http://news.uga.edu/releases/article/new-science-paper-magnitude-plastic-waste-going-into-ocean-0215/

New Science paper calculates magnitude of plastic waste going into the ocean
8 MILLION METRIC TONS OF PLASTIC ENTER THE OCEANS PER YEAR

February 12, 2015

Writer: Stephanie Schupska
Contact: Jenna Jambeck ,

Athens, Ga. – A plastic grocery bag cartwheels down the beach until a
gust of wind spins it into the ocean. In 192 coastal countries, this
scenario plays out over and over again as discarded beverage bottles,
food wrappers, toys and other bits of plastic make their way from
estuaries, seashores and uncontrolled landfills to settle in the world’s
seas.

How much mismanaged plastic waste is making its way from land to ocean
has been a decades-long guessing game. Now, the University of Georgia’s
Jenna Jambeck and her colleagues in the National Center for Ecological
Analysis and Synthesis working group have put a number on the global
problem.

Their study, reported in the Feb. 13 edition of the journal Science,
found between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric tons of plastic entered the
ocean in 2010 from people living within 50 kilometers of the coastline.
That year, a total of 275 million metric tons of plastic waste was
generated in those 192 coastal countries.

Jambeck, an assistant professor of environmental engineering in the UGA
College of Engineering and the study’s lead author, explains the amount
of plastic moving from land to ocean each year using 8 million metric
tons as the midpoint: „Eight million metric tons is the equivalent to
finding five grocery bags full of plastic on every foot of coastline in
the 192 countries we examined.“