New research in South Australia has shed more light about where micro-plastics are accumulating in waterways and where the plastic pollution is coming from. Researchers have found many of the plastics are entering rivers, creeks and the ocean through fibres from synthetic clothing and particles from tyres.
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00:00 From our homes to the roads and increasingly the environment, plastic is everywhere and
00:07 new research has found it's accumulating in patches of the South Australian Ocean.
00:14 We have found a potential accumulation zone off of Maiponga. We're looking at, yeah, probably
00:21 about 12-15km offshore from Maiponga.
00:27 Flinders University scientists used ocean current modelling to predict where plastic
00:32 particles are ending up in an effort to better understand the issue.
00:36 This information that we're finding is really beneficial because we have the understanding
00:40 to know how to implement change from our results. It's not so much about cleaning up what's
00:47 already out there, it's mitigating and stopping what's entering our ecosystem. That's a much
00:52 more achievable task.
00:54 Some of the microplastics the researchers found were from tyre particles washing into
00:59 stormwater. Others were from general waste breaking down in the environment. But the
01:05 vast majority were from synthetic clothing fibres.
01:09 They on average made up about 72% of what we were finding. So an easy way to mitigate
01:14 against that is to use washing machine filters because then when we're washing our clothes
01:18 that's not coming out in our waste water.
01:21 The team sampled water from the Torrens and Onkaparinga rivers and in the Gulf of St Vincent.
01:27 Their research has now been handed to the government.
01:30 And as a government we really want to hear about it and then work together on what we
01:33 can do to make things better.
01:35 A global problem with no easy solutions.
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