This article is astounding. There is a giant swirling soup of plastic particles poisoning the aquatic food chain.
There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea turtle with
a plastic band [it got caught in as a youngster] strangling its shell into an hourglass shape; a humpback
towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh and make it impossible for
the animal to hunt. More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine
mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either
from mistakenly eating this junk or from being ensnared in it and
drowning.
[....]
He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and
arrived at the following conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea
contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.
This statistic is grim—for marine animals, of course, but even more so
for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more
likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and
disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly, and
that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene
activity. “Every one of us has this huge body burden,” Moore says. “You
could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100
industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950.” The fact that these
toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean
they’re benign: Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term
ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own
biochemistry.
And it just gets scarier. Here's a few more choice tidbits. On the specific threats to children:
Dr. Goldstein also notes that pregnant women are particularly
vulnerable: “Prenatal exposure, even in very low doses, can cause
irreversible damage in an unborn baby’s reproductive organs.” And after
the baby is born, he or she is hardly out of the woods. Frederick vom
Saal, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia who
specifically studies estrogenic chemicals in plastics, warns parents to
“steer clear of polycarbonate baby bottles. They’re particularly
dangerous for newborns, whose brains, immune systems, and gonads are
still developing.” Dr. vom Saal’s research spurred him to throw out
every polycarbonate plastic item in his house, and to stop buying
plastic-wrapped food and canned goods (cans are plastic-lined) at the
grocery store.
On the disposal issue:
Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very
small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,” Moore says,
describing how the material’s molecular structure resists
biodegradation. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as
it’s exposed to sunlight and the elements. And none of these untold
gazillions of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: Even when plastic
is broken down to a single molecule, it remains too tough for
biodegradation.
Truth is, no one knows how long it will take for plastic to biodegrade,
or return to its carbon and hydrogen elements. We only invented the
stuff 144 years ago, and science’s best guess is that its natural
disappearance will take several more centuries. Meanwhile, every year,
we churn out about 60 billion tons of it, much of which becomes
disposable products meant only for a single use. Set aside the question
of why we’re creating ketchup bottles and six-pack rings that last for
half a millennium, and consider the implications of it: Plastic never
really goes away.
And don't even get me started on the nurdles.
