Which Countries Are The Biggest Contributors to Ocean Pollution?

The ocean is Earth's life support system. We depend on it to control our climate, absorb CO2, and provide protein to more than a billion people. However, with 97% of the world's ocean being contained, at the rate we are destroying our ecosystem and contaminating the ocean with 12.7 million tonnes of plastic per year, the harm we are causing to marine life is becoming irreversible. The ocean's condition over the next 10,000 years will be influenced by what we do during the next 10 years. So, which countries are the biggest contributors to ocean pollution?

CIWEM, an institution that works at the management of marine resources, has recently created a statistic on which countries are the most responsible for throwing the highest amount of plastic into the ocean. These countries were discovered to be the worst offenders when measuring the amount of plastic that goes into the ocean each year in kilograms. India (126.5 million kg), China (over 70.7 million kg), Indonesia (56.333 million kg), Brazil (38 million kg), and Thailand (22.8 million kg) topped the list as the worst offenders.

It is actually not because those countries produce the most plastics because for the record based on annual plastic waste, the ranking looked rather different. So, let’s take a look at the different approaches by seeing which countries produce the most annual plastic waste: United States (42 billion kg), India (26.3 billion kg), China (21.5 billion kg), Brazil (10.6 billion kg), and Indonesia (9.1 billion kg) As we can see, the list looked rather different. This means the problems didn’t come from countries' big plastic production, rather it came from their bad waste management.

The graph depicts the rise in annual global plastic output, expressed in tonnes, from 1950 to 2015. Only 2 million tonnes were generated annually over the world in 1950. Since then, yearly production has nearly doubled, reaching 381 million tonnes in 2015. To put this in perspective, this roughly equates to the mass of two-thirds of the world's population. The 2008 global financial crisis primarily caused the brief decline in yearly production in 2009 and 2010; a comparable impact is visible across numerous indicators of resource production and consumption, including energy.

With this statistic, we hope that people can be more aware about ocean pollution and help to recover our ocean.

References:

Plastic Pollution. (2018, September 1). Retrieved September 13, 2022, from https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution

These 10 Countries Are the Biggest Contributors to Marine Plastic Pollution – New Analysis. (n.d.). Retrieved September 13, 2022, from https://www.ciwem.org/news/10-countries-biggest-contributors-marine-plastic-pollution