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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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