A DISTURBING story has been circulating for the last few days, generally under the title as reported by Thomson Reuters “World’s oceans clogged by millions of tons of plastic trash.” The story went on to report that “China was responsible for the most ocean plastic pollution followed by Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Egypt, Malaysia, Nigeria and Bangladesh.”
Upon seeing the Philippines mentioned, local press and media jumped up with headlines such as “PH among top nations dumping plastic into seas” and “PH among worst offenders in ocean pollution.”
Protecting the environment is a critical issue that we must all be serious about and express our concerns with action and not just words.
But the problem is that over the last 50 years, legitimate environmental problems have been clouded with both faulty research and biased reporting by the press and media. While the old adages of “Sex sells” and “If it bleeds, it leads” has been part of the press and media for decades, now the press and media seeks readership with dramatic stories about supposed environmental degradation. If the truth is not ‘scary’ enough, then press and media seem to feel obligated to turn up the heat.
The stories are based on research from the University of California Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis along with the Washington-based Ocean Conservancy published last week in Science Magazine. The report tries to estimate the amount of waste plastic that is being dumped into the world’s oceans. But there is the problem.
Bloomberg wrote “About 9.1 million metric tons of plastic is apt to flow into the oceans this year.” The globalpost.com said “A staggering 8 million metric tons of plastic pollution enter the oceans each year.”
The executive summary of the actual report said: “We calculate that 275 million metric tons (MT) of plastic waste was generated in 192 coastal countries in 2010, with 4.8 to 12.7 million MT entering the ocean.” While 8 and 9.1 are in the middle of the range, the range itself is huge. Any high school statistics student knows that when your top number is 2.6 times as large as your bottom figure, that is not a ‘scientific estimate; it is a guess.
Even naming the Philippines as the number three plastics polluter is somewhat of a farce. The pollution data is based on the amount of plastic products produced in a country and then an arbitrary percentage is assigned as to how much of that plastic might-note the word ‘might’- find its way into the oceans. The list of “polluters” was based on the number of people living within 50 miles of an ocean coastline therefore assuming that these people dump their plastics in the sea.
Guess which large nation has the greatest ‘Coastline to land area ratio’ on the planet–the Philippines. And Indonesia and PHL rank number 1 and 2 respectively for having the longest coastlines not facing the Arctic region like Russia and Canada.
Pollution is everyone’s problem. But scare tactics like this based on faulty analysis serves no purpose to motivate and mobilize public action.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano