Pollution Archives - Saving Seafood

River Traps Chew at Huge Ocean Plastics Problem

June 16, 2022 — Floating fences in India. Whimsical water- and solar-driven conveyor belts with googly eyes in Baltimore. Rechargeable aquatic drones and a bubble barrier in The Netherlands.

These are some of the sophisticated and at times low-tech inventions being deployed to capture plastic trash in rivers and streams before it can pollute the world’s oceans.

The devices are fledgling attempts to dent an estimated 8.8 million tons (8 metric tons) of plastic that gets into the ocean every year. Once there, it maims or kills marine plants and animals including whales,dolphins, and seabirds and accumulates in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other vast swirls of currents.

Trash-gobbling traps on rivers and other waterways won’t eliminate ocean plastic but can help reduce it, say officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

Korean researchers reveal effects of a common pollutant on scallops

June 2, 2022 — Researchers from Korea Maritime & Ocean University, in Busan, South Korea revealed that exposure to higher levels of benzo[α]pyrene (BaP) slowed immune response in bay scallops and lowered their capacity to deal with oxidative stress and DNA damage.

BaP is a carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH), and one of the most common pollutants released into the sea. They are formed by incomplete combustion of organic matter, including wood and fossil fuels. They are not water soluble, but attach to fine silt at the ocean bottom, where they may be consumed by shellfish.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

NGO uses shareholder-sponsored proposals to push ocean plastic commitments

July 15, 2021 — As You Sow, an NGO based in Oakland, California, U.S.A., is riding a wave of success from its tactic of borrowing the shares of activist investors to submit shareholder proposals aimed at securing greater corporate transparency and commitments on ocean plastic.

As You Sow focuses on changing corporate policy on topics like climate change or ocean plastics by engaging with shareholders, who in turn seek greater environmental commitments from the companies they are invested in. According to As You Sow Senior Vice President Conrad MacKerron, the tactic was slow to start at first, but has been gaining steam.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

MASSACHUSETTS: New Bedford’s trash skimmer ‘Walley’ picked up about 500 pieces of this type of litter in one week

May 25, 2021 — Greg Pimentel and Shay Ribeiro bent over a folding table set on the dock at Pier 3. Covering it was a brown pile of organic matter speckled with the bright, artificial colors of plastic.

For more than one hour, they sorted with gloved hands through multiple piles counting cigarette butts, food wrappers, plastic fragments and other pieces of human waste. When they were done, they dumped everything into a barrel.

“If more people took care or properly disposed of trash, we would only have organic material here,” Pimentel, director of community outreach at the Community Boating Center, said.

The material they pulled came from the trash skimmer first installed in 2019. For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the floating box gobbles up harbor water and all its detritus.

The skimmer is named Walley and much like the Pixar robot, Wall-E, that cleans Earth one piece of trash at a time, the water skimmer sucks up human waste to make the New Bedford Harbor a bit cleaner.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Expedition hauls tons of plastic out of remote Hawaii atolls

April 23, 2021 — A crew returned from the northernmost islands in the Hawaiian archipelago this week with a boatload of marine plastic and abandoned fishing nets that threaten to entangle endangered Hawaiian monk seals and other animals on the uninhabited beaches stretching more than 1,300 miles north of Honolulu.

The cleanup effort in Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument lasted three weeks and the crew picked up more than 47 tons (43 metric tons) of “ghost nets” and other marine plastics such as buoys, crates, bottle caps and cigarette lighters from the shores of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

The monument, the largest protected marine reserve in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world, is in the northern Pacific Ocean and surrounded by what is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a huge gyre of floating plastic and other debris that circulates in ocean currents. The islands act like a comb that gather debris on its otherwise pristine beaches.

The ecosystem in the monument is diverse, unique and one of the most intact marine habitats on Earth. But the beaches are littered with plastic and nets that ensnare endangered Hawaiian monk seals — of which there are only about 1,400 left in the world — and green turtles, among other wildlife.

The crew removed line from a monk seal on the expedition’s first day.

With virtually no predators, the islands are a haven for many species of seabirds, and Midway Atoll is home to the largest colony of albatross in the world. There, the land is littered with carcasses of birds that have ingested plastics and died.

The cleanup was organized by the nonprofit Papahanaumokuakea Marine Debris Project, which partners with the state of Hawaii and federal agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Washington Post

Fisherman-led program RIO works to clear plastic from the oceans

April 22, 2021 — San Antonio, Texas, U.S.A.-based Restoring Integrity to the Oceans this week announced its new Plastic Neutral Program to help businesses mitigate the effects of plastics pollution.

The program’s first corporate sponsor, Logistics Plus, is a global transportation and supply chain company based in Erie, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

How Did the Pandemic Affect Ocean Conservation?

April 13, 2021 — As we enter what’s hopefully the home stretch of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s time to take stock of how it affected every aspect of our world, to consider what happened, what could be done different to avoid those problems in the future, and what’s next.

That might mean confronting some of our earlier conclusions. For example, at the start of the pandemic we were bombarded with often false stories about suddenly quiet cities and waterways experiencing animals reclaiming what was once their habitat. “Nature is healing” stories like this seem to have created an overly rosy picture of the pandemic’s impact on the natural world.

The reality is much more complicated, and I’m not just talking about things like the well-publicized millions of inappropriately discarded plastic bags and protective masks ending up in the ocean. Many other changes to the world’s waters, including some potentially harmful ones, are taking place beneath the surface.

“Protected and conserved areas and the people who depend on them are facing mounting challenges due to the pandemic,” says Rachel Golden Kroner, an environmental governance fellow at Conservation International. Indeed, for the past two decades a sizable chunk of global biodiversity conservation has been funded by ecotourism, a funding source that dries up when international travel slows down, as it did this past year.

Read the full story at EcoWatch

Four nations make global call for action to curb marine plastics pollution

April 12, 2021 — Four countries are upping their engagement in the fight against marine litter and plastic pollution by teaming with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) to organize a ministerial conference on preserving the oceans through the sustainable production and consumption of plastics.

Germany, Vietnam, Ecuador, and Ghana are organizing the ministerial conference, to be held in September 2021, in line with a decision made during the first session of the fifth United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-5) – held virtually between 22 and 23 February – as the push for a common position on marine litter and plastic pollution intensifies among global community members.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Plastic Ingestion By Marine Fish Is A Widespread And Growing Problem

February 12, 2021 — The consumption of plastic by marine animals is an increasingly pervasive problem, with litter turning up in the bellies of wildlife as varied as mammals, birds, turtles and fish. However, according to a research review by ecologists at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station and PhD student Alex McInturf at UC Davis, the problem is impacting species unevenly, with some more susceptible to eating a plastic dinner than others. With billions of people around the world relying on seafood for sustenance and financial security, this research, published Feb 9. in the journal Global Change Biology, warns that there is a growing number of species – including over 200 species of commercial importance – eating plastic.

Matthew Savoca was collecting data on plastic ingestion by seabirds for his PhD when he became interested in uncovering ecological traits linked to increased consumption. Now, as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hopkins Marine Station, he has conducted one of the most comprehensive analyses of plastic ingestion on fish ever performed.

“Fish are a really good species to track the flow of plastic pollution through marine ecosystems,” said Savoca, who is lead author of the paper. “Now, we are showing the numbers in ways they haven’t been shown before. No previous studies have looked across all of this research for broad patterns and drivers.”

Read the full story at Science Blog

The Serious Health Risks of a Polluted Ocean

February 8, 2021 — Ocean pollution is widespread, worsening, and poses a clear and present danger to human health and wellbeing. But the extent of this danger has not been widely comprehended – until now. Our recent study provides the first comprehensive assessment of the impacts of ocean pollution on human health.

Ocean pollution is a complex mixture of toxic metals, plastics, manufactured chemicals, petroleum, urban and industrial wastes, pesticides, fertilisers, pharmaceutical chemicals, agricultural runoff, and sewage. More than 80 percent arises from land-based sources and it reaches the oceans through rivers, runoff, deposition from the atmosphere – where airborne pollutants are washed into the ocean by rain and snow – and direct dumping, such as pollution from waste water treatment plants and discarded waste. Ocean pollution is heaviest near the coasts and most highly concentrated along the coastlines of low-income and middle-income countries.

Ocean pollution can also be found far beyond national jurisdictions in the open oceans, the deepest oceanic trenches, and on the shores of remote islands. Ocean pollution knows no borders.

Read the full story at The Maritime Executive