The Environment
This was passed along to us and we thought you’d find it quite interesting…
The amount of unmanaged plastic waste entering the ocean has reached crisis levels. On current trends, the global quantity of plastic in the ocean could nearly double to 250 million metric tons by 20251 —or one ton of plastic for every three tons of fish. Yet a collective response by ocean states, especially by the handful of Asian countries with particularly high volumes of unmanaged plastic waste, could almost halve this total, mitigating the mounting environmental and economic damage.
This is the critical finding of a joint report by the Ocean Conservancy and the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment, Stemming the tide: Land-based strategies for a plastic-free ocean. Our comprehensive investigation found that more than 80 percent of ocean plastic comes from land-based sources rather than ocean-based sources such as fisheries and fishing vessels. Of that 80 percent, three-quarters comes from uncollected waste, and the remainder from leaks from within the waste-management system itself.
