Irish Examiner view: At last, EU moves to protect oceans

New rules deal with fishing gear placed on the market and waste fishing gear collected

Waste lobster pots being pulled out from the seabed in Galway.

Leo Baekeland invented the first fully synthetic plastic in New York in 1907. He called the material Bakelite and offered the term ‘plastics’ to the world. He cannot have imagined how ubiquitous plastics would become. Neither could he have imagined even a fraction of the myriad positive applications of the material. No one alive just over a century ago could have imagined that discarded plastics would become such a toxic blight, polluting waterways and oceans, snaring animals, birds, and fish for the decades between the moment they are dumped and eventually disintegrate.

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