“Even though we’ve kept several trash bins at the fishing harbour and the litter is being collected regularly, the fishermen throw empty packets and bottles around. When the fishing harbour was dredged, tonnes of empty liquor bottles were retrieved along with silt. The oil accidentally getting mixed with the seawater from the boats, will also pose a serious health threat to fish eaters,” said a Fisheries Department official. J.K. Patterson Edward, Director of Suganthi Devadasan Marine Research Institute, said the abundant marine litter and plastic pollution was one of the serious environmental challenges. Micro plastics in the size of less than 5 mm and macro plastics in size larger than 25 mm, including plastic cups, ropes, bottles, plastic crude oil containers, plastic bags, food wrappers and fishing gears, could be seen in the fishing harbour and the surroundings.
“Macro plastics will break down into micro plastics when exposed to sunlight or wave action while these waste will take hundreds of years to degrade in the ocean. When the micro plastics pile up in a polluted area owing to their greater surface-to-volume ratio and hydrophobic nature, they get easily associated with other organic and metal pollutants on the ocean surface and deep-sea sediments… It is almost impossible to remove them from the environment, where they accumulate. It will be highly detrimental to marine organisms and those who consume seafood,” said Mr. Patterson.
It was important to remove macro debris from the environment before it was converted into micro plastics. Continuous clean-ups on shorelines were effective in reducing the amount of plastic, micro plastics and plastic-additive chemicals in the environment. There should be a well-established waste collection and recycling system he suggested. “Above all, we, the human beings causing these pollution should be behave in responsible manner to save marine wealth,” Dr. Patterson says.
A.G. Murugesan, toxicologist and former Head of Sri Paramakalyani Centre for Environmental Sciences of Manonmaniam Sundaranar University at Alwarkurichi in Tenkasi district, said the micro plastics being inadvertently consumed by fishes would be passed on to human beings. The accumulation of these micro plastics in human body, in the long run, would cause serious ailments, including cancer. “The ill-effects of micro plastics has become a broad-based study by toxicologists across the globe, who believe that the sharp increase in the number of cancer patients is due to these sorts of pollutants,” he added.
The State government has come out with ‘Tamil Nadu Fishnet Initiative’, under which discarded and ghost nets would be collected and recycled. This initiative would help the Extended Producer Responsibility of fishnet producers and would be executed with an allocation of ₹1 crore. “Unfortunately, this initiative is yet to be implemented in the fishing harbour,” said a official from Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board.