Is the Mediterranean turning into plastic soup? • FRANCE 24 English

A wild hidden beach in Corsica seems like paradise on Earth. But on one of these boats, young scientists have spotted something fishy and are taking action. We’re letting the mantonet drift. The net’s mouth ski and collects floating plastic and micro debris from the top of the water column. It’s all collected at the bottom of the net. [Music] The Mediterranean is suffocating. Too warm, too polluted, too plasticky. Every day, the 22 countries on its coastline dump an estimated 730 tons of plastic waste into the sea. What you see on the surface is just a quarter of it. The rest sinks. Plastic doesn’t biodegrade. It breaks down into tiny pieces. 80% of it comes from land, the rest from fishing and shipping. Grew up here. The scale of the pollution changed the course of his life. I’m from the village just behind us. I spent every summer in the sea, and I was sick of seeing plastic every time I swam. One summer, we decided to do something about it. We contacted scientists and offered to collect data. And that’s when it hit me. The amount of pollution was simply overwhelming. I couldn’t just turn a blind eye. In 2016, he founded the environmental NGO Mar Vivo. Every summer, volunteers and marine scientists head out on expeditions around the island of Corsica in southern France. Their aim, address the issue at its root. The beach isn’t crowded, so the trash here doesn’t come from locals. It’s brought in by currents which shift with the seasons. We need to study the type of product, where they’re coming from, which neighboring countries or industries are operating near the sea. Their mapping surveys have helped identify over 15,000 pieces of waste on the Corsican coast, mostly thin plastic packaging. A lot of it is food wrappers, sugary snacks, processed food. The Mediterranean is a hot spot for microplastic pollution. These nano particles make their way into the food chain, starting with marine life and ending up in humans. Studies show that they’re linked to heart diseases. They can be found in the bloodstream, the brain, even testicles. It’s extremely worrying. [Applause] The floating lab also runs underwater experiments to track the health of the ecosystem. They record the sound of wild animals, collect DNA samples, and identify species. With our computer, we’re going to cover 100 meters at 3 m deep. We snap a photo and estimate the species size together with France’s leading marine and scientific research institutions. These volunteers have monitored the same sites for a decade, urging companies and governments to act. [Music] [Music] You feel so powerless, but suddenly you see what’s worth saving. It’s an emotional roller coaster. At first, the team simply cleaned the seashore, but soon realized they were only hiding the problem, not solving it. Our job actually consists in understanding how this waste ended up here. We’re collecting and recording it to determine which kinds of waste are the most problematic. The NGO now works with policy makers to cut back on singleuse plastics pushing for more public fountains to reduce bottle waste in a bid to protect the Mediterranean. That report from our downto-earth team including Araj Pri who joins me on the set. Hi. We’re going to keep talking about plastics. Now microplastics obviously are everywhere in the ocean but also in our drinks and our food and our cosmetic products. But plastic production doesn’t seem to be ending or even decreasing anytime soon. No, not at all. As you know, negotiations for a treaty to end plastic pollution fell apart last month. Every year, more than 400 million tons of plastic are produced around the world. And that figure is projected to increase two or even threefold by 2050. Now, although some countries are limiting single-use plastic products, many others are doing the exact opposite. the US, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and of course, China, the world’s biggest plastic manufacturer with around a third of global production. Now, the problem is only 9% of plastics are recycled. Most of it ends up burnt or in landfills, lakes, rivers, and there are now more microplastics in the seas than stars in our galaxy. And this is affecting the lives of more than 800 marine species. So, so what kind of impact is this having on our own health? Well, every breath that we take contains microplastics. We inhale as much as 68,000 microplastic particles every day according to the latest study. Humans are ingesting more microplastics than ever before. And they are so tiny that they can actually dig into your lungs, transfer into your tissues, enter your bloodstreams, and then reach your organs. Um, they’ve been found even in breast milk and in bones. Just this year, scientists have discovered that patients diagnosed with dementia had up to 10 times as much plastic in their brains compared to people without the condition. Experts from the Lancet Medical Journal say that plastic is responsible for at least $1.5 trillion a year in health related damages. It re it really is scary and an enormous problem. What can consumers do, we as consumers to try and help the problem? Well, when you realize that one single liter of bottled water contains as many as 240,000 different plastic particles, it does make you think twice about buying it. Same with synthetic clothes. One load of laundry can release 700,000 microplastic fibers on average. Scientists also say that the level of pollution is actually higher when you’re indoors or in small closed spaces like a car for example. And by the way, opening your window does not improve the situation because you’re then breathing car tire particles. Some researchers though are working on innovative solutions, uh, fungi, bacteria that feed on plastic, magnets that can filter water for example, and there’s a new gel that actually clumps microlastics together so that they can easily be removed from water and later on recycled. Aurora, thanks for that update and for staying on top of that story for us. That’s Oral Gupri, our environment editor here at France

The Mediterranean is thought to be the most polluted sea on Earth. The equivalent of 34,000 plastic bottles are dumped into it every minute. This unprecedented level of pollution is devastating for both humans and marine life, half of which are found nowhere else on the planet. FRANCE 24’s Down to Earth team met with volunteers and scientists fighting plastic waste on the island of Corsica, one of the worst affected locations in the world.
#corsica #Mediterranean #plasticpollution

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