The results of the study question the widely held assumption that most plastic debris at sea comes from land-based sources, the authors say.
The authors visited the island in 1984, 2009 and 2018, finding that plastic drink bottles were the type of debris which had experienced the fastest growth rate on its shores, increasing by 15 percent every year, compared with seven percent for other types of debris.
The team found that 90 percent of the bottles identified during the monitoring period had been manufactured in the last two years, according to their date stamps. This indicates that the debris likely did not drift over from Asia—which would usually take between three and five years. "For example, litter due to unavailable waste collection gets washed down drains on streets entering rivers that carry these plastic debris to sea," Richard Alan Gross, from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, told"Other entry routes include illegal dumping directly into or nearby waterways, blowing off landfill sites, accidental and inevitable discharges of plastics during activities such as construction, manufacturing, farming, washing our clothes and via waste-water treatment...
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