Tag: oceans

New Greenpeace report reveals the deadly impact of ghost gear

Stuart Mitchell

An estimated 640,000 tonnes of abandoned or lost fishing equipment, or ‘ghost gear’, enter the ocean every year, equivalent in weight to more than 50 thousand double-decker buses. In total, they make up around 10% of the plastic waste in our oceans, entangling and killing marine life, warns a new Greenpeace Germany report, Ghost gear: the abandoned fishing nets haunting our oceans, launched today.  The report comes as Greenpeace ship, Arctic Sunrise is surveying Mount Vema,  a biodiverse seamount in the Atlantic, 1,000 kilometers off the coast of South Africa,…

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National Geographic Launches Planet or Plastic?, a Multiyear Initiative to Reduce Single-Use Plastics and Their Impact on the World’s Oceans

Stuart Mitchell

As the amount of single-use plastic in the world’s oceans continues to grow, National Geographic is announcing a new, global commitment to tackle this pressing problem. National Geographic has launched Planet or Plastic?, a multiyear initiative aimed at raising awareness of this challenge and reducing the amount of single-use plastic that enters in the world’s oceans. Doing so will not only benefit the thousands to potentially millions of marine animals that become entangled in, suffocated by, or ingest plastic each year, but will also contribute to the overall health of…

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