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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.
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.
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".
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.
Straight from the Alternative Bio Department of Trump University.
OMFG.
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.
Yeah, because there are so many scientist who became billionaires by scamming people for grant money.
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.
Science has shown that micro plastics, micro fibers and micro beads are detrimental to marine life. What I have seen is that you are attempting to apologize for the plastics industry and sway the debate towards an acceptance of that.
People have the right to know how their choices are affecting the environment. Clear headed thinking is needed to correct the wrong choices we have made in the past as consumers.
Perhaps that is absurd to you, but that is your choice.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range