How to combat the threat of Marine Litter | DTE Call For Action

Whatever waste that we are unable to manage, which is escaping our formal systems for managing solid waste, is eventually finding its way through the stormwater drainage or to the sewer canals, to small rivers then big rivers and eventually ending up in the ocean bed.
So basically the ocean ecosystem is currently being treated as the global dumpyard.
We need to dive deep into this agenda to find out what is the extent of marine litter, what are the sources and what we need to do to protect our marine ecosystem.

So let me now come to the Indian scenario. So as you can see in this map, half of the Indian border is exposed to the ocean. So there are about nine states along this coastline, about 7500 kilometers of coastline. And about 250 million population is basically settled along the coastline. And let me also point out a very important point here. If you look at India's position in the global map. So you can see we have the Strait of Hormuz here and we have the Strait of Malacca here, which basically connects one ocean to another ocean. And then here, this is basically a common path of ship movements. And India is very strategically located in the global map, specifically in the in the ocean map, which absorbs about 200,000 ship movements every year.

Every year, about 5.6 million tons of garbage is leaked to the South Asian Seas. So this is also a big contributor to the overall marine litter problem. But let me come back to the Indian map.
So India has about 4 million fishermen. And of all the fishing gear that is used, the most dangerous
of which is often found in the deep seas, is basically the ghostnet, the net that is basically used
for catching fishes millions of fishes. Now, India happens to be the second largest fish producing nation across the world.

And then this abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear. ALDFG is basically a serious threat
worldwide. Now, Indian fishing community has estimated 174,000 fishing gears. And out of this, in the year 2021, they recovered about 58,000 kg of ghost nets.

The most common victim of this waste is basically the sea turtles. Let me share a data to explain how grave a problem it is. So for every thousand eggs that is given by a female turtle, only ten are being able to convert into adult turtles. So a lot of other marine animals basically survive by just eating the sea turtle. So that's basically why it's a very important indicator of the ocean health
on the extent of litter. The reason why the survival rate of this sea turtles are very poor because they are the largest victims of this abundant, lost or discarded fishing gears in our oceans for every kilometer of coastline, the extent of marine litter was one metric ton of waste to the ocean bed.
And these numbers basically give us all the reason to pay immediate attention to this emerging global threat. Otherwise, we may have some catastrophic consequences going forward.

We have done characterization of what has been found. So it is almost 55% to 57% of plastic. 30% to 40% of religious waste. And then about roughly 2% of plastic, about 2% of textile waste about 2% to 3% of papers and about 2% of glass. Now, there could be many sources. First is the the tourist activity and the beach litter. And then we have the litter by the fishing community.

Now, this is a very serious agenda because the fishing communities use fishing gears, especially the nets or the ghost nets, and it is causing death of millions of marine animals. And then the municipal waste, it is definitely the largest of all the sources.

Now, here I’d like to make a quick point that about 80% of marine litter is basically an offshoot of land based mismanagement of solid waste.

Down to Earth is Science and Environment fortnightly published by the Society for Environmental Communication, New Delhi. We publish news and analysis on issues that deal with sustainable development, which we scan through the eyes of science and environment.

0:00 The journey of marine litter
0:40 Expert Introduction
0:57 The Indian Scenario
2:26 ALDG fishing gears and nets
3:22 Plight of Sea Turtles
4:07 Extent of Marine Litter
4:28 Types of Marine Litter
4:54 Source of the Waste
6:29 What needs to be done