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Environmentalists applaud greener laws but see âlong road aheadâ Virginia General Assembly (Source: Capital News Service) By Veronica Campbell | Capital News Service | May 14, 2021 at 4:56 PM EDT - Updated May 14 at 5:56 PM
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (CNS) - New legislation in Virginia will soon give some power to local governments and help environmental organizations and businesses combat plastic pollution.
Jim Deppe is an advocacy coordinator for Lynnhaven River Now, an organization that believes in restoring and protecting Virginiaâs waterways. Deppe also coordinates the Virginia Coastal Alliance, which comprises 17 organizations in Virginia that focus on off-shore drilling and single-use plastics.
âBags, polystyrene and balloons are all significant problems in the marine environment,â Deppe said. âTwo years ago, there was no option for municipalities to put laws in place locally that would allow the elimination of plastic bags, polystyrene and ba
In a few years, there will be more tonnage of plastic than fish in the oceans.
Since plastic breaks down into micro-sized fragments, any of us who eat fish will also be filled with more plastic.
Actually, we are already ingesting something like a credit card per week.
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Giant floating garbage patches the size of Texas collect in ocean currents. They are called gyres, and they now spiral slowly in five of the seven seas.
Fossil fuels have made the ocean more acidic than it has ever been in almost one million years.
Acidification weakens the fish shells and wrecks the coral. As a result, half of the
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Plastic is absolutely everywhere. Approximately 80 percent of marine litter originates on land and most of it is plastic. The well-known Great Pacific Garbage Patch creates powerful imagery of just how dire the plastics problem is; a gigantic, continent-sized, swirling mess of tiny plastic particles from broken-down plastic containers, bags, and bottles, and they’ve discovered more than just one there’s five.
However, what most people don’t realize is that the bigger problem is the photodegradation of these large pieces of plastics, which eventually break down under UV light into smaller and smaller pieces, but never fully biodegrade. These are known as microplastics and they are widely dispersed and cannot be mapped from the air.