Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
This is true that the descriptions of the "great garbage patch" make it sound like you can walk across it in rubber galoshes.
With that said, the magnitude of plastic being everywhere is well-documented.
Forget the big documentaries or other "propaganda" out there. Just walk around outside in your own neighborhood with a plastic bag for a while. Go to a nearby park or subdivision's "common area" - and pick up every piece of plastic you find. You'll be surprised just how quickly the bag fills up with everything from bottlecaps, car fender chips, McDonald's happy meal toy parts, straws, and all manner of unidentifiable plastic shards.
If those plastic pieces are in the oceans, in the ground, etc. in the same magnitude (or worse), then the scale of the problem isn't being overstated by environmentalists.
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.
There has been some controversy surrounding the use of the term "garbage patch" and photos taken off the coast of Manila in the Philippines in attempts to portray the patch in the media often misrepresenting the true scope of the problem and what could be done to solve it. Angelicque White, Associate Professor at Oregon State University, who has studied the "garbage patch" in depth, warns that "the use of the phrase 'garbage patch' is misleading. ... It is not visible from space; there are no islands of trash; it is more akin to a diffuse soup of plastic floating in our oceans." In the article Dr. White and Professor Tamara Galloway, from the University of Exeter, call for regulation and cleanup and state that the focus should be on stemming the flow of plastic into the ocean from coastal sources.[49]
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) agrees, saying:
While "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" is a term often used by the media, it does not paint an accurate picture of the marine debris problem in the North Pacific Ocean. The name "Pacific Garbage Patch" has led many to believe that this area is a large and continuous patch of easily visible marine debris items such as bottles and other litter—akin to a literal island of trash that should be visible with satellite or aerial photographs. This is not the case.
—Ocean Facts, National Ocean Service[50]
from Wikipedia.
Also, when you say "pacific plastic mire", I think you mean North Pacific Gyre.
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.
Plasticizers, cross-linkers, photosensitizers etc... there are all kinds of chemicals that go into plastics
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
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.
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.
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!
scientists say it's microscopic which they always conveniently fail to mention when talking about the magnitude of this problem.
I think you'll find scientists saying it's microscopic IS the magnitdue of the problem.
If only environmentalists didn't have a proven track record of deliberately overstating threats in order to get the outcomes they desired, we might be able to believe them. As it is, we must require extraordinary evidence before believing any of their claims. They're about as credible as the mainstream media at this point, sadly. If only they hadn't pissed their trustworthiness away in a poorly considered series of artificial crises that were later proven false. The whole planet will suffer due to their misdeeds. :(
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Do you also believe the earth is flat because you can put a ruler to the ground and not see an obvious curve?
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.
Well...
8 billion tons of plastic, worst case (assuming all plastics ever made are now microplastic pieces in the oceans).
1.33 billion cubic kilometers of oceans.
So, absolute worst case is 6 tons of plastic per billion tons of ocean.
Alas, 0.006 ppm isn't nearly as scary as 8 billion tons made!!!
And that 0.006 ppm ignores that a significant fraction of that plastic is NOT in the oceans in microscopic chunks or otherwise....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Doesn't the fact that age is going up in countries have more to do with infectious disease and food supply?
I don't think the health benefits or detractions of plastics have much to do with the arc of increasing lifespans as much as better sanitation and medical care.
However, perhaps dumping lots of plastics into the food chain could have increasing and longer term effects now and in the future on not just humans but all life on our planet.
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.
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
Just walk around outside in your own neighborhood with a plastic bag for a while.
I can vouch for this activity. I've walked numerous beaches on the east coast of the US/Mid-Atlantic with a bag and after travelling maybe 1000 ft, it was FULL with all manner of plastics. The great plastic garbage patch is no hoax.
The first story linked in the OP quotes a specialist saying that even the plastic garbage in the ocean sheds those additives as it gets into millimetre range.
No, unlike the idiots who can't even read the story linked in the OP, which clearly confirms my point even as reporter desperately tries to conflate plastic trash with microplastics, it clearly states that the additives, which are the substances that might potentially have some metabolic effect, get shed by plastic once it gets small enough.
And plastic is metabolically intert. I stand by my views, unlike all the ACs spamming garbage that keeps conflating things to make this environmentalist false outrage of the year to sell views. Comes with the fact of being an engineer. You actually read things linked, instead of just knee jerking.
Actually that is the tolerance of environmentalist movement. These are the people who were attacking relevant scientists for decades at this point for daring to investigate the issues being raised by them instead of just buying their doomsaying as is.
I suspect that much of the modern far left that has problems with the issues you mentioned would still have problems with how these people act.
Those of us living in first-world countries know how long 5mm is, thank you very much.
#DeleteFacebook
The first story linked in the OP quotes a specialist saying that even the plastic garbage in the ocean sheds those additives as it gets into millimetre range.
It doesn't get to a certain size and then all that stuff immediately jumps out and disappears. For one thing, it goes into the oceans, where it can be concentrated by various processes. For another, it doesn't dissipate all at once. And millimeter range is precisely where it can be consumed by marine life, and shed those additives into whoever eats it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's a poorly written article. Bisphenol-A is the main component of polycarbonate plastics and exists as residual monomer... so they are always part of the plastic. Every time the plastic particle is abraded or broken it releases more Bisphenol-A into the environment. There is no way to separate the two.
love is just extroverted narcissism
These are two energy-intensive isotopes that we have large stockpiles of as a byproduct of exploiting other, more immediately useful materials. Breeder reactors can convert these into new fission fuels. It all depends on how serious we want to get about this carbon problem.
Way to completely miss several key points from my original post anonymous coward. What your posting is the effects of 3rd world locals dumping their trash in the ocean. This has NOTHING to do with the plastic talked about in the main article or my post.
Thankfully science has never been wrong, over stated, and all of those who keep voting you up can't see it either!
Here's what you'll actually see in the middle of the pacific https://aquariumworks.org/2017...
Wow! A single patch of scum for 1000 nautical miles! Maybe charter a boat outside of your 3rd world carribbean bath tub sometime sushine and see that your over stated Hondoran trash problem is just that... Overstated.
And vote me down mods, I've got karma to burn going against your, "science has never been wrong" group think!
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.
So I'm afraid you have to pick one. You can't have it both ways.
So when I read your post, with ultimatum style rhetoric like that, in the context of micro plastics in the environment, I couldn't help but come to the conclusion that you sir are a micro plastics apologist. And no, I'm not being facetious.
I can see from your posts that you see it differently, but in my opinion, and in the opinion of scientists of all fields, plastics in the environment, whether micro or not, are not a good thing. Actually, plastics in the environment are detrimental to life in general. There is no debate about this.
So actually, the only thing that is irrelevant are your weak attempts to "normalize" plastics in the environment.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
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
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
No, as it gets to certain size, the amount of grinding apparently gets it off. By the time its in the millimetre range, it's gone.
You're also consistently missing the point. I am in completely agreement, as you can see in my opening post, that plastic garbage swallowed by marine life is a problem. I can actually talk in length on the subject, likely beyond overwhelming majority of the posters here, ranging from how the chain actually works to the source of the said plastic and the economic realities as to why Western crowds wanting to reduce this problem is not going to accomplish anything - they're a source for but a tiny and largely irrelevant fraction of the problem. And we don't really have any way of reducing the problem where it matters without exposing billions of people to risk of infection, disease, poisoning and death that they had a few decades ago, when death toll was in millions yearly by most optimistic numbers. Problems that have been largely negated in last few decades specifically because of proliferation of plastic packaging.
What I'm pointing out that is that plastic garbage problem is not the same thing as microplastics problem. Those are intentionally conflated in the media to get views. These are two completely different problems, with different causes and different effects, none of which overlap to any meaningful degree.
Pretty much every article I've read on this topic so far has been poorly written, because they all focus on scaring people, rather than conveying the facts which are generally far less scary.
So the obvious question becomes, what kind of concentrations of it do we need to observe meaningful negative impact on humans?
My understanding is that whatever traces remain (and there obviously will remain some traces of it) are likely harmless. To my understanding, the actual damage to sea life is done mechanically, not metabolically.
And whatever damage is done metabolically is likely being done many times over by our exposure to plastics on daily basis. Considering that we are more healthy than ever on average, it would appear that whatever their negative effects may be, they are massively overshadowed by the positives, such as affordable reduction of bacterial content in food due to lack of oxygen and such.
Sure, but plastics ending up in marine life cause many other problems, as I have pointed out and are easily searchable on the internet.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
So in your view, if someone takes two separate problems, who have two completely different causes and two completely different effects, and points out that those are in fact not the same problem... they an apologist for one or both of the problems.
Do you realise just how absurd you sound?
No, as it gets to certain size, the amount of grinding apparently gets it off. By the time its in the millimetre range, it's gone.
That's not how it works. It doesn't get ground off. It gets separated by chemical attack, or by UV. By the time it's in the millimeter range, probably most of it has been detached by UV bombardment. But UV penetrates water poorly, rapidly being absorbed by water molecules. The heavier plastics, which don't ride on the surface of the water, can still contain additives.
And we don't really have any way of reducing the problem where it matters without exposing billions of people to risk of infection, disease, poisoning and death that they had a few decades ago, when death toll was in millions yearly by most optimistic numbers. Problems that have been largely negated in last few decades specifically because of proliferation of plastic packaging.
Of course we do. For example, we could actually recycle, even when it's not profitable. And we could pass laws requiring marking all plastic parts for recycling. There's tons and tons of blister packs and bags which could be recycled if they were only marked. We could bake the recycling cost into the products at the time of sale with a tax, as California does with electronics, which would wind up accounted for in the cost of products and which would naturally induce customers to purchase goods in more easily-recycled packaging. These measures would not solve the problem completely, but they would help mitigate it (as you say we cannot do.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So I just found three posts made by you answering different posts by me in this thread. This is the third I'm going through. I answered first two I went through assuming honest misunderstanding on your part. However at this point, all of them, 3/3 have contained a lie about my views, dressed up to look as if you're a reasonable poster.
I'll give you a chance to prove yourself as something other than a malicious actor in those messages. Here, I'll simply dismiss you with "three separate lies in three different answers is enough for me to stop assuming anything but malice on your part and stop taking you seriously".
I suspect that much of the modern far left that has problems with the issues you mentioned would still have problems with how these people act.
And your politicizing of this issue is why you fail to see the problem right in front of you. It matters not whether you voted for Trump of Clinton. The problem of plastics in the environment is not going away anytime soon, unless science finds a quick and easy way to correct our mistakes.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Your first part appears to be an agreement masked as disagreement, as you essentially agree with my premise, and merely disagree on technical detail (grinding vs chemical/UV separation). And I continue to insist, as I have from the first post (seriously, why are you all pretending this part of the post is not there) that there's a genuine problem with sea life swallowing plastic garbage. You're appear to be fighting against imaginary enemy here. I am in full agreement that this is a problem, and have been from the start.
My problem is and remains the conflation of the two separate, different problems, because I see this as continuation of the absurd fear mongering commonly done in media on environmentalist issues, rather than addressing them on their actual merits. There are genuine problems. We should look into addressing them. Problem with plastics garbage problem, is that there's very little that Western world can do about it. It's literally not the problem caused by us. between 80 and 90% of the plastic garbage that ends up in the oceans comes from ten great rivers in the world. Of these, zero are in North America and zero are in Europe. Two are in Africa and eight are in Asia.
We're simply insignificant, and this isn't a problem we're causing. As such, everything you're suggesting would at best reduce our part of the load, which is barely above ten percent of total. All the while the problem in developed world keeps growing, because they keep pulling more and more people out of poverty and misery.
This is probably the first issue related to environmentalism where developed countries will have to spearhead the development. And that will not happen because unlike us, they're overwhelmingly pragmatic rather than dogmaic. They will not do anything about the problem, until it's more detrimental to them than beneficial. And considering what would happen to poor in developing countries across Asia and Africa rivers, where most of the plastic garbage originates, should price of plastic packaging actually go up, it will take some actually serious consequences rather than inane moaning by people utterly removed from reality of the world to get them to change their ways.
Essentially, we should do our part, but in the current situation, once you actually identify the problem correctly on this issue, you have to concede that there's little to nothing we as Westerners can do about it even if we all came together and somehow managed to completely stop the flow of our plastic waste into the oceans. Whatever reduction we can accomplish in total would be worth a few years of growth in the rest of the world.
And as far as we know, the clothing fibres problem that was called "microplastics" in the original study that started the conflation trend in media some months ago are not a problem at all. They're utterly metabolically inert and mechanically too small to cause any harm. Which is good, because the concentrations of those things people have in them are meaningful. But having meaningful concentrations of harmless substance in your that you cannot see and that can penetrate your cells with ease is being conflated with a genuine problem of plastic garbage in the oceans, and masked as one problem.
Which is my point, and which I have to re-iterate again. We went from "all penetrating inert substance we can't see" and "non-penetrating substance we can see that can cause harm" to "all penetrating substance that we may or may no see that can cause harm". Do you see how conflation of two separate issues into one blows the issue completely out of proportions?
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
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
Here, I'll simply dismiss you with "three separate lies in three different answers is enough for me to stop assuming anything but malice on your part and stop taking you seriously".
If you wanted to dismiss me you wouldn't have gone to such lengths. And why the quotes?
Anyway, perhaps you can stay on target, which is the effects of plastics on marine life.
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 *
This was my feeling exactly. I'm sorry, these leftists are terrifying people. All they think of is murder, mayhem, and destruction.
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/.
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.
>Science has shown that micro plastics, micro fibers and micro beads are detrimental to marine life
Science has shown no such thing. Science has shown however that plastic garbage, once it gets small enough, is.
The current environmental activist journalistic project is conflating the problem of microplastics with the problem of plastic garbage. Which is why the signal to noise ratio on searches for "microplastics" has gone from what they used to mean just a few years ago to the current mishmash of microplastics and plastic garbage. Two completely separate problems conflated into one.
Which is about as anti-scientific as you can get. And when you call anti-scientific obfuscation "scientific", you reach the top level of propaganda. The Ministry of Truth level, when lie becomes true just because you keep repeating it.
If that was the target, I wouldn't care at all, because I agree, and so does the scientific consensus at the time.
The moment however you attempt to peddle a lie of "microplastics" being relevant to this problem is the moment both myself and scientific consensus will have a serious problem. Unfortunately due to activist meddling in this issue, and constant conflation of the issue of microplastics, the "all penetrating, metabolically inert and mechanically harmless particulates that come primarily off clothing in washing and drying cycles" with plastic garbage, the "non-penetrating, metabolically sometimes active and mechanically very harmful materials that come primarily from plastic packaging and various sizable plastic garbage being discarded in the rivers and then flushed down the oceans forming large garbage patches below the surface causing damage to marine life in the area", we have a problem.
I used extremely cheap (IIRC they were under $20 for ~5 meter panels) wire & brushwood fencing to cover my cyclone-wire back fence. This is not the high-quality stuff used by professional fence builders, it was the cheap crap available at discount hardware stores. Just tie it onto the cyclone fence with some fencing wire.
Dunno if they have this in the US but it's not uncommon in AU - here it's made from Ti Tree varieties (Melaleuca sp.), the same species that Ti Tree oil comes from. an extremely fast growing scrubby bush. I expect they'd use different species in other countries because it would be an environmental crime to introduce such a fast growing invasive weed to other countries.
Anyway, I knew it was cheap shit and would only last a few years but that's all it had to last for in order to provide shade and shelter from the hot & dry north wind for some creeping roses to establish themselves.
Any creeping or vine plant would do. jasmine, honeysuckle, passionfruit, whatever.
For example, the morning glory that came and completely took over the back fence, killing most of the roses. but now i have a back fence that's completely covered in morning glory with occasional roses popping out.