And after me the flood of rubbish …
Too many people carelessly and recklessly still simply drop their garbage and are no longer interested in it and pretend that someone is cleaning up behind them.
But the garbage remains.
And if it is deposited on some patch of former nature, it is mainly washed up in the oceans.
According to a scientific study, extra garbage has also landed there since the corona pandemic – namely countless masks, gloves and other protective equipment including tests. This is reported by the “Daily Mail“And cites researchers from California who use a computer model to simulate the fate of plastic waste when it leaves beaches, drifts along the water and falls to pieces.
They estimate that from the beginning of the pandemic to August 2021, 8.4 million tons of pandemic-related plastic waste was generated in 193 countries.
► Almost three quarters – 71 percent – should be washed up on the beaches by the end of 2021, according to the model.
Most of the Covid-related plastic comes from medical waste generated by hospitals, the researchers say. That dwarfs the contribution made by packaging from online shopping giants like Amazon and eBay.
The study was led by a team of researchers from the School of Atmospheric Sciences at Nanjing University and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.
“Plastic waste harms marine life and has become a major global environmental problem,” it says in their paper. “The Covid-19 pandemic has increased demand for single-use plastic and put pressure on this already out of control problem. This is a long-term problem for the marine world and is mainly accumulated on beaches and coasts. “
Most of the plastic waste ends up in the oceans via rivers. Asian rivers account for 73 percent of all plastic emissions, with the three largest contributors being the Shatt al-Arab, Indus, and Yangtze rivers, which flow into the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and East China Sea.
European rivers cause eleven percent of the runoff, with minor contributions from other continents.