Land Reclamation

There are also a number of other anthropogenic (due to man and his activities) impacts on the marine environment which are not caused by vessels. These include:

Land reclamation exercises – land reclamation is increasingly being employed worldwide as a coastal defense (e.g. the Netherlands, where 15% of today’s land has been reclaimed from the sea – this amounts to twenty times the size of Malta!) or in order to augment the surface area of small nations (e.g. Malta). In such exercises, waste from the demolition of buildings or from the excavation/digging of new land is dumped into the sea, choking all forms of life found underneath.