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Plastic refuse turns Sweden's west coast into garbage dump

Xinhua, September 29, 2015 Adjust font size:

Currents from the North and Baltic seas have combined to make a part of the Swedish west coast one of the dirtiest in northern Europe, local media reported on Monday.

Every year about 8,000 cubic meters worth of the garbage, the equivalent of five bathtubs' worth every hour of a whole year, ends up on the upper part of the west coast, according to an analysis by the environmental group Keep Sweden Tidy cited by daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

"Plastic is a fantastic material but it is completely absurd that packages to be used only once are made from a material that lasts over 100 years," said Dr. Eva Blidberg, a marine ecotoxigologist employed by the organization.

The trash gathers and swirls in Skagerack sea just north of Denmark, where a stream from the North Sea runs into another current originating from the Baltic sea east of Sweden.

While international public body OSPAR estimates that this strip of the west coast is the most littered in the northeast Atlantic, it estimates that only 15 percent of the trash washes ashore.

"The garbage that is washed is what floats. We do not know how much is on the sea bed," said Martin Hassellov, a professor in analytical chemistry at Gothenburg University. Endit