generalspeaking

"I knew there would be a lot of fishing gear, but 46 percent was unexpectedly high."
"Initially, we thought fishing gear would be more in the 20 percent range. That is the accepted number [for marine debris] globally—20 percent from fishing sources and 80 percent from land."
Laurent Lebreton, oceanographer, Ocean Cleanup  

vaidehi shah from Singapore - Litter on Singapore's ECP

A 2017 study out of Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany drew the conclusion that up to 95 percent of global ocean plastic emanated from ten rivers -- eight of which are in Asia and two in Africa. Ocean Conservancy issued its own report the same year with their conclusion that 60 percent of the world's ocean plastic pollution saw five countries as being responsible for that trash: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

According to the Helmholtz report, some of the lowest levels of floating plastic were found in the drainage basin of the Great Lakes, where over nine million Canadians live, an area that takes in as well on the U.S. side, Cleveland and Chicago. These are regions where waste undergoes management with recycling and collection programs reflecting the conscientious choices of consumers in the West whose trash plastic waste represents a minuscule proportion of worldwide plastic waste.

The rapid economic development in Asia through the previous thirty years is attributed to the virtual tidal wave of garbage consumers have become accustomed to discarding and which their municipal administrations have been incapable of instituting measures to minimize waste by recycling methodology or reducing plastic packaging. In North America overall, there are no beach landscapes overwhelmed with plastic garbage, nor do open-air dumps close to coastal areas proliferate as they do in Asia.

Countries were ranked in a 2015 study published in the journal Science, by their rate of "mismanaged" waste,  highlighting ocean pollution countries like Bangladesh where 89 percent of garbage has been mismanaged, in comparison to the U.S. rate of two percent. A panel of ecological experts was canvassed in a 2015 study led by Ocean Conservancy to figure out which types of plastic trash represented the most danger to marine life. Plastic bags, buoys, cigarette butts, balloons, fishing equipment, utensils and food packaging made the list, followed by plastic straws.

It is the plastic detritus that has the very real potential of entangling creatures of the sea that present the most damaging danger in the ocean. According to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, an estimated 46 percent of plastic making up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is comprised of abandoned fishing gear, called "ghost gear", which has been lost or deliberately abandoned. "In comparison to other consumer items discarded in the ocean, it seems that fishing gear poses the greatest ecological threat", the 2015 Ocean Conservancy report noted.

Now three times the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch continues to exponentially expand. The great misfortune is that ocean plastic has a food odour attractive to seabirds, explaining why it is that up to 90 percent of all seabird species consume such trash. A whale washed up on the coast of Australia, died from consuming close to 30 kilograms of plastic. Seafood is beginning to host trace amounts of plastic.

A report by the World Economic Forum warns that should current trends continue, there will eventually be a greater presence of discarded waste plastic than the current number of fish in the sea by sheer weight alone.

NOAA marine debris removal Hawaiian Islands, 2014