Research News

Expiration Dates and Plastic Degradation in Marine Environments

There is a lot of plastic in the ocean. So much that scientists use words like dominance, ubiquitous, and persistence to describe its presence. In fact, according to recent measurements, up to 12.7 million metric tons of plastic waste entered the oceans in 2010 alone.

 

Now, a team of researchers from the University of Patras in Greece has published research examining the degradation of polyethylene terephthalate bottles (PETs) collected from the submarine environment. In particular, the researches investigated, “the degradation potential of plastic bottles of different age that were found at the bottom of the Saronikos Gulf,” which is located in the Aegean Sea/East Mediterranean. What they found was disturbing.

These plastics begin to break down as soon as they enter the ocean, but according to the paper’s abstract, “PETs seem to remain robust for approximately fifteen years,” and they last even longer when deposited into the deep sea, away from sunlight and other elements. What’s more, when they do breakdown, they result in the formation of microplastics, which are now being found in marine creatures around the globe. The problem is especially bad in the Mediterranean Sea.

By cataloguing the expiration dates printed on bottles and comparing that to surface characteristics of the plastic, researchers were able to estimate how long it takes for degradation to occur. The researchers acknowledge that an expiration date does not give an exact estimate for when the plastic was deposited in the sea, or how long they may have spent out of the water (e.g., on a beach), but they feel confident in saying that samples held up for approximately fifteen years before significant degradation occurred. Samples taken from the Ionian Sea confirmed these results.

Determining how long it takes for plastic bottles to degrade in the marine environment is important because, according the authors, it helps us “understand whether plastics have just entered the marine environment or whether they accumulate into the marine environment for decades.”

Read the paper, published 22 March 2016 in the journal Scientific Reports.

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