Clyde badly contaminated by plastic debris

[Nick]

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Marine bilogists say marine life in the Clyde is 'riddled with pollution' caused by ­plastic discharged into the estuary. They have discovered that up to 80 per cent of flatfish and 60 per cent of hermit crabs in the Firth of Clyde have ingested tiny pieces of plastic.

Scientists from the Marine Biological Station on the isle of Cumbrae also found significant contamination in sandhoppers – tiny crustaceans that live in the sand below the tide line – suggesting the firth’s entire marine food chain is affected. An earlier study found 80 per cent of prawns were contaminated.

SCOTSMAN ARTICLE

[Telo]

So many of the south-west facing bays are heaving with household, industrial, agricultural and fisheries rubbish. A few years ago in Arrochar, before the council took it away, the heap of plastic and general flotsam and jetsam must have been about three or four feet deep.

[Old Troll]

Very disappointing news to hear about this level of plastics contaminating our local waters. Certainly the River Clyde is not too bad for human rubbish with the GCC scavenging boat the Sea Witch doing a good job within the river. I pass downriver and back to Rutherglen on my annual migratory paassage and have not seen other than tree branchs and logs etc apart from an odd buckfast bottle and wee football. I remember walking in Carradale bay some years ago and the beach being knee deep in plastic bags. Surely fishing,agricultral and household waste are not being dumped to such levels as to cause this problem. Do the scientific people have a source for the extent of the problem.

[sahona]

Just as well they got the news out before Cumbrae (well, Keppel) is closed down

[Telo]

Surely fishing,agricultral and household waste are not being dumped to such levels as to cause this problem.

South-west facing bays capture rubbish from well beyond these shores because of the prevailing wind. The last time I had a good rake about in the rubbish was in the one of the bays just north of Portpatrick. Of the stuff whose place of manufacture/branding that could be identified, a huge proportion were fishing boxes and fertiliser sacks from IoM, England and Ireland. No doubt some of our identifiable rubbish of Scottish origin ends up in Norway; we're certainly no different and the "midden" culture ("just dump the stuff...") is deeply engrained in Scotland.

I'm not having a pop at farmers or fishermen, but while the former moan about their animals eating litter, we've probably all seen their abandoned fertiliser sacks lying about the fields or being blown around. I'm sure things are improving, but both industries have long had a problem of dumping their rubbish; "externalisation" of costs is the technical term, I believe. In fact, it's not that long ago when paper, cardboard and plastic eating utensils and detritus were regularly dumped from the sterns of David MacBrayne's finest.

EDIT: In the Arrochar example quoted in my previous post, the three or four foot high heap included seaweed, not just jetsam.

[Silkie]

The midden culture was perfectly understandable when we believed that the natural world was capable of absorbing all our rubbish without difficulty (as it undoubtedly was in the days before petrochemicals and the 7 billion people supported by them) and there are many middens, millenia old, and of great archeological interest today which will be completely recycled eventually by natural means.

What is harder to understand is that we continue to behave like this now that we know how almost indestructible our modern rubbish is. The unfettered externalisation of costs is a great evil and although we are nibbling at the edges of the issue with waste legislation I'm not aware of any body which recognises the other side of the coin, namely that natural resources are currently considered to be free for anyone who can afford the extraction costs.

And FFS don't get me started on tax regimes.

[Arghiro]

Just consider that anyone eating locally caught fish, shrimp etc will be ingesting the plastic too.

In fact, I doubt that the problem is localised actually, ANY fish or other seafood from anywhere in the world is likely to be contaminated, isn't it?

[sahona]

Not wishing to seem frivolous, but how are we expected us to suffer if we ingest miniscule particles of plastic?
As far as I know,they would just go straight through, unnoticed, like the odd grain of sand etc, that we swallow anyway.(good roughage)
Don't get me wrong, I'm just as annoyed by the "sargasso" of plastics as the next person, but I wouldn't worry about minisciule stuff from a seafood or fish meal - probably been eating it for years already.
The human plumbing/digestive system is well capable of dealing with far worse - I know!

[cpedw]

The human plumbing/digestive system is well capable of dealing with far worse - I know!

You won't be going into details will you?

Incidentally, I reckon this detritus will mainly be in the fishy digestion bits that we don't normally eat so again, not much of a health threat.

Derek

[DaveS]

For years the Forth has had a problem with small plastic pellets. These are almost certainly feedstock for injection moulding and therefore valuable material that it's hard to imagine being deliberately jettisoned. How and why they are getting into the estuary remains a mystery (unless I've missed relevant news).

[Piperatsea]

The little bits of plastic we all (and I'm including the fish) eat don't seem so bad. It's the chemicals that leach out which are not so nice. They go into fish flesh and don't get flushed out so they accumulate. This is worse in fatty fish like salmon-just one of the many reasons I will never eat salmon.

Sadly I have no great ideas for ridding the seas of the mountains of plastic. The only hope I can see is that oil will get so expensive that the plastic will become valuable so we can all sail around collecting it and selling it to help pay for our boats!

[Clyde_Wanderer]

The little bits of plastic we all (and I'm including the fish) eat don't seem so bad. It's the chemicals that leach out which are not so nice. They go into fish flesh and don't get flushed out so they accumulate. This is worse in fatty fish like salmon-just one of the many reasons I will never eat salmon.

Sadly I have no great ideas for ridding the seas of the mountains of plastic. The only hope I can see is that oil will get so expensive that the plastic will become valuable so we can all sail around collecting it and selling it to help pay for our boats!

If plastic gets that valuable due to increased oil prices we wont be able to afford boats to pay for, since they are now made from oil bi products
C_W