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Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere (npr.org)
An anonymous reader shares a report from NPR about ecologist Chelsea Rochman, who has dedicated her career to studying how microplastics are getting into the food chain and affecting everything from beer to fish: Since modern plastic was first mass-produced, 8 billion tons have been manufactured. And when it's thrown away, it doesn't just disappear. Much of it crumbles into small pieces. Scientists call the tiny pieces "microplastics" and define them as objects smaller than 5 millimeters -- about the size of one of the letters on a computer keyboard. Researchers started to pay serious attention to microplastics in the environment about 15 years ago. They're in oceans, rivers and lakes. They're also in soil. Recent research in Germany found that fertilizer made from composted household waste contains microplastics. And, even more concerning, microplastics are in drinking water. In beer. In sea salt. In fish and shellfish. How microplastics get into animals is something of a mystery, and Chelsea Rochman is trying to solve it.
Since she started studying microplastics, Rochman has found them in the outflow from sewage treatment plants. And they've shown up in insects, worms, clams, fish and birds. To study how that happens, [researcher Kennedy Bucci] makes her own microplastics from the morning's collection. She takes a postage stamp-size piece of black plastic from the jar, and grinds it into particles using a coffee grinder. "So this is the plastic that I feed to the fish," she says. The plastic particles go into beakers of water containing fish larvae from fathead minnows, the test-animals of choice in marine toxicology. Tanks full of them line the walls of the lab. Bucci uses a pipette to draw out a bunch of larvae that have already been exposed to these ground-up plastic particles. The larva's gut is translucent. We can see right into it. "You can see kind of a line of black, weirdly shaped black things," she points out. "Those are the microplastics." The larva has ingested them. Rochman says microplastic particles can sicken or even kill larvae and fish in their experiments.
Since she started studying microplastics, Rochman has found them in the outflow from sewage treatment plants. And they've shown up in insects, worms, clams, fish and birds. To study how that happens, [researcher Kennedy Bucci] makes her own microplastics from the morning's collection. She takes a postage stamp-size piece of black plastic from the jar, and grinds it into particles using a coffee grinder. "So this is the plastic that I feed to the fish," she says. The plastic particles go into beakers of water containing fish larvae from fathead minnows, the test-animals of choice in marine toxicology. Tanks full of them line the walls of the lab. Bucci uses a pipette to draw out a bunch of larvae that have already been exposed to these ground-up plastic particles. The larva's gut is translucent. We can see right into it. "You can see kind of a line of black, weirdly shaped black things," she points out. "Those are the microplastics." The larva has ingested them. Rochman says microplastic particles can sicken or even kill larvae and fish in their experiments.
Will probably become the cause of global warming soon
Plastic is inert. Nobody cares.
I don't know which animals feel pain. But for the ones that do, if a researcher gives them food that contains sharp, ground-up pieces of plastic, the researcher should also include medicine that dulls or eliminates the pain.
I'd hate to eat sharp, ground-up plastic, with no pain medicine.
...I don't see anything changing because of this information. All developed nations are addicted to plastic. They aren't going to stop using it because we find it fish bellies. That just isn't enough incentive.
A few eco-conscious types might make token efforts at reducing their plastic consumption, but it will barely make a dent in overall consumption.
The silver lining here is that this abundance will ensure the shortest possible time for plastic-eating creatures to evolve. And, really, it's already happened.
Actually, we knew this will happen over a hundred years ago already.
A certain Mr. Malthus explained how the world will drown in its own manure. He is still "ridiculed" by the unsophisticated liberal arts bunch who call themselves "economists" and don't understand basic physics, although we see more and more evidence that our "growth" is unsustainable.
The world is drowning in the excess heat the human shit is trapping, drowning in the garbage people are producing and the biosphere is being literally converted to shit at an increasing pace.
And due to the well-known market failure of underinvestment in science and technology, coupled to the slow erosion of democracy by the rich elites, it is increasingly unlikely we'll get a "technological solution".
It is all thoughts and prayers from now on.
The key to the caterpillarâ(TM)s talents could lie in its taste for honeycomb
Hey, wait a second, *I* like honeycomb! Maybe I can digest plastic too! It would explain why I like to chew on the ends of straws long after the drink has been depleted. And also how I am able to eat (and enjoy) that cheese sauce from Arby's.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've sailed through this so called pacific plastic mire and have seen absolutely nothing. I've even swam and scuba dived through it and didn't see anything. Those scientists say it's microscopic which they always conveniently fail to mention when talking about the magnitude of this problem.
It's not a big deal. Just scientists peddling fear for more grant money.
This is honestly getting a bit tiring. The problem we have that is being discussed here is not microplastics. It's plastics. The plastic packaging etc, which gets small enough from being grinded by water to be swallowed by various animals, while remaining large enough to get stuck.
"Microplastics" are the nanometer grade particulates, which mainly come from washing and drying clothing. They are small enough to pass freely through cellular walls, and as far as we know are completely metabolically inert. As in they have no observable impact of any kind on the cells they pass through.
Those two are completely separate issues, with completely distinctly different sources and completely different effects. Plastic trash does indeed get accumulated in garbage patches. It does indeed tend to kill a significant amount of wildlife.
Microplastics are everywhere because washing and drying synthetic clothing has been a thing for a century or so. It's utterly harmless to biological life as far as we know, because the particulates in question are small enough to be mechanically irrelevant (can't get stuck in organs when they're small enough to pass through cellular walls) while being metabolically completely inert (they do not interact with your organism chemically either).
The fear mongering stories from journalists tend to conflate these two, and then project the harmful consequences of the former on the latter. This essentially acts in the same way that radiation being scary was sold - "it's everywhere, you can't see it, and it's really harmful" has a tendency to overload our danger perception mechanisms and break the system intended to evaluate the threat. Which causes us to overestimate the threat by a huge margin, all while generally ignoring it. I.e. "radiation is super dangerous, yet we fly on airplanes without noticing that it gives us a massive radiation dose".
You're a moron.
And this is a good example of a person who's threat evaluation systems went haywire from aforementioned conflation. He suggests that "I should eat plastic trash", which he understands would be harmful.
Without understanding that if his conflation of "microplastics are the same thing as plastics" was correct, every single one of us has been eating "plastic trash" their entire lives. Because microplastics have been here for at least a century. But it isn't. Which is why we are not suffering problems that much of wildlife eating actual plastic trash are suffering from. We don't have a lot of plastic stuck in our digestive systems, nor are we dying from it.
It's time to murder this Superkendall faggot
No more fucking denialist retardo-publican shit, you need to die now lying faggot. You need to be publicly murdered so Republican denialist faggots understand what their lies buy them. They need to go, it's time to murder them all.
Tesla fucktards cannot understand what smarter people are talking about... What else is new on Slashdot?
C6gunner need to be filled with buckshot. Murder this lying faggot.
Not an expert on plastics.
The only way to stop the lies is to cut this faggot's head off, let's get on that. It's time to stop the lying Republican faggot problem with extreme prejudice, kill this bitch. Find its family.
You're an Internet Tough Guy who is much worse than anything you pretend to fight.
If/when massive censorship or ID comes to internet forums it will be because of people like you. One of you will go too far, incite something, actually act on your antisocial impulses, something like that, and the media will just eat it up. Then the politicians will do what they always do and "promote safety". That will be the end of it. Think before you act, you moron.
For a good while, dead wood was not digest-able by anything. It piled up, producing much of the coal we use today. Then one day via either God or natural selection, take your pick, some bacterium learned to digest it. Aided by termite guts, they've been munching wood ever since.
One humid day you may find that bugs ate your PC. (No, not those kind of bugs.)
There's already known slow digesters of plastic.
Table-ized A.I.
You wrote an expert-sounding essay on a topic like this without doing your homework on pthalates? Really??
https://www.theguardian.com/li...
One form of microplastics is micro fibers. Microfibers wear off of synthetic clothing every time you take a step, walk down the street, go to the park, go swimming, or do virtually anything else. They banned microbeads because they were getting swallowed by fish, getting into the soils, and getting into the food supply. But the amount of microbeads that were released into the environment is dwarfed by the amount of microfibers released into the environment each and every day. Patagonia of course pretends like they care about our environment but virtually all their products are made from synthetic materials. Their customers hike to some of the most remote places on the earth with some of the worldâ(TM)s most fragile environments littering microfibers all along the way.
It's time to kill the Republican denialist faggots, no more lies.
I find particularly non interesting.
Woman feeds plastic to fish unable to break it down. Then finds plastic inside fish.
like come on. what was there supposed to happen in this experiment? and if you force feed them enough, they die? SULPLIZE MUCHH?
what we would really care is .. say we converted all of the fossile oil into plastics, how much would there be? enough for a problem or not?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You're kinda right, but let's murder denialist Republicans first. Patagonia makes the same products as everyone else, but Republicans lie to protect that which they know is not true. They must choke on the plastic, manually, each. Teach them.
It's not a big deal. Just scientists peddling fear for more grant money.
Wow, you are stupid. Lets just consider the motivations of scientists in general. These are generally pretty smart people, who have chosen careers that they know will not make them money the same way that they would were they to go into, say investment banking. A vast majority are going to be motivated by things like curiosity, a passion for the natural environment, discovering truth (regardless of what that truth reveals). None of these things tends to encourage falsifying results, lying to the media, and tricking people into giving them grant money.
Oh sure, there are a few bad apples in every barrel, but they are pretty few and far between. Moreover, other scientists tend to find them pretty quick when they start checking each other's work, because sniffing out the truth is what these people try to do.
I'm not saying they are always right, but only a true idiot doesn't listen carefully to what they have to say.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Absolutly buddy
Just leave yupr name and address here and Iâ(TM)ll deliver them liars to you so you could punish them
Straight from the Alternative Bio Department of Trump University.
OMFG.
I know of (unknown until now) bacteria that degrade PET, how much is it worth ?
How to make money with this information ?
Maoist.
Tell us more about your plans.
Also, don't let FACTS, such as growing life expectancy in the way of your "reasoning".
People in most nations are getting older by the day, despite the DANGEROUS PLASTIC PARTICLES.
We start recycling the stuff and/or properly burn it into CO2 and H2O.
That would be a middle ground between "bain it, or we will all die soon" and "lets do nothing".
But I guess that would be a sane solution and not good for hyping a "movement".
If we only stopped listening to Big Oil, Big War and their ANTIFA thugs, we could replace oil by U238 and Thorium. France proved it, when they still had balls.
Also, we can properly collect and burn all waste plastic parts. Then make new plastic from rapseed oil. Do that cycle FOREVER.
No need to fall for the Maoist trap of "mankind inevitably destroys itself, now give us all power to stop this".
www.wikipedia.org
Just subtract the Marxist/Globalist Bull and you have a great repository of technology.
The Africans already have that. But they are corrupt to the bone and still think like members of a stone-age tribe. That's why they have 7 kids per woman.
Could you please report this guy to the local police department ?
He seems to be a free-running murderer-in-waiting.
I don't have keyboard you racist clod! How many hogshead are in a keyboard letter?
Do I just shit and piss the plastic out?
Do I give a shit?
PATENT.
Stop crapflooding.
If you want to role play, go join an MMO.
If it's everywhere, and been going on that long, it can't be all that apocalyptic. Most organisms must handle it pretty darn well.
A great number hunkered down on campus because they were afraid to go out into the real world. They discovered that if they just took more classes eventually they would be given a permanent position on campus.
Reminds of many Science Fiction/Fantasy shorts I listen to on Clarkesworld Magazine like this one.
It's funny how our imaginations aren't that far off from potential planetary catastrophe in any humanly direction we chose. Put your tinfoil hats on and jump into your bunker with your MRE's, it's gonna be a wild ride!
yah. murder people who disagree with you. that's the way to accomplish things.
war will solve all our problems. yay you.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
This is your brain once modern environmentalist movement gets to it. You become a religious fanatic, demanding death to those who so much as dare question your dogmatic beliefs.
Science is AMAZING!
Those of us living in first-world countries know how long 5mm is, thank you very much.
#DeleteFacebook
Identify a species of open-ocean alga known to form floating mats, Sargassum for example, that flourishes in the presence of a nutrient like iron. Seed the Pacific gyre with large amounts of the plant and the nutrient. Because this part of the ocean is a gyre, currents sweeping floating material into one area. the nutrient should stay in one place long enough for the alga to form large mats that after they run out of nutrient will die, decay and sink to abyssal depths, taking atmospheric carbon and floating plastic down with it.
Plastic is made from oil. Oil is something between a rock and an organic. Plastic makes the oil harder to break down. We are basically making artificial and very flexible rocks.
The plastic doesn't deteriorate like normal organic matter , it breaks down more like rocks because that is what it is. So is it harmful? no on can say. Not enough data.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
This is your brain once modern environmentalist movement gets to it. You become a religious fanatic, demanding death to those who so much as dare question your dogmatic beliefs.
Yet you yourself display dogmatic beliefs in other posts in this thread.
I agree that dogmatism is a non-starter, especially when it comes to correcting the course towards environmental responsibility.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
that's where all my tiny prophylactics went.. busted again.. price check .. Extra Large correction -- tiny prophylactics
hehe..
"I display dogmatic beliefs" such as?
Pretty much the only belief you could even remotely suggest to be dogmaic I have demonstrated in this thread is the belief that scientific inquiry should supercede journalistic malpractice. Are you saying that this is a wrong view to hold?
Your dogma is the blaming of journalism for scientific outcomes you don't like.
A simple google search can bring up a lot about the downsides to plastics in the environment that are well researched and well written. However you would pan all such as "dogma", because you would rather explain away the negative affects of plastics in the environment, especially towards marine life.
So the dogma I see is your blame of journalism for things you don't agree with.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Membrane BioReactor sewage treatment plants do not allow these micro plastics to get through. Fixed.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
He's denialist faggot scum it's time to murder this lying cunt for the good of the planet.
Chemists worked out how to make plastics.
Now their job is working out how to fully biodegrade plastics.
If they could be degraded into something safe and useful, all the better.
Go well
Sad but true. You can read my research at https://midnightpapers.com/.
I can only get exercised by Big Plastic! Micro plastic is boring and unacceptable!!
That's interesting, considering that journalism even in this story tries to spin statements of the scientist into something they're not, and I'm debunking it literally using the quotes from the scientist.
I'm going to guess you're one of those dogmaic people, who think that when scientist disagrees with you in the story and journalist agrees, journalist actually knows the science and scientist can be safely ignored. Good luck with that.