It has been established that decommissioned subsea oil and gas pipelines represent an inconspicuous source of microplastics. These pipelines are capable of delivering up to five hundred tons of microplastics annually into the British part of the North Sea, which is comparable to the volume of plastic entering the sea from rivers during the same period.
This conclusion was reached through the joint work of British and American ecologists. Specialists assessed the amount of plastic contained in this infrastructure and modeled the process of its degradation after the pipelines were taken out of service.
The results of the study were officially published in the scientific journal Journal of Hazardous Materials.