nanoplastics
The nurdle hunters: is combing UK beaches for tiny bits of plastic a waste of time?
More than 170 tons of plastic particles are floating in the world’s oceans – and millions of them wash up on our shores.
Tiny plastic particles have reached clouds, contaminating ‘everything we eat’ via rain, study warns
Airborne plastic particles in cloud water could impact rapid cloud formation and potentially affect the climate
How plastics are poisoning us
Plastics release and attract toxic chemicals, and appear everywhere from human placentas to chasms thirty-six thousand feet beneath the sea. Will we ever be rid of them? Elizabeth Kolbert writes for The New Yorker
In a nutshell:
Born in 1865 out of a quest to eliminate elephant ivory from the billiard ball supply chain, plastics are now being spewed forth at an annual production volume of over eight hundred billion pounds. As plastics break down into microplastics and disperse, they make their way to the most distant parts of our planet as well as infiltrating the internal organs of species up and down the food chain. No amount of recycling, reusing or repurposing is going to solve the plastics problem.
Key quote:
“So long as we’re churning out single-use plastic . . . we’re trying to drain the tub without turning off the tap,” Matt Simon writes. “We’ve got to cut it out.”
Big picture:
Reducing plastic pollution cannot be seriously entertained without a commitment to reducing, if not eliminating, plastic production; and that in turn would involve a winding down of the petrochemical industry at precisely the point in time when Big Oil, faced with an energy transition to renewables, is looking to plastics as one of the mainstays of future profits. The oil and gas industry, protected by massive political might and bankrolled by decades of record profits and willing financiers will not go quietly.
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How plastics are poisoning us
They both release and attract toxic chemicals, and appear everywhere from human placentas to chasms thirty-six thousand feet beneath the sea. Will we ever be rid of them?
LISTEN: The man who discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is still trying to stop ocean pollution
In 1997, Captain Charles Moore first discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” the largest accumulation of plastic waste in the ocean. Since then, scientists have documented how plastic has permanently damaged marine ecosystems and even altered evolution — and the problem has only grown larger.
Adrienne Matei: Plastic is already in blood, breast milk, and placentas. Now it may be in our brains
The particles could be linked to cognitive impairment and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.
Animals are migrating to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
The oceanic soup of plastic fragments is becoming a new kind of ecosystem.
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