Coastal anemones found side-by-side with pelagic (open ocean) gooseneck barnacles and pelagic bryozoans on a derelict fish crate recovered from the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. Photo: Linsey Haram / Smithsonian Institution

Ocean plastic pollution reaches “unprecedented” levels – The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is now so huge and permanent that a coastal ecosystem is thriving on it – “The problem is getting bigger and bigger by the minute”

By Ivana Kottasová 18 April 2023 (CNN) – Scientists have found thriving communities of coastal creatures, including tiny crabs and anemones, living thousands of miles from their original home on plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a 620,000 square mile swirl of trash in the ocean between California and Hawaii. In a new study published in the Nature […]

Plastic Waste in Canggu Beach, Bali. A tourist walks along a beach covered in piles of debris and plastic waste in Canggu, Bali, Indonesia, 12 December 2021. Photo: Made Nagi / Greenpeace

Plastic recycling is a dead-end street: year after year, plastic recycling declines even as plastic waste increases

WASHINGTON, D.C., 24 October 2022 (Greenpeace USA) – Most plastic simply cannot be recycled, a new Greenpeace USA report concludes. Circular Claims Fall Flat Again, released today, finds that U.S. households generated an estimated 51 million tons of plastic waste in 2021, only 2.4 million tons of which was recycled.  The report also finds that no […]

Southern resident orca J16 makes a rainbow while surfacing in Puget Sound. Photo: Miles Ritter

Orca task force adds 13 recommendations at final meeting as “biological extinction” looms

By Bellamy Pailthorp 8 October 2019 (KNKX) – Their goal is clear: to prevent Puget Sound’s iconic Southern Resident killer whales from going extinct. Solving that problem is anything but simple. The task force convened by Gov. Jay Inslee to save the orcas added 13 new recommendations this week, at its final meeting. The additions […]

Winds carry microplastics “anywhere and everywhere”, even to remote mountaintops – “It’s astounding and worrying that so many particles were found in the Pyrenees”

By Damian Carrington 15 April 2019 (The Guardian) – Microplastic is raining down on even remote mountaintops, a new study has revealed, with winds having the capacity to carry the pollution “anywhere and everywhere”. The scientists were astounded by the quantities of microplastic falling from the sky in a supposedly pristine place such as the […]

Plastic pollution found in every tiny animal tested in the Mariana Trench, the lowest point in any ocean – “What you put in the trench stays in the trench”

By Ed Yong 27 February 2019 (The Atlantic) – Alan Jamieson remembers seeing it for the first time: a small, black fiber floating in a tube of liquid. It resembled a hair, but when Jamieson examined it under a microscope, he realized that the fiber was clearly synthetic—a piece of plastic. And worryingly, his student […]

U.S. cities burn recyclables after China bans imports – Residents fear rise in pollution from incinerators

By Oliver Milman 21 February 2019 (The Guardian) – The conscientious citizens of Philadelphia continue to put their pizza boxes, plastic bottles, yoghurt containers and other items into recycling bins. But in the past three months, half of these recyclables have been loaded on to trucks, taken to a hulking incineration facility and burned, according […]

Half of killer whales doomed to die from pollution – “It is like a killer whale apocalypse”

By Damian Carrington 27 September 2018 (The Guardian) – At least half of the world’s killer whale populations are doomed to extinction due to toxic and persistent pollution of the oceans, according to a major new study. Although the poisonous chemicals, PCBs, have been banned for decades, they are still leaking into the seas. They […]

Orcas of the Pacific Northwest are starving and disappearing – “It’s an ecosystem-wide problem”

By Jim Robbins 9 July 2018 SEATTLE (The New York Times) – For the last three years, not one calf has been born to the dwindling pods of black-and-white killer whales spouting geysers of mist off the coast in the Pacific Northwest. Normally four or five calves would be born each year among this fairly […]

Microplastics pose threats to iconic ocean giants – Whales swallowing thousands of plastic particles every day

5 February 2018 (Murdoch University) – Scientists are warning that microplastics in our oceans are posing a significant risk to filter-feeding marine animals like manta rays and whale sharks.A new analysis for the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, led by Murdoch University PhD student Elitza Germanov, warns that microplastics could be hazardous because they […]

Industrial waste pollutes America’s drinking water – “I want to see our future generations have the time to grow up and not have to deal with young kids dying and sicknesses and illnesses”

By Jasmine Spearing-Bowen and Karl Schneider 17 August 2017 PHOENIX (News21) – In Ringwood, New Jersey, Ford Motor Co. dumped more than 35,000 tons of toxic paint sludge onto lands occupied for centuries by the Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lenape tribe, poisoning groundwater with arsenic, lead and other harmful chemicals. Today, more than 43 […]

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