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Ocean Currents Are Sweeping Billions of Tiny Plastic Bits to the Arctic (smithsonianmag.com)
The world's oceans are littered with trillions of pieces of plastic -- bottles, bags, toys, fishing nets and more, mostly in tiny particles -- and now this seaborne junk is making its way into the Arctic. From a report: The plastic was discovered by an international team of researchers who circumnavigated the Arctic on a five-month journey aboard the research vessel Tara in 2013. They sampled the ocean water along the way, looking at plastic pollution. And though the plastic concentrations were overall low, they located a specific region located north of the Greenland and the Barents seas with unusually high concentrations. They published their results in the journal Science Advances this week. It seems that the plastic is riding up to the pole with the Thermohaline Circulation, a "conveyor" belt ocean current that transports water from the lower latitudes of the Atlantic Ocean toward the poles. "[A]nd the Greenland and the Barents Seas act as a dead-end for this poleward conveyor belt," Andres Cozar Cabanas, lead author of the study and researcher at the University of Cadiz, Spain, says in a press release.
Going to glass and aluminum will make soda too expensive for the poor? Good. Now we're tackling public healthcare-subsidized obesity at the same time.
Back when sodas were sold in glass bottles, Coke (and their forgettable competitors) implemented a bottle buyback model so they could clean and re-use the bottles.
Soda companies did not move from this model to thin plastic because plastic was cheaper, they moved away because of a germaphobic generation obsessed with discarding anything that might carry pathogens just to be safe. Faced with the widescale rejection of their bottle reclamation and re-use program, soda companies found the cheapest disposable resource, which was also a favorite of the sanitary dogma, plastic.
Cans survived because even though there was also a can buyback process, the mechanism of opening a soda can is destructive and non-trivially reversible. Even the more extreme of the sterile fanatics could accept that melting tin or aluminum and recasting a new can would be destructive enough to kill any bacteria from prior human contact.