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Ninety-Nine Percent of the Ocean's Plastic Is Missing
sciencehabit writes Millions of tons. That's how much plastic should be floating in the world's oceans, given our ubiquitous use of the stuff. But a new study (abstract) finds that 99% of this plastic is missing. One disturbing possibility: Fish are eating it. If that's the case, "there is potential for this plastic to enter the global ocean food web," says Carlos Duarte, an oceanographer at the University of Western Australia, Crawley. "And we are part of this food web."
Wait. Isn't Slashdot supposed to link me to articles? I know no one RTFA, but if there isn't any link at all and just a blurb, what's the point?
Plastic has lots of energy (try burning it) and thus could be a food source in and of itself. Thus there could be a bacteria that is eating it. Where this is disturbing is that we like to put useful plastic things into the water such as fibreglass boats. Could there be a bacteria evolving that will start corroding our plastics?
Also the fish that eat it may now have a gut bacteria that will break it down.
Whatever the truth turns out to be I suspect it will be fascinating!
The tiny plastic beads and broken down bits end up in fish flesh, this has been established.
http://www.fastcoexist.com/3020951/these-big-eyed-fish-are-vacuuming-up-our-plastic-pollution-at-night
Plenty of information on this out there. 19% of all fish caught in a single survey in Hawaii had plastic in the bellies.
Is that water, the ultimate solvent -- or perhaps bacteria -- are breaking down the plastics back into it's components
Of the two, I'd go with bacteria, given that the bottled water aisle of my grocery store strongly suggests that water is a little less ultimate than you imply.
According to some of the stuff you can see here based on observations of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, plastic only degrades into tinier plastic pieces, right down to molecules. It's already in the food chain and has been for decades.
no no no, couldnt be, we have to go with the scary version, we cant go using reasonable options, how will anyone get funding for research???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
It getting into guts is a different problem.
Plastic microbeads are _excellent_ at absorbing many pollutants onto their surfaces.
When this is eaten in quantity, this can be a really efficient way for those pollutants to get into the fish - and hence into the food-chain.
yeah, its almost certainly not the fish, it must be the micro-organisms.
Now, if I can only think.. what eats the micro-organisms in the oceans?
Of course its in the fucking food supply. You shit in the ocean, something eats it and we end up eating that. If we're lucky its only shit which is a naturally bio-degradable food source for plants. If we're unlucky, its the various poisons we dumped in there too, 'cos it was cheaper than processing them.
Here's the "Science" magazine page:
http://news.sciencemag.org/env...
and here's the referenced paper:
http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...
Most of it is stored in a cool dark place. You know, under all that other water.
Hypothetical stuff causes hypothetical problems. Wow, I would have never thunk it! Let the paranoia.. er fun begin!
Before you claim troll show me where in the non-existent TFA (yes, I read this one) they come up with: 1) Their estimated "millions of tons". 2) How many "millions" are they claiming. 3) Why the only possible explanation is that fish are eating it (so now it's in your food). Nope, I'm not going to wait. They use a 1970 study that showed .1% of plastic washes into the ocean. This was the same time that we had TV commercials with American Indian's crying on TV because people on average were dumping their shit everywhere. We also had everyone pumping out CFCs for everything in a can.
I agree that "The Great Pacific Garbage Dump" is a huge problem, and know that the same problems exist in every ocean. Fantastic theories (or fantasy depending on your perspective) requires evidence, and there is none to back TFA. None of this addresses the real problems causing dumping (like greed and a lack of enforced regulation, or wars).
The last paragraph of TFA says it all. "We really don’t know what this plastic is doing.” So the point of the article telling people fish are eating the plastic is what exactly?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I am not buying the universal solvent theory, because even accounting for the salts in the water, it would take hundreds of years for most plastics to dissolve.
The bacteria theory is more likely, because I remember reading something about bacteria living in trash dumps, and supposedly breaking down plastic. I do not remember a followup, but it's still more likely than the above. The problem is, this does not necessarily result in harmless components being the end result.
Here's another theory that I consider more likely: algae and barnacles attach themselves to plastic objects, and eventually sink them out of sight. Not as perfectly conductive to happily singing "La-la-la" and dismissing all worries, but hey, if you wish, you can just come up with more comforting theories, like "Magical pink narwhals are spearing the floating plastic, and melting it in underwater volcanoes to build underwater cooling systems to fight global warming".
No good deed goes unpunished...
no no no, couldnt be, we have to go with the scary version, we cant go using reasonable options, how will anyone get funding for research???
I find this to be quite bizarre; this notion that all "scary" alternatives are somehow unreasonable and only non-scary alternatives qualify as reasonable.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
I'm going to call myself a wise skeptic. Someone else provided the missing link to the original story which points out that the plastic volume is derived from a 40+ year old estimate of how much plastic washes into the ocean (0.1%.) This estimate, doubtless taken as an article of faith in the published work, is from a time prior to widespread recycling, the EPA (and its analogs in other industrialized nations) having teeth, bioplastics that are designed to degrade, improved waste management, billions spent on public awareness, sponsored programs such as Adopt-a-Highway and other environmental measures. They disregarded all of that, took the 0.1% figure from a obsolete study, multiplied it by the quantity of plastic being manufactured today ran with the figure.
This stuff is so transparent it's laughable. It deserves ridicule. Instead it's blessed with the benefit of the doubt because the worst case fits the narrative to which you've been trained to adhere.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
A vast amount of this plastic is breaking up into tiny pieces, which then form a new class of plankton plastic plankton - and this plastic plankton is being eating by sea creatures along with the phytoplankton and zooplankton which make up their normal diet. Nobody knows what the effects of this will be.
To most of you guys "plastic is plastic", that's all to it
But the truth is plastic is _more_ than mere plastic --- it is a combination of many types of chemicals, all mixed together to achieve the characteristics of the plastic that it needs to have
To see it another way, a plastic is like a steak. It is definitely _not_ only a piece of beef, but also the sauce (which itself is made of the starchy gravy - which can be broken up to other more basic components, - the flavoring [salt, sugar, spices, and so on]), plus the added chemicals, such as the aromatics (which is largely benzene group) that were formed when that beef was put over the fire
Same thing with plastics - it is not only the acrylic resins, but we also need to account for additives such as the plasticizers, color, elastomers, and so on, plus other chemicals that were produced as a by-product of the mixing of all those chemicals over a "heated process"
When we can eat steaks, the different bacteria inside our guts dissolve different ingredients from the steak that we have eaten
Bacteria are not like human beings - they do not have other bacteria in their guts !
Most often a type of bacterium may be able to digest a type of ingredient within a type of plastic, and that is all to it, which means, the other chemicals inside the plastic are still left intact, not dissolved, not digested, not broken down
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
prepackaged fish sticks?