Welcome to the world’s largest garbage dump(3)

However, research has indicated that BPA, as chemists know it, can affect the human endocrine system, especially during stages of rapid development, such as in fetuses or during childhood.

But even before they degrade, ocean-borne plastics have a severe effect on marine life. The UN Environment Program has reported that at least 267 marine species worldwide - including 86 percent of all sea turtles species, 44 percent of all seabird species and 43 percent of all marine mammal species - are regularly affected by becoming entangled in or ingesting marine debris.

According to Greenpeace, studies have show that about 50 to 80 percent of sea turtles discovered dead are know to have ingested marine debris, and 111 of 312 species of seabird are also known to have ingested debris.

On average, 350,000 albatross chicks hatch every year on the 6.2-sq-km Midway Island in the North Pacific. However, more than 30 percent of them die, many from malnutrition and dehydration because the parent birds mistake floating plastic debris for food.

To date, there is no effective solution to the problem. "Micro-plastics in the oceans will eventually wash ashore, UV or biodegrade, become suspended in the water column, or sink to the sea floor," Eriksen wrote.

Countermeasures

'It is a very poor use of resources to try to collect micro-plastics from the oceans. What is reasonable is to collect very large plastic pollution. This means that cleaning up beaches so that debris doesn't go back in the ocean. Also, one thing that works is to pay fishermen to recover lost fishing nets. Imagine if a fisherman was paid 1 US dollar for every 10 kilos of fishing nets they returned to land. This would prevent a net from shredding into many small particles over time," Eriksen wrote.

In the coastal city of Dalian in Northeast China's Liaoning province, Tang Zailin, deputy president of Dalian Environmental Protection Volunteers Association, organizes weekend volunteers to collect living and construction waste and litter discarded by tourists in the offshore area. The volunteer program has been running for almost 10 years.

Dalian's coastline accounts for 10 percent of China's total. Compared with the Yellow Sea, the waters of Bohai Bay are calm and gentle, and as a result, the area's self-purification capacity is relatively weak. In recent years, increased development and construction for commercial use have resulted in the rapid growth of marine garbage.

"We have been trying to collect garbage from the water, the seabed and the beaches. In general, we divide the garbage into eight major types, including construction- or tourism-related, industrial waste, and waste from marine aquaculture," Tang said.

"You can get everything that you find on land from the sea - plastic bags, newspaper, everything," he said, adding that the volunteers once fished up two cellphones from the seabed.

As a popular coastal city, Dalian's beaches are attracting an increasing number of summer tourists. Tang said 70 percent of the garbage collected on the beaches, in the water and on the seabed is plastic waste, such as food and drinks packaging, while the remainder includes cloth and rubber.

"We also count the cigarette butts we collect on the beach as plastic. They account for 10 percent of all the plastic garbage we find, and we have also found seabirds that mistook photo-degraded plastic for food and died," he said.

While the efforts of Tang and other volunteers worldwide win plaudits from all quarters, some experts, such as Carl Safina, founding president of the Blue Ocean Institute, see them as a palliative, not a solution.

Safina is convinced that problem will remain unless radical measures are undertaken on dry land, not in the oceans. For him, the type of plastic used in packaging is a crucial part of the problem.

"Plastic can be made from materials that truly degrade in sunlight and water. But now, few items are made like that. Why do we package something like yogurt, which might last two weeks, in a material that lasts centuries? It makes no sense," he said.