants. Researchers found shredded plastic waste that is not yet classified as microplastic in areas where untreated water is released into the ocean, such as parts of Greece and Turkey.
