Smoke Screen
global briefs
Tobacco Industry is Big Plastic Polluter New Underwater Maps Track Fish
JJ Gouin/AdobeStock.com
To better track the location and movement of marine fish in U.S. waters, The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries is using a new interactive website, the Distribution Mapping and Analysis Portal. It demonstrates that the ranges of many marine species are shifting, expanding and contracting in response to changing ocean conditions. Intended to improve data sharing and collaboration, it will facilitate judgements about fishery management and increase knowledge about species distribution. The portal displays data from NOAA Fisheries bottom trawl surveys for five regions (Northeast, Southeast, Gulf of Mexico, West Coast and Alaska) and includes a map viewer and graphing capabilities for more than 800 marine fish and invertebrate species. Understanding where species are distributed and the factors that drive patterns are important for species conservation and management. Rick Spinrad, Ph.D., NOAA administrator, says, “Changes in fish stocks can have significant economic and cultural impacts for communities and businesses across the U.S. The visualization capabilities of this new tool boost our ability to turn the data NOAA collects into robust decision-making resources for the entire fishery management community, helping build a climate-ready nation.”
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Broward County, Florida Edition
NaBroward.com
The once-common sight of public smoking is fast disappearing from society, but cigarette butts are still the most common source of plastic pollution in the global environment, not bottles, plastic bags or food wrappers. Smokers generate almost 900,000 tons of toxic waste annually, deposited on streets, landfills, rivers and beaches in every country. They take 10 or more years to degrade, releasing more than 7,000 toxic chemicals into the environment. The Ocean Conservancy found partially digested cigarette butts in 70 percent of seabirds and 30 percent of sea turtles sampled in one study. The industry sponsors clean-ups, anti-littering campaigns and other gestures to distract the public, say critics. Cigarettes could theoretically be banned if they were treated as single-use plastics. Smokeless and chewing forms of tobacco like gutka and khaini are sold in South Asia, with millions of their plastic pouches littering the environment. From the mining of materials for batteries to metal and plastic waste leaching into soil and water, electronic tobacco and nicotine products such as vaping are creating a new wave of pollution. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported last year that lithium-ion batteries are entering municipal waste systems because consumers dispose of these products labeled as disposable in household trash. Brian Yurasits/Pexels.com
Finding Nemo
