There are large accumulations of plastics in the ocean, even outside so-called garbage patch

The longer plastics are exposed to sun, wind, waves, and sea water, the more they weather and disintegrate. Other studies have shown that larger non-degraded plastic items and particles occur primarily where plastic enters the sea. The further the particles are transported, the more weathered and smaller they should be. “This is exactly what we showed with our investigations. And as expected, we found the highest quantities of plastics in the samples we took in the area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, says UFZ researcher Robby Rynek, lead author of the study. “However, the items do not in any way form a carpet of plastic that covers an entire surface in a dense manner. This is important when thinking about plastic removal technologies, which would have to cover vast areas in order to be able to collect significant amounts of plastic. Most plastics are small fragments that escape nets or which can only be collected with considerable animal ‘by-catch’,” says co-author Dr Melanie Bergmann from the AWI. It is therefore essential to reduce the emissions of plastics.

“The most surprising and at the same time most worrying result of our study is that we found equally large quantities of particularly small microplastics in the remote marine protected area north-west of Hawaii. We hadn’t expected that. According to the calculations of the forecast model, there should be considerably less plastics in this area”, says Rynek. “Microplastics are most likely distributed much further across the oceans than previously assumed. We actually found plastics at all of our sampling stations. There were no samples without plastics. So, we can’t assume that plastics are causing problems mainly in the known accumulation areas – the problem is much bigger and actually affects the entire ocean ecosystem”, says Annika Jahnke.