KATHMANDU, JUNE 09
Whenever we eat seafood as a family, it makes me wonder how much plastic my young children might be ingesting-and how much of it the world's children will eat over their lifetimes now that plastics have firmly entered the food chain.
At the current rate, there will be more plastic than fish by weight in our oceans by 2050. Already about a quarter of the fish caught contain microplastics in their guts.
The scuba diving industry-a source of jobs in many tourism-dependent island nations-will need to adapt as encounters with underwater debris become more common than encounters with marine life.
Bad trash management is a problem that affects all of us in some way or another. Waste mismanagement and the continuing popularity of single-use plastics in many countries means that about one garbage truck is emptied into the ocean every single minute.
There are some commendable efforts underway to find solutions for recovering plastics in the ocean at scale, such as Ocean Cleanup and Ocean Works.
