Time to Tackle Plastic Pollution of Oceans, says Bluewater as World Marks Earth Day

Sweden’s Bluewater, a world leader in innovating water purification solutions for homes and commercial and public organizations, today marked Earth Day with a call for human ingenuity to be mobilised like never before to address the ongoing pollution of the world’s oceans by plastics.

“Many thousands of tons of plastic waste like bottles or bags are ending up in the world’s oceans every year, choking marine life and breaking down into hazardous microplastic particles that end up in our food chain,” said Bluewater founder and chairperson Bengt Rittri. 

Speaking at his company’s head office in Stockholm, Sweden, Bengt Rittri used Earth Day 2017 to warn of the dangers to the health of the planet and human wellbeing posed by the growing levels of microplastic in the oceans. Noting over 2.6 billion people rely on the ocean as a primary source of protein according to the Ocean Conservancy group, Bengt issued a call for a global mobilisation of human ingenuity to tackle the ocean pollution problem.

A 2016 study published by the World Economic Forum estimated that the accumulated number of microplastic particles in 2014 ranged ‘from 15 to 51 trillion particles, weighing between 93 and 236 thousand metric tons, which is only approximately 1% of global plastic waste estimated to enter the ocean in the year 2010’. WEF noted that these figures are larger than previous global estimates, but vary widely because of the scarcity of data in most of the world oceans.

“Humans have shown themselves to be brilliant at inventing groundbreaking ways to make our day-to-day lives easier, healthier and more efficient, so there is simply no reason why that ingenuity cannot also be harnessed to find ways to capture and recycle plastics at the end of a product’s lifetime,” Bengt Rittri said.