More than 80 percent of non-organic waste on beaches in Buenos Aires are plastics

More than 80 percent of the non-organic waste found on beaches in Buenos Aires are plastics, the third Coastal Waste Census conducted by Fundación Vida Silvestre Argentina reported.
The census, carried out together with NGOs from the main coastal cities of the province of Buenos Aires on 813,554 square meters of beach in 16 localities, showed that 82 percent of the 46,673 non-organic waste found corresponds to plastics.
Among that 82 percent, the main residues detected were plastic bags, cigarette butts, plastic remains, nylon remains, caps and plastic bottles, among others.
According to Vida Silvestre in a statement, tons of garbage arrive daily to the seas through the drainage system (storm mouths, rainforests), rivers, wind and what people throw into coastal environments. In turn, the sea collects waste during high tide and transports it to very remote sites.
Some of the “main actions that contribute to the reduction of the entry of garbage into the sea are the regulation of the delivery of bags in shops, the promotion of the separation of waste at source and its subsequent recycling by the municipalities, and the correct treatment of waste to prevent it from ending in the , through an improvement in rainwater drains,” said Verónica García, coordinator of the Marine Wildlife Garbage Project.
According to different studies published in the journal Science in 2015, the deliberate production and consumption that has been taking place decades ago caused that from 1950 to 2015 we have generated 6.3 billion tons of plastic waste.
Of that volume, almost 5 billion tons of plastics are still in the environment, whether in final disposition sites, green spaces, in the neighborhoods themselves, the beach or the sea.
90.5 percent of the plastics manufactured were never recycled and only 9 percent of all the plastic waste we generated was recycled.
With this rate of production, recycling and discard, scientists estimate that by 2050 some 12 billion tons of plastics will end up in the dumpsters or in the environment.

Source: Télam