Plastics wastes are not only a growing problem for the Pacific Ocean – see Plasteurope.com of 25.08.2009. According to Charles Moore, who is credited with discovering the Pacific garbage patch in 1997, there is a comparable amount of post-consumer plastics swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. Much of it originates in North America, which has a large consumer population and compared to the Pacific region many rivers and streams flowing into the ocean. As the Atlantic is stormier, the debris may be more scattered, and this is compounding the problem.

Marine experts say that much of the plastics wastes found in the oceans already has been broken up into tiny, nearly invisible, pieces that can be impossible for fish to distinguish from plankton. What’s more, the plastic bits sponge up chemicals potentially harmful to the marine food chain. The US National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that as many as 100,000 marine mammals could die trash-related deaths each year.

While North American researchers have been mapping the waste for at least two decades, efforts are now being intensified. At the 2010 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, Oregon in February, a US team led by Anna and Markus Eriksen of Santa Monica, California, reported finding long trails of seaweed mixed with bottles and crates and other plastics wastes in the North Atlantic Subtropical Convergence Zone on a trip from Bermuda to the Azores. The couple plans similar studies in the South Atlantic in November 2010 and the South Pacific in spring 2011.

Over the past two decades, students at the Woods Hole Sea Education Association in Massachusetts have collected more than 6,000 water samples between Canada and the Caribbean, finding the highest concentration of plastics wastes between 22 and 38 degrees latitude, an area roughly stretching between Washington, DC and Cuba. NOAA is co-sponsoring a new voyage by the Woods Hole group this summer, to measure plastic pollution southeast of Bermuda.

The European Parliament’s Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety is currently pushing to have the Council add plastics wastes to the protocol of existing EU marine agreements with countries and regions. While the Parliament is backing the plan generally, it could run afoul of national states’ agendas. Committee member Anna Rosbach, an MEP from Denmark, notes that it took 20 years for final passage of the content of the Lisbon Agreement – through an additional protocol. The agreement itself was never passed because of a territorial dispute between Spain and Morocco.