We begin, as always, with alarming misinformation, this time about how much plastic there is in the oceans, and how much more is heading there. It turns out that the amount is manageable by extending known best practices to more developing countries, and that we are developing technologies that can even clean up our beaches and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with enough investment.
By 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans, study says.
WaPo [paywalled] 2016
No, it doesn’t.
World Economic Forum, The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking The Future of Plastics
We need to know two things: how much fish is in the ocean, and how much plastic there will be in 2050.
Let’s start with the fish.
Satellite imagery lets us estimate how much plankton the oceans hold, and therefore how much life the plankton supports.
In 2008, from studies using this satellite imagery, the researcher Simon Jennings estimated there were 899 million tonnes of fish in the ocean. This is the number the Ellen MacArthur Foundation uses.
Except there’s a problem. Simon Jennings no longer backs this number. Several years later he revisited the study and concluded that phytoplankton support much more ocean life than previously thought. His latest estimates are that there are between 2 and 10 billion tonnes of marine life in the oceans.
What about the plastic? Again, the numbers don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Besides, the ratio of fish to plastic doesn’t matter. We need more fish and other ocean life, and less ocean plastic, no matter what current levels are.
Any ocean plastic is bad; how it compares to fish is irrelevant.
Captain Charles Moore…was the first person to report…the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.
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Good News: New TED Talk on Ocean Cleanup: We can clean up Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 5 years!
Plastic brought to land & is recycled into new products, like sunglasses, accessories for electric vehicles, and even Coldplay’s latest vinyl record
Support from Netherlands company
bit.ly/4j0FPOI
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— Frank D. Russo (@fdrtoday.bsky.social) April 11, 2025 at 11:49 AM
The patch stretches about 1.6 million km2. That’s the dark side of plastic. But plastic also has a good side.
- Saving food from rotting
- Saving lives in medical equipment and supplies
- Making vehicles lighter
Of the 8 billion tonnes that the world has produced since 2015, a little less than a third is still in use. For the rest of it, assuming that it doesn’t end up as litter, there are three possible fates:
- It can go straight to landfill
- It can be recycled
- or it can be incinerated
Most plastic goes to landfills.
The good news is that, while we can’t realistically eliminate plastic waste completely, we can eliminate plastic pollution.
Around 1 million tonnes end up in the ocean every year.
The world produces around 460 million tonnes of plastic each year, and 350 million tonnes of it becomes waste.
We are doing a fantastic job of not turning all of that waste into pollution, Now we only need to get a little bit fantasticker.
Around 80% of the plastic in the Patch comes from fishing. The GPGP sits in a part of the Pacific with lots of industrial fishing. We don’t know how much of the plastics across all our oceans come from land…Our best estimate is that 80% comes from land.
We need to know how much rope and netting each fishing vessel goes to sea with, and how much they come back with, and set fines for abandoned gear high enough so that the owners will round it up for dumping on shore.
Good waste-management practices in rich countries mean that the quantity of waste that is mismanaged, and at risk of getting into the oceans, is small. This isn’t the case everywhere.
We know where the problems are. We know the cost of not fixing them. Next we need the political will to require fixes.
[Dutch entrepreneur] Boyan Slat is a doer, not a talker. [He] and his team made high-resolution maps of where plastics were entering the world’s rivers, and how they got from there to the oceans.
One-third of the 100,000 river outlets they modeled were dumping plastic into the sea…Eighty per cent of the ocean plastics came from the 1,656 rivers that emitted the most.
How do we stop plastic pollution in our oceans?
- Stop export of plastics to less-affluent countries
- Invest in more waste management, particularly sealed landfills in poorer countries
- Recycle where it makes sense, but don’t expect it to solve the problem
- Expect more from industry, including recycling technology
- Strict policies on plastics in the fishing industry
- Invest in cleanup technology like the Interceptor
- Clean up our beaches and shorelines
- Clean up the oceans, as The Ocean Cleanup project has set out to do, removing 11.5 million kg of ocean trash in 2024.
Things to Stress Less About
- Landfills are not as bad as they seem. If they are properly sealed, they don’t leak into rivers and oceans.
- Plastic straws really don’t matter. Few reach the oceans.
- The occasional plastic carrier bag is fine.
I shop at Meijer, which accepts all of its own bags back for recycling. When I go to pick up an order, I hand over bags from previous trips.
