Forget all those warnings about the million tons of plastic debris floating in the ocean. Ignore the photos that you think show the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Andrés Cózar of theUniversity of Cadiz in Spain is the man who once extrapolated the 1 million-ton estimate. Since then, however, he has led research that collected samples at 141 ocean sites. Cózar’s new estimate: 7,000 to 35,000 tons of plastic are floating in the ocean.
That doesn’t sound especially good either, but it’s always better to have better numbers.