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MATERIAL WITNESS

Cleaning the seas with blue diesel

Nature Materials volume 20, page 1588 (2021)Cite this article

The island is within the South Pacific Gyre, one of the vast rotating current systems in the world’s oceans. This flow carries buoyant plastic waste into a kind of vortex, where it stays trapped — unless washed ashore on islands like Henderson — until it very slowly degrades and breaks down into fragments, ultimately of a few millimetres in size (microplastics). The gyre has thus become one of five gigantic global garbage patches, blighted by the accumulated rubbish that humans drop into the seas. Recent studies on Henderson Island found plastic waste from Russia, the United States, Europe, South America, Japan and China. We are all responsible for it.

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References

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    Philip Ball

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Ball, P. Cleaning the seas with blue diesel. Nat. Mater. 20, 1588 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01164-3

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