Almost 36,000 feet underwater, near the very bottom of the world’s deepest ocean trench, scientists came across a troubling find: a plastic bag, similar to one you might take home from a supermarket, lying incongruously in the darkness. A recent study on deep-sea ocean pollution identified the bag, found in 1998 by a robotic submersible at a depth of 35,756 feet in the Mariana Trench, as the deepest known piece of plastic trash on Earth. Scientists say its presence in one of the world’s most remote environments signals just how worryingly pervasive plastic pollution has become. What they found was a disturbing amount of trash clogging deep-sea environments, including the Japan Trench and the Mariana Trench, as well as deep-sea areas in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. More than one-third of the waste they counted was made of plastic ― a staggering 89 percent of which was single-use items like plastic bags, packaging and bottles.

Source: Huffington Post May 14, 2018 13:07 UTC