With marine litter, especially micro-plastic becoming major trans-boundary pollution threat, India is firming up a plan to make its 7,500 km of coastline plastic pollution free. As the first step, sensors-equipped floating buoys will be deployed in the ocean to measure marine plastic footprints.
The move comes a year after the UN Environment Programme initiated the global “Clean Seas Campaign” asking the member nations to change their “throwaway habits” before an irreversible damage is done to the seas.
According to an estimate, up to about one million seabirds and 1,00,000 marine mammals die each year from ingesting plastic or by getting tangled in nylon fishing line, nets, plastic can holders, and plastic rope.
In India too, the situation is not encouraging. Various studies have noted that the Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal, and the Indian Ocean are ingested with pollutants ranging from plastic to oil spills and waste. However, plastic which is the main culprit claims thousands of ocean lives every year. A report too has attributed plastic to be cause of the 80 per cent of the ocean’s pollution.
A senior official from the Union Ministry of Earth Sciences said that as part of this commitment, the Government will establish a national and regional marine litter action campaign as well as a programme to measure the total marine plastic footprint in India’s coastal waters.
To begin with, sensor-equipped floating buoys will be installed in the ocean to keep a tab on pollutant levels. These will be regularly monitored by the officials from the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) which is executing the project.
These sensor-equipped buoys will be installed in six coastal areas: Digha (West Bengal), Goa, Mumbai, Kochi, Vishakapatnam and Chennai. These buoys will collect data in real time, which the authorities will be able to monitor and take requisite action.
A scientist from the INCOIS said that the sensors at the bottom of the buoys will be attached to the seabed to help prevent them from being washed away.
A study has found Mumbai’s surrounding waters as some of the most polluted in the world. It found an average of 68.83 items a square metre at four beaches - Juhu, Versova, Dadar, and Aksa - and most of them (41.85 per cent) were microplastics.
Concerned at the rising pollution levels in the oceans, last year UN Environment Programme (UNEP) had launched a mega global campaign to eliminate major sources of marine litter viz microplastics in cosmetics and the excessive, wasteful usage of single-use plastic by 2022.
launched at the Economist World Ocean Summit in Bali, the #CleanSeas campaign is urging Governments to pass plastic reduction policies; targeting industry to minimise plastic packaging and redesign products; and calling on consumers to change their throwaway habits - before irreversible damage is done to our seas.
Our oceans have been used as a dumping ground, choking marine life and transforming some marine areas into a plastic soup, Erik Solheim, Head of the UNEP, too noted at an event held on World Environment Day on June 5. The theme of the occasion was “Beat Plastic Pollution.”
last year, at a meeting of the United Nations in Nairobi it was decided that plastic waste needed to be curbed, and an agreement was signed by over 200 countries, including India.
Researchers who have called for immediate action have found plastic in the stomachs of 44 per cent of all seabird species, 22 per cent of cetacean species, and in all sea turtle species. Among seabirds, the Procellariiformes (albatross, petrels, shearwaters) are most vulnerable due to their small gizzard and inability to regurgitate the plastics. Plankton eaters - birds, fish, and mammals - often confuse plastic pellets with their food; copepods, euphausiids and cephalopods.
According to the 2015 Global Ocean Commission, it’s estimated to reach 500 million tonnes a year by 2020, Rex Weyler, co-founder of the Greenpeace International, said in his blog.