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The weight of the world's oceans is about 1,450,000,000,000,000,000 tons, so at 8 million tons per year it would take about 18 million years for that plastic to
by xamuel 6y ago
The weight of the world's oceans is about 1,450,000,000,000,000,000 tons, so at 8 million tons per year it would take about 18 million years for that plastic to add up to 1/10000th of the ocean's mass, assuming all that plastic is completely non-biodegradable over an 18 million year period.
- pixl97 6y agoThe problem with that take is assuming even distribution. Nothing in the ocean is. Almost all ocean life is in the top 50 meters. And the vast majority of that is close to a shore, the same shores where the majority of plastics are introduced to the ocean.
- xamuel 6y agoTrue, the actual magnitude of the problem is probably somewhere in between the two extremes. The point of my comment was to battle an increasingly often-used fallacy where people spout numbers that look large out-of-context and then scream about the sky falling based on those large numbers. You could say something like, "Ten MILLION planets get sucked into blackholes every YEAR! This is terrifying!" (I just made those numbers up for illustrative purposes), without looking at what those numbers are relative to this just creates unnecessary panic and motivates people to mis-allocate precious resources that could be spent on more urgent problems.