Plastic production has increased dramatically worldwide over the last 60 years and it is nowadays recognized as a serious threat to the marine environment. Plastic pollution is ubiquitous, but quantitative estimates on the global abundance and weight of floating plastics are still limited, particularly for the Southern Hemisphere and the more remote regions. Some large-scale convergence zones o...

An increasing amount of anthropogenic marine debris is pervading the earth's environmental systems, resulting in an enormous threat to living organisms. Additionally, the large amount of marine debris around the world has been investigated mostly through tedious manual methods. Therefore, we propose the use of a new technique, light detection and ranging (LIDAR), for the semi-automatic recognit...

Plastics in the marine environment have become a major concern because of their persistence at sea, and adverse consequences to marine life and potentially human health. Implementing mitigation strategies requires an understanding and quantification of marine plastic sources, taking spatial and temporal variability into account. Here we present a global model of plastic inputs from rivers into ...

Sample preparation for nanoscale plastic debris extraction from soil using europium doped polystyrene particles (Eu-Ps NP).

The microstructure characterization of tempered nanocrystalline bainitic steel is investigated in the present study. It is found that two types of plastic relaxation, dislocation debris and nanotwin, occurs in the displacive transformation due to relatively low transformation temperature and high carbon content. Because most carbon atoms trap in the dislocation, high dislocation density can be ...

Growing scientific evidence indicates that synthetic plastic microbeads (hereafter, microbeads) are a threat to the environment and should be banned from all personal care products. Microbeads pollute the environment, adding to the increasing abundance of microplastic debris. Too small to be efficiently filtered by wastewater treatment processes, microbeads are found in aquatic habitats and fis...

Researcher and media alarms have caused plastic debris to be perceived as a major threat to humans and animals. However, although the waste of plastic in the environment is clearly undesirable for aesthetic and economic reasons, the actual environmental risks of different plastics and their associated chemicals remain largely unknown. Here we show how a systematic assessment of adverse outcome ...

Microplastic debris floating at the ocean surface can harmmarine life. Understanding the severity of this harm requires knowledge of plastic abundance and distributions. Dozens of expeditions measuringmicroplastics have been carried out since the 1970s, but they have primarily focused on the NorthAtlantic andNorth Pacific accumulation zones, withmuch sparser coverage elsewhere.Here, we use the ...

UNLABELLED More so than at any previous time, there is a heightened awareness of the amount of plastic in the environment, it's spread to even remote localities and the multiple influences of this on organisms. In the austral summer of 2007/08 Greenpeace and British Antarctic Survey ships (MV Esperanza and RRS James Clark Ross respectively) conducted the first co-ordinated joint marine debris s...