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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.
First result that comes up on the old Anagram Generator for "Mr Dollar Ton" is "Random Troll". No joke.
Terribly sorry to out you Mr Ton but I thought that was just too funny and you deserve recognition for your cleverness. People will forget and you may post again, I'll not reveal your secret twice. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not quite, Sparky:
"Plastic particles may highly concentrate and transport synthetic organic compounds (e.g. persistent organic pollutants, POPs), commonly present in the environment and ambient sea water, on their surface through adsorption.[43] Microplastics can act as carriers for the transfer of POPs from the environment to organisms.[23]
Additives added to plastics during manufacture may leach out upon ingestion, potentially causing serious harm to the organism. Endocrine disruption by plastic additives may affect the reproductive health of humans and wildlife alike"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I suggest a STFW if you care to know about such things as BPA, DEHP, et al. Plastics are not biologically inert.
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
The plastic polymer may be inert, but that does not apply to the additives that are mixed in with it.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/...
Compounds used to give plastics useful properties are not themselves plastics, true, but they enter the environment because they are used for that purpose and become components of the end product.
I was, until now, genuinely so ignorant that I had believed the above explanation superfluous.
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
Plasticizers, cross-linkers, photosensitizers etc... there are all kinds of chemicals that go into plastics
love is just extroverted narcissism
You wrote an expert-sounding essay on a topic like this without doing your homework on pthalates? Really??
https://www.theguardian.com/li...
As a real actual scuba diver, rather than someone who clearly pretends to be like yourself, I've seen the impact of plastic on our oceans and it is frankly tragic.
If a local public park had even a fraction of the litter that turns up on almost every reef in the world then the local residents would be in uproar about the littering of their park.
There are also plenty of pictures of the problem that trivially disprove your lies. Most beaches have local residents or local governments cleaning them regularly, this is what things look like when they don't:
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
And this is just one example of a real actual scuba diver diving in a real actual plastic island that you're downplaying as not existing:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
In terms of micro-plastics though specifically, I'm not sure I understand why the summary is pretending the reasons for plastics moving up the food chain are unknown. They're well known and well understood, there's even a common word for the effect, it's called bioamplification, where smaller creatures consume something (in this case, micro-plastics) and then larger predators eat many of these smaller things, and in turn ingest the microplastics in the smaller prey they've consumed, carry on ad-nauseum until you reach the top of the food chain. At this point there is a significant amount of evidence suggesting this is a leading cause of infertility and still births in, for example, a number of whale populations.
So kindly fuck off with your anti-science bullshit, this is a tech site and you're in the wrong place if you think this is somewhere where people want to be fed that crap.
We can see that you stand by your views, and you are entitled to them. What is galling however is that you are actually defending micro plastics in the environment. It makes me wonder what else you would defend.
I understand your method of trying to drill down to to "metabolically inert", which is actually a red herring argument. As per the article, they also mention this:
"Plastic also attracts other chemicals in the water that latch onto it, including toxic industrial compounds like polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs."
And that is really just the tip of iceberg when it comes to the detrimental effects of plastics in the environment. So for you to use a phrase like environmentalist false outrage really is beyond the pale, and indicative of either someone who is knowingly trying to mislead and deflect or knowingly ignorant.
I would guess it is the former.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range