Twenty-four trillion pieces of microplastics in the ocean and counting
Based on a total of 8,218 pelagic microplastic samples from the world’s oceans collected between 2000 and 2019, a team of scientists has developed a publicly available dataset for assessing the abundance of microplastics and their long-term trend in the world’s upper oceans. The team found 24.4 trillion pieces (82,000–578,000 tons) of microplastics in the world’s oceans, but the actual amount is likely to be much greater. …read more
