German government report: global ocean protection measures have failed
By Axel Bojanowski Thousands of tons of trash are thrown into the sea each year, endangering humans and wildlife. A classified German government report obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE indicates that efforts by the United Nations and the European Union to clean up our oceans have failed entirely. Since the world’s oceans are so massive, few people seem to have a problem with dumping waste into them. But plastics degrade at very a slow rate, and huge amounts of them are sloshing around in our oceans. Wildlife consumes small pieces causing many of them to die, since the plastics are full of poisons. And, as experts warn, we’ve reached a point where it’s even getting dangerous for humans to consume seafood. Given these conditions, the international community has been pushing for four decades for massive bureaucratic efforts aimed at clearing the oceans of waste. In 1973, the United Nations sponsored a pact for protecting the oceans from dumping. Additional provisions have been added to the so-called Marpol Convention — short for “marine pollution” — on six different occasions. And nine years ago, the European Union put directives on the books that forbid any dumping of maritime waste into the ocean while in ports. Still, according to a classified German government strategy paper obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE, if you add up all the good such measures have done, you still end up with zero. In fact, according to the confidential paper, international efforts aimed at protecting the oceans have failed across the board. Our oceans have devolved into vast garbage dumps. Even strict laws have yet to do anything to help the oceans, the paper states. Take the case of the North and Baltic seas. Although dumping into them has been illegal since 1988, the amount of waste found in these seas has still “not improved.” The government also estimates that, each year, 20,000 tons of waste finds its way into the North Sea alone, primarily from ships and the fishing industry. The paper concludes that all related international agreements have been “unsuccessful.” … Birds often have a hard time distinguishing between little pieces of plastic and food. According to a study conducted in 2002, 80 percent of the birds examined along the North Sea had plastic particles in their mouths. Likewise, researchers at the Research and Technology Center Westcoast based in the northwestern German town of Büsum have recently determined that almost all (93 percent) diving birds on the North Sea have pieces of plastic in their stomachs. Yet another study found an average of 32 pieces of plastic in the stomachs of northern fulmars, a relative of the petral. With all these pieces in their stomach, the birds always feel full, so they consume less, get fewer nutrients and, in many cases, die. A panel of experts told the EU that migratory birds feed pieces of plastic they find in the Atlantic Ocean to their young in Antarctica. According to the United Nations Environment Program, there are, on average, some 18,000 visible bits of plastic floating on every square kilometer of sea. Some knots of floating trash are even visible on satellite photos. Researchers from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation tested 11 randomly chosen sites in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and found that the mass of plastic was six times greater than the mass of plankton. Plastic does, over time, disintegrate into ever smaller pieces. But it takes centuries to break down completely. A particularly crass example of seaborne trash is presented by the German Bight, a part of the North Sea on Germany’s coast. Fully 8 million bits of garbage can be found there. In the southern part of the North Sea, an average of 575 pieces of refuse can be found per square kilometer. …
