ENVIRONMENT-EUROPE: Human Waste Threatens Sea Life

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Aug 3 2006 (IPS) - Human-made waste is poisoning the seas around Europe, according to a report by a French research institute.

This pollution, from plastic bags to cigarette butts, is leading to a proliferation of toxic algae and the destruction of coral, molluscs and fish, researchers say.

The study carried out by the French Research Institute on Sea Exploration (IFREMER, after its French name) suggests that the Mediterranean Sea alone contains more than 300 million pieces of waste, mostly plastic bags and cigarette butts but also glass and metal bottles.

The study says the Mediterranean is the most polluted sea around Europe, followed by the North Sea, which has some 150 million pieces of waste. It estimates about 50 million pieces of waste in the Gulf of Gascony to the south-west of France.

According to the study, some 17,000 cubic metres of waste gather along the 300 km shore from Bordeaux port to the village of Saint Jean de Luz at the Spanish border.

This waste disposal is the consequence of failure to legislate against mass production and disposal of such items, and the failure of the public to adopt clean behaviour while vacationing, environmentalists say.

“The market of plastic wrapping materials is enormous and very powerful, and it blocks all legislation to reduce and regulate production,” says Isabelle Poitou, director of the French Observatory of Industrial Waste in the Seas.

“We must force humankind to admit that its irresponsible behaviour is destroying its own habitat, including those places were it spends its leisure time,” Poitou told IPS.

The waste is striking back at vacationers, reducing possibilities of swimming in the sea and in lakes.

According to IFREMER, 90 percent of wrapping materials are made of plastic, which needs several hundred years to degrade. Plastic wrapping material represents up to 95 percent of waste found in the oceans and seas.

The French government has launched a new campaign aimed at vacationers. “Do not drop your waste on our coasts,” a slogan goes. “If you do not drop your waste, you contribute to save your environment.”

Besides the plastic bags and bottles polluting the waters, toxic algae are spreading due to intensive agriculture and the hot weather.

On Jul. 28, Italian authorities were forced to order a swimming ban at several beaches in the north of the country near Genoa after they found an unusually high concentration of ostreopsis ovata, a toxic alga.

The alga releases neurotoxins, leading to breathing and digestive problems, and skin rashes.

In Germany, health and environmental authorities have warned that the high temperatures had led to unusual growth of Cyanophyta bacteria in several lakes and public swimming pools. Some bathing facilities were closed.

“Intensive agriculture leads to a massive release of phosphates and nitrates in the sea waters near the coast,” Chloe Fromange from the group Environment in Brittany told IPS. “These two elements are very nutritive for algae, which, helped by high water temperatures and photosynthesis during the late weeks of the spring, grow very rapidly.”

But while high temperatures provoke extraordinary growth of algae and bacteria, they mean death for other sea species.

In the basin of Thau, a seawater lagoon in southern France famous for its shellfish farming, authorities have reported widespread destruction of molluscs. “When the algae die and decay, they further reduce the oxygen in water, thus killing the molluscs,” says Denis Regler, director of a centre for research on shellfish farming near Thau.

The heat has also destroyed sea fans and other coral in the Mediterranean, Jean Georges Harmelin, biologist at the Oceanographic Centre at Marseille told IPS. “The water in the Mediterranean reached temperatures of 29 degrees Celsius during July, four degrees higher than the average. In this hot water, coral and sea fans die due to lack of oxygen.”