by Wayne Havrelly, KGW Staff

kgw.com

Posted on May 15, 2014 at 6:39 PM

CANNON BEACH, Ore. -- It just might be the biggest environmental crisis that most people have never heard about: tiny, contaminated pieces of plastic are polluting the worlds beaches.

Small plastics along the tide line of an Oregon beach may look like bits of shell, but they are, in fact, a pervasive form of pollution that scientists have discovered on nearly every ocean beach on Earth. Tracy Sund picks up small bits of plastic debris along the shore for the City of Cannon Beach, but he cant get to it all.

These pieces have been at sea a long time, he said holding a small plastic shard. The pieces keep fracturing off, getting smaller and smaller. They [can also] get ingested by wildlife.

The plastics dont biodegrade. The smallest shards, known as microplastics, can mesh unseen into beach sand and stay unnoticed for years.

A recent one-square-meter sample of sand taken from Fort Stevens State Park in Warrenton yielded 10 pounds of plastics.

Most microplastics on Oregon beaches are believed to come from what called is called the North Pacific Gyre, a giant whirling garbage dump in the Pacific, now bigger than that state of Texas. Its just one of five giant garbage fields swirling in the planets oceans.

Researcher Marc Ward first learned about microplastics a decade ago, while working to save sea turtles. Turtles often ingest the plastic and die.

More here:

Microplastics polluting Ore. beaches, killing wildlife