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Using GPS and satellite tags inside plastic bottles, scientists have found that plastic pollution can travel thousands of miles in just a few months. Their project, published this week in the magazine PLOS ONE, tracked a bottle for over 1,768 miles in 94 days.
The results “show that this is a truly global problem, as a piece of plastic dropped into a river or ocean could soon end up on the other side of the world,” said Emily Duncan, a marine scientist at the University of Exeter. and lead author of the new study, she said in a statement.
Duncan and his colleagues released 25 500-milliliter bottles equipped with GPS and satellite tags in the Ganges River – the second largest river contributing to ocean plastic pollution, after the Yangtze River – and in the Bay of Bengal. The project was carried out in collaboration with the National Geographic Society’s Sea to Source initiative.
The bottles sent down the Ganges moved more slowly and in stages, getting caught from time to time along the path downstream. The bottles released into the ocean, however, traveled longer distances, first carried on coastal currents before being dispersed more widely.
Scientists have made their pollution tracking technology open source, which means it “could be used to teach plastic pollution in schools, with kids being able to see where their bottle goes,” Duncan said. . “The data from these tags could fuel global models to give us a clearer picture of how plastic moves across the ocean and where it ends up.”
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