How We Can Keep Plastics Out of Our Ocean | National Geographic

8 million metric tons of plastic trash

enters the sea from Land every year the

equivalent of five plastic bags filled

with trash for every foot of Coastline

in the

world across our ocean plastic trash

blows into

circulation dispersed almost everywhere

but concentr ating in huge swaths in the

midst of global currents breaking down

into smaller and smaller

pieces ingested by species across the

Marine

World and sinking to the Bottom of the

Sea anyone can make plastic anywhere in

the world and sell it anywhere else in

the world there's no design Paradigm

there's no barriers in order to solve

the plastic packaging problem we need to

effectively rethink the entire system

system from one which is linear I take

make dispose to one where it can be

recovered and fed back into the economy

as a valuable plastic material or one

where it is biob benign and it can enter

the environment the ultimate goal of the

new Plastics economy is to design an

economy where plastic packaging never

becomes waste and to do that we need

every single player in the chain to

change the way that they do

things but marine pollution comes in

many forms

industrial

Agricultural and urban waste also sweep

into the sea fueling explosions of algae

that Rob marine ecosystems of the oxygen

they need to

survive with sustained pollution these

areas become dead zones which already

exist in more than 400 locations across

the

globe but nutrient pollution can be

managed

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through change in major contributing

systems like

agriculture if you eat you're involved

in agriculture so it's a problem that

all of us have to work together to solve

soil health is critical for water

quality it's the first thing we have to

focus on here on the farm organic matter

is the key thing that we try to improve

the more organic matter you have in the

soil the better the soil can hold on to

nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen

organic matter keeps it from leeching

out of the soil it grabs onto it and

that's good for the farmer but it's also

good for water quality in the bay for

any farmer to change their system is

tricky and it takes a lot of work I

think all Farmers want to it's learning

different processes practices that allow

you to do it effectively that becomes a

key