Another reason te eat organic food and cut/recycle plastic packaging!

PARIS — Tonnes of throw-away plastic and massive runoff from chemical fertilizer are choking the world’s oceans, the UN’s environmental watchdog warned on Thursday.

Taken together, the two sources of pollution threaten biodiversity, harm water quality, poison fish stocks and undermine coastal tourism, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said in its annual Year Book report... Only better waste management and a coordinated shift towards cleaner engines of economic growth can insure the future health of the planet’s aquatic commons...

“The phosphorus fertilizer and marine plastic stories bring into sharp focus the urgent need ... to catalyze a global transition to a resource-efficient Green Economy,” UNEP executive director Achim Steiner said.

Recent research suggests that both problems are more widespread — and deleterious — than one thought. In the United States alone, for example, the costs associated with phosphorus pollution are estimated at more than two billion dollars a year, with the global tally in the tens of billions. Some three dozen countries mine the phosphate rock found in growth-enhancing fertilizers. While a finite resource, supplies are not about to run out — at current production rates, supplies will last an estimated 300 to 400 years.

Use of chemical-based fertilizers increased worldwide by 600 percent during the second half of the 20^th century, but precisely how much flows into the environment is not known...

....a new concern is microplastics, tiny particles smaller that five millimetres in length discharged as pellets by industry or broken down by waves and sunlight...

Just how much plastic has been discarded into the sea in unknown, but consumption of plastic products continues to rise worldwide.

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