Familiar with these marine creatures shown above? I believe you are! More than just marine animals, these creatures often end up as delicacies on our dining plates.
Our love for seafood
Much loved by most people, Hirschmann (2020) founds that Singaporeans consumes around 21 kilograms of seafood per person per year in 2019. A trend that has been relatively constant over the past decade.
In global terms, the average per capita seafood consumption is at 19 kilograms in 2017 according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), a trend which has been rising since 1961 as seen in figure 1 below.
Figure 1
BUT, have you ever wonder the environmental impacts our love for seafood may have caused?
Love for seafood turns harmful
Yes, the consumption of seafood has an impact on our environment. Most notably, plastic pollution – a pressing and prevalent issue that arise from our heavy consumption of seafood.
The bulk of plastic pollution occurs during the catch process. A study by Lebreton et al. (2018) found that the 1.6 million km2 Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) between California and Hawaii consists of:
| Plastic size type | Volume (metric tons) | Examples |
| Megaplastics | 42,000 | Fishing nets |
| Macroplastics | 20,000 | Crates, eel trap cones, bottles |
| Mesoplastics | 10,000 | Bottle caps, oyster spacers |
| Microplastics | 6,400 | Fragments of rigid plastic objects, ropes and fishing nets |
Of the massive amount of plastics found, a huge bulk of it (emphasized in bold) comes from the seafood catch process. Of noteworthy are the fishing nets (in megaplastic form) as that alone makes up 46% of the total plastic found in the GPGP.
Indeed, as articulated by Torrella (2018), “nearly half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result of our eating [of] fish, the same fish we pledge to protect by ditching plastic straws.”
Plastic pollution in the marine environment is pressing. Marine animals can be injured as they find themselves being entangled in plastic objects – especially fishing nets or strings, or when they mistakenly ingest plastic wastes as food. These plastics, when ingested by marine animals, may end up in the food chain through bioaccumulation and biomagnification and ultimately, reaching onto our dining plates.
Moreover, it is estimated that there might be more plastic wastes than fishes in the world’s oceans, rivers and lakes by 2050 if plastic pollution is not rectified or mitigated (Awuchi & Awuchi, 2019). Together with Greenpeace International (2018) findings that over 400,000 aquatic mammals perish annually as a result of plastic pollution in our water bodies, this puts the sustainability of the seafood industry at substantial risk.
As such, there is an urgent need for the catch process to be more sustainable. Proper disposal of catch equipment should be undertaken to minimise and prevent the exacerbation of the plastic pollution issue in our waters. On the everyday level, consumers should consider turning to pseudo-seafood choices such as plant-based shrimp, crab cakes or tuna made from tomatoes (Torrella, 2018) to reduce our demand for live catch seafood and hence, alleviating the associated plastic pollution contributed by the catch process, as well as ocean depletion to maintain the sustainability of our marine ecosystem.
References:
Awuchi, C., & Awuchi, C. (2019). Impacts of Plastic Pollution on the Sustainability of Seafood Value Chain and Human Health. International Journal of Advanced Academic Research, 5(11), 46-138. Retrieved September 19, 2020, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337312788_Impacts_of_Plastic_Pollution_on_the_Sustainability_of_Seafood_Value_Chain_and_Human_Health
Greenpeace International. (2018). “Plastic Debris in the World’s Oceans”. Greenpeace
International. Retrieved September 18, 2020.
Hirschmann, R. (2020, July 14). Singapore: Seafood consumption per capita 2019. Retrieved September 18, 2020, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1038132/per-capita-seafood-consumption-singapore/
Lebreton, L., Slat, B., Ferrari, F., Sainte-Rose, B., Aitken, J., Marthouse, R., . . . Reisser, J. (2018). Evidence that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is rapidly accumulating plastic. Scientific Reports, 8(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-018-22939-w
Ritchie, H., & Roser, M. (2019, September 13). Seafood Production. Retrieved September 18, 2020, from https://ourworldindata.org/seafood-production
Torrella, K. (2018, December 26). How the Seafood Industry is Polluting the Ocean and Killing Off Marine Life. Retrieved September 18, 2020, from https://www.teenvogue.com/story/how-the-seafood-industry-is-polluting-the-ocean