Plastic waste in the Pacific's trash island could mostly come from a handful of nations

ACCORDING to recent research, 90% of the thousands of tonnes of plastic waste that form what's known as the North Pacific Garbage Patch, could come largely from fishing equipment originating from five industrialized nations.

Whether known as "the seventh continent," "trash island" or the "garbage continent," there are all kinds of unglamorous names for this huge pile of floating trash that covers an area of 3.5 million sq kmi n the middle of the North Pacific Ocean.

Among the waste that makes up this island of garbage, a large part appears to come from floating materials resulting from fishing-related activities, as revealed by a recent study published in Scientific Reports.

Researchers from the Ocean Cleanup project and Wageningen University in the Netherlands collected 6,093 pieces of trash measuring less than 5 cm from the garbage patch and analyzed them one by one.

The most common plastic objects were unrecognizable plastic fragments.

However, fishing and aquaculture equipment was the second-largest category of trash.

The researchers were able to identify a total of 232 plastic objects and their country of origin based on elements such as language, text, company names or brand logos. A significant portion of this waste was found to come from Japan (34%), China (32%), South Korea (10%), the United States (7%) and Taiwan (6%).

The study highlights the important role that the fishing industry plays in addressing the global issue of plastic pollution in the ocean: "While recent assessments for plastic inputs into the ocean point to coastal developing economies and rivers as major contributors into oceanic plastic pollution, here we show that most floating plastics in the North Pacific subtropical gyre can be traced back to five industrialized fishing nations," the researchers conclude.