then-ruling grand coalition -- made up of Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union party and the center-left Social Democratic Party -- declared that it viewed existing regulations aimed at containing the flood of waste as "in principle sufficient." Germany's Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety declined to provide any additional comments to SPIEGEL ONLINE on Thursday.

Insufficient Disposal Opportunities

Environmental protection advocates, on the other hand, are not shy about voicing their dismay. "In the absence of controls and penalties," says Onno Gross, the president of Deepwave, a Hamburg-based ocean conservation organization, "it's apparently tempting to get rid of your waste in the 'blue closet.'" Still, according to the internal government paper, disposing of maritime waste in a proper fashion isn't easy as it needsNorth Sea had plastic particles in their mouths. Likewise, researchers at the Research and Technology Center Westcoast based in the northwestern German town of Büsum have recently determined that almost all (93 percent) diving birds on the North Sea have pieces of plastic in their stomachs.

Yet another study found an average of 32 pieces of plastic in the stomachs of northern fulmars, a relative of the petral. With all these pieces in their stomach, the birds always feel full, so they consume less, get fewer nutrients and, in many cases, die. A panel of experts told the EU that migratory birds feed pieces of plastic they find in the Atlantic Ocean to their young in Antarctica.

According to the United Nations Environment Program, there are, on average, some 18,000