![]() Video Plastics, other garbage found in ocean nearly 11 kilometres down "Without hesitation, it's the most fantastic place I've ever been in my life," said Ronconi. Some of them breed nowhere else in the world - including the great shearwater, which Ronconi was studying during his postdoctoral research at Dalhousie University. Ronconi and Ryan are seabird researchers who visit the island primarily to study the millions of seabirds that live and nest along the tall cliffs that wrap around it on all sides. They found that 73 per cent of accumulated bottles and 83 per cent of newly arrived bottles had been manufactured in China and had date stamps indicating they had been manufactured in the past two years - not enough time for them to travel from Asia without the help of ships. In 2018, the team collected 2,580 plastic bottles from about a kilometre of beach, plus another 174 that washed up over 10 weeks. The island is close to halfway between South Africa and South America. Peter Ryan, director of the Fitzpatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town, that tracked and examined trash washing up on Inaccessible Island from over more than three decades. Most were manufactured in the previous two years. Maelle Connan, a member of the research team, checks bottles washed ashore on Inaccessible Island for manufacturers' marks to determine when and where they were made. "One of the common assumptions is that most of the garbage in the oceans is flowing out of rivers on land."Ī commonly cited estimate is that 80 per cent of plastic in the oceans is washed into the seas from land-based sources, and much of the rest is fishing gear. "It's a surprise in that it makes us rethink the source of the garbage in our oceans," said Robert Ronconi, a Halifax-based researcher, currently with the Canadian Wildlife Service, who co-authored the new study. ![]() Nevertheless, "ships are responsible for most of the bottles floating in the central South Atlantic Ocean, in contravention of International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships regulations," concludes the new international study published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ![]() Ships have been strictly banned from throwing trash overboard for more than 30 years. Thousands of plastic drink bottles are washing up on a remote, uninhabited island in the South Atlantic, and researchers say they're evidence of illegal dumping from cargo ships.
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