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Ocean plastic's race against time : plastic recycling

The first resource 2016
Frances Ringwood

Summary

This article from South Africa reports on the Race for Water Foundation's global survey of microplastic contamination in coastal sands, finding alarming levels of microplastics at ocean island and shoreline locations worldwide. The findings underscore that microplastic pollution has reached a global scale that threatens marine ecosystems and the organisms that depend on them.

Study Type Environmental

The Race for Water Foundation is a Swiss non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving the world's waters. South Africa recently participated in the foundation's global study focused on assessing the risk posed to global oceans by microplastics - the preliminary results are startling. Professor FRANKLIN Servan- Schreiber is a member of the Swiss team from the Race for Water Foundation, which has been traveling the world's oceans, visiting variousis land coastlines and testing the amount of microplastics in the sand to determine the extent of the problem and how it affects marine life. Normal plastic pollution, contributing towards giant trash gyre islands at various points in the ocean, tends to snatch newspaper headlines; however, microplastics could have already become a much bigger problem.

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