The ocean has plastic in it.
So do you.
Fifty years ago plastic was a material. Today it is in mothers' milk, in placentas, in the walls of human arteries. Researchers have found it in the deepest ocean trenches and in the air above cities that have never seen a factory. It does not decompose. It breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, each one still plastic, still accumulating in the tissues of every living thing that swims, breathes, or feeds in the sea.
The ocean absorbs what we discard. It always has. The difference now is that what we're discarding doesn't dissolve, doesn't return to soil, doesn't complete any cycle the living world knows how to process. It stays.
8M
tonnes of plastic enter the ocean every year — the equivalent of a rubbish truck emptying into the sea every minute
50yr
the time it takes for a plastic bottle to begin breaking down, during which it sheds microplastics continuously
100%
of sea turtles studied have been found to have ingested plastic — as have 90% of seabirds
9.4Mt
India's annual plastic waste — the largest single-country share of ocean plastic pollution on Earth