Up to 12.7 million tonnes of plastic enters the oceans every year

The wasted wrappers and beer can binders that choke our oceans and the struggling marine life that pays for our mistakes holds an uncomfortable spot in many of our minds, but are we really aware of the extent of it all?

It has been recently calculated that every single year up to 12.7 million tonnes of plastic waste enters our oceans. That’s the equivalent of a full truckload of plastic being dumped into the sea every 60 seconds, a rather frightening concept. Imagine your weekly rubbish and recycling collectors loading up their trucks and driving straight down to the shore to unload all the unwanted trash that we’ve already forgotten about; that’s not too far from the truth of the sheer scale of this problem.

It has gone so far now that the plastic that has long been worn and twisted and folded by the sea has found a place in the stomachs of the unwitting fish that populate this blue world in the form of micro-plastics, and is being served back to us on a plate with a side of chips. Even crustaceans tested in the very depths of the Mariana Trench, a world all its own, had been found to have ingested plastic, a startlingly sobering discovering.

But where has this astonishing amount of plastic come from?

Annual plastic production has skyrocketed since the early 1950s with 8.3 billion tonnes having been produced since then, going from a new-age fad to an absolute essential that has been greedily absorbed into our everyday, and it is only recently that we’ve come to realise our big mistake. Without a movement away from the cheap and easy material that we can’t seem to do without, plastic production is looking to double by 2025, and who knows what the ocean will look like by then?

Working with leading experts in marine conservation, DIVE PROJECT CORNWALL is determined to eliminate plastic pollution and protect the marine environment to save all life in our oceans for many future generations to enjoy.