Humans are smearing the oceans with plastic, according to British scientists who sifted shorelines to find microscopic fragments of stockings, yoghurt pots, rope, shopping bags and bleach bottles everywhere they looked.
The spread of polymer waste has been reported before: researchers have surveyed beaches on completely uninhabited islands in the Antarctic and found plastic cups, polymer sandals and cordial bottles wherever they have looked.
But Richard Thompson and colleagues at the University of Plymouth, England, reported in the journal Science yesterday that they looked at apparently clean sand and mud on British beaches, in intertidal estuaries and even under 9m of water for evidence of invisible pollution.
"We found microscopic fragments almost from the first sample. Since then we have looked at more than 20 sites around the UK and this material has been present at all of them," he said. "We are finding just as much in remote parts as we are nearer the big centers."
They found that microscopic fragments of plastic had been ingested by barnacles -- which filter water for food -- and in lugworms that burrow in mud, and tiny crustaceans that feed on detritus. In plankton samples they found polymer fibres as small as 30 millionths of a meter.
Plastics wash up on beaches to be broken by waves. The team searched for nylon, polyester, acrylic and six other kinds of polymer with a clear chemical "signature."
They could not identify plastics produced more than 20 years ago, and they could not pick up evidence of particles smaller than 20 microns. But they have clear evidence that long after plastic bags, nylon ropes and Tupperware boxes have vanished, their constituent fragments remain. Nobody knows whether this material can get into the food chain: that is the next line of research.
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