1. Where does vinyl pollution come from?

Seeing that its commercial development in the 1950s, plastic has been a real success. Its world production is growing exponentially. It come to 288 million tons news, an increase of 620% when compared with 1975. The success of plastic originates from its impressive qualities: easy formatting, low cost, rot-proofness, mechanical resistance... the ideal material for packaging is its main area of use (40 to fifty percent, according to PlasticsEurope ).

Roughly many of these of marine litter comes from the land. This kind of pollution comes mainly from household waste, poorly accumulated, poorly recycled or forgotten in nature or close to roads. This waste materials will be carried by the winds, pushed by the rains to take the way of the sewers, rivers and waterways, then to end in the oceans. Negligence is the key cause of this pollution, that must be added natural disasters such as floods and tsunamis.

It is estimated that poor management of home or municipal waste was responsible in 2010 for 5 to 13 , 000, 000 tonnes of plastic air pollution in the oceans . More worryingly, this figure could be increased by 10 in 2025, or 50 to 135 million tons of vinyl that may be dumped each 12 months in the oceans. This kind of increase is primarily due to the increase in plastic materials consumption in emerging countries that contain not yet established up collection and taking facilities.

2. How exactly does it accumulate in the gyres?

The surface pollution of the marine environment, very emblematic, has attracted much attention from the clinical community and the standard public. In fact, no ecosystem is spared. Also the most remote places are concerned: bays, estuaries, lakes, deserts and abyssal plains are also infected by plastic. As for the pollution of waterways and rivers, it must be studied much more detail, especially as these are the key plastic vehicles of the sea.

If perhaps the first indications of this plastic pollution at sea go back to the 1970s, it was only in the nineties that a navigator and American expert in this field, C. Moore [3], alarmed the medical community about the cheap accumulation in some areas. Plastic debris degrades only very slowly and remains in the marine environment. Under the effect of the circular currents that animate the five great ocean basins, they collect in the "subtropical gyres". These vast swirling moves of anticyclonic direction (contrary to the direction of the earth's rotation) are accompanied by a slow-moving convergent flow on the, which concentrates the suspended particles.

fig. 1: The scale on the right expresses concentrations of micro-plastics close to the surface, in number of pieces per km2 (in logarithmic scale). 

There are 5 aspects of oceanic plastic piling up positioned in the North Ocean, South Pacific, North Ocean, South Atlantic and Native american indian Ocean, respectively. These 5 zones of accumulation show up in orange or red on the map of figure 1, as well as the Mediterranean Ocean and the Black Ocean which also have high concentrations of plastic dirt.

It is commonly referenced to as a vinyl continent, but it is far from the land on which wish able to walk. The name of the seventh continent comes from the fact that areas of accumulation of plastic polluting of the environment are vast as areas. The most significant area is found in the North Pacific cycles and is almost 6th times the size of France is 3. 4 million square kilometers.

3. In what state is plastic?

For its various uses, plastic has recently been designed to rot and last. Once in the environment, this property becomes a major disadvantage. Depending on its nature, the lifespan of a clear plastic can differ from a few years to several generations. At sea, under the result of abrasion by waves and solar rays, the plastic breaks. As a result, in subtropical gyres, the majority of debris are fragments that do not exceed a few millimeters, as can be seen in Figure 2.

Fig. 2: Plastics harvested in the North Atlantic Gyre during the 7th Continent Expedition in May 2014. The pieces typically measure 1 to 2 millimeters.

The seventh contains would actually be a soup of small pieces of vinyl, particles called microplastics. Surface area concentrations in subtropical gyres are 200, 000 to 600, 000 pieces every square kilometer. This vinyl pollution spreads over an incredible number of square kilometers so we can estimate that 5 000 billion particles drift in our oceans.

4. What are the results on environmental surroundings?

4.1  Imprisoned animals, swallowed plastic materials

The first effect of this pollution, the most direct, is the imprisonment of animals in move nets or large dirt. It is a cause of significant mortality of marine mammals, turtles and birds.

An additional direct result is ingestion. It is now accepted that this concerns the complete food cycle of the marine environment. There is also a continuum of vinyl debris sizes, from several centimeters to a micron (thousandth of a millimeter) to a nanometer (millionth of a millimeter).

Figure 3: Photo of a copepod Centropages typicus containing 7.3 μm polystyrene particles visualized by fluorescence microscopy (dorsal view).

Every single size of marine affected individual in the food string compares to a size of debris which may be consumed. After ingestion, the plastic material accumulates in the intestinal system of the pets, which then feed less and finally die. (Figure 3). thus shows micrometric bits of polystyrene which have accumulated in the intestinal system of a copepod (zooplankton) .

4.2 Installment payments on your Invasive species transported

Numerous organisms, some of which are invasive species, heap together on plastics and are transported along with them for thousands of kilometers over several years. This is a real danger for the balance of ecosystems.

Figure 5. SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) photo of a micro-plastic recovered during a 7th Continent expedition in May 2014 in the sub-tropical gyre of the North Atlantic. The image is artificially colored to accentuate the contrasts. The plastic appears in pink. A large part of the microplastic, which is 2 mm long, is covered with a biofilm based on bacteria, diatoms and other microorganisms

The microorganisms associated with plastic are as diverse as seafood, seaweed, shells.... They can be obvious to the naked eye or minute size. In addition it has been shown that the bacteria that increase on plastics in the gyres are different from the natural bacteria in the marine environment. A few could be potentially pathogenic. It of plastic-related microorganisms is known as the plastisphere (Figure 4).

4. 3. A proven chemical pollution

This kind of plastic debris represents a chemical pollution in several ways. They contain substances that can be chemically utilized in marine organisms during ingestion (they are said to be bio-available). A few of these molecules are potentially toxic and can accumulate within the body (they are bioaccumulative). Moreover, during the aging of the plastic material in the environment, chemical substance substances incorporated during their manufacture (mainly additives) can be released into the environment or when they are ingested by the organisms.

Plastics are also vectors of persistent organic and natural pollutants. Some plastics can concentrate pollutants present in the surroundings during their long stays in rivers, estuaries and rivers and oceans. Plastics can thus multiply the primary concentration of these substances by a factor of up to 100, 500. These molecules are also likely to bioaccumulate in living organisms, ie to concentrate along the food chain. In an article in the journal Character in 2013, several experts came together to offer classifying plastic debris as a dangerous substance [6]. No action for the moment.

The pollution of environments by plastics is problems of great complexity and scientists are not yet able to fully determine its consequences on the balance of ecosystems and the health of consumers. The social and monetary impacts are also certain and considerable. Government determination is needed to improve municipal waste management. The awareness and commitment of everybody are also vital.