Plastic production is skyrocketing, pushing microplastic pollution to dangerous new levels:
Not even the Arctic Ocean is immune to the incessant growth of microplastic pollution. In a new study that analyzed sediment core samples, researchers quantified how many of the particles have been deposited since the early 1930s. As scientists have shown elsewhere, the team found that microplastic contamination in the Arctic has been growing exponentially and in lockstep with the growth of plastic production—which is now up to a trillion pounds a year, with the global amount of plastic waste projected to triple by 2060.
These researchers analyzed the seawater and sediment in the western part of the Arctic Ocean, which makes up 13 percent of its total area. But in just that region, they calculated that 210,000 metric tons of microplastic, or 463 million pounds, have accumulated in the water, sea ice, and sediment layers that have built up since the 1930s. In their study, published last week in the journal Science Advances, they cataloged 19 synthetic polymer types in three forms: fragments, fibers, and sheets. That reflects a dizzying array of microplastic sources, including fragments from broken bottles and bags and microfibers from synthetic clothing.
Overall, the team found that microplastic levels have been doubling in Arctic Ocean sediments every 23 years. That mirrors a previous study of ocean sediments off the coast of Southern California, which found concentrations to be doubling every 15 years. Other researchers have found an exponential rise in contamination in urban lake sediments.
[...] The atmosphere, too, is increasingly infested with microplastics. By one calculation, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of disintegrated plastic bottles could be falling on the United States alone. A study of a peatland area in the Pyrenees found that in the 1960s, less than five atmospheric microplastics were being deposited per square meter of land each day. It's now more like 180.
This new Arctic paper "helps to show that any increase in production is matched in the environment," says Steve Allen, a microplastics researcher at the Ocean Frontiers Institute who did the peatland study. "And as more research into human exposure comes to light, I believe the increase will also be shown in human bodies."
[...] This burden on ecosystems is why environmentalists and scientists are calling for the United Nations plastics treaty, which is currently in negotiations, to include a dramatic cap on production. In March, researchers provided hints that a cap could produce quick results: They found that although ocean microplastic levels have skyrocketed over the past 20 years, they actually fluctuated between 1990 and 2005—perhaps due to the effectiveness of a 1988 international agreement that limited plastic pollution from ships.
Kim writes that the new paper is another data point in favor of production limits: "This strongly supports the urgent need of globally concerted vigorous action to substantially reduce the plastic ocean input, and thus to protect the Arctic environment."
Journal Reference:
Seung-Kyu Kim, Ji-Su Kim, So-Young Kim, et al., Arctic Ocean sediments as important current and future sinks for marine microplastics missing in the global microplastic budget, SciAdv, 2023. DOI: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add2348
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday July 11 2023, @02:08PM (15 children)
What if we had more government . . . uh, um . . .
regulationoversight? Yeah, that's a safer word that doesn't paint me as an authoritarian communist.Maybe capitalism should not be allowed to run lose with no restraints of any kind. No boundaries all the way out to the end of the universe. Free to do whatever is most profitable. Consequences be damned.
After all, compare our wonderful American
death carehealth care system for the profit of a few.Maybe we should not be drowning in microplastics? Once upon a time, it was possible to build things without so much plastic. It was possible to have soft drinks without plastic.
Question: is there some technological fix for microplastics I am missing?
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2023, @02:21PM (6 children)
If we replaced your organs one by one with new ones, along with a change of blood, any bio-accumulated microplastics and Forever Chemicals would not be present. At least not in large amounts.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Tuesday July 11 2023, @03:20PM (2 children)
How do we manufacture new organs not already containing microplastics?
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2023, @03:53PM
You don't, but you can use BPA-free microplastics.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 14 2023, @04:26AM
FTFY.
And to your question: by just not doing that. I suppose we could even try that wild and crazy idea of regulation, should it become necessary in this situation.
(Score: 3, Touché) by PinkyGigglebrain on Tuesday July 11 2023, @03:35PM (2 children)
There are definitely people around who would benefit from getting a new brain.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 3, Touché) by BsAtHome on Tuesday July 11 2023, @04:28PM (1 child)
You assume the new brain will function better than the old one...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 11 2023, @05:51PM
Some programming languages (example: Java) allow use of Unicode characters in identifiers. If emojis are used for variable and function names, this could confuse the programming of a replacement brain.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 11 2023, @04:07PM
There's a reason the big chemical interests just settled for $10B+ on the "forever chemicals" issue: they know the true costs are far higher.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by sigterm on Tuesday July 11 2023, @05:07PM (1 child)
You don't even have to get in to the economic systems debate at all. How about: Truth in advertising, and independent scientific analysis before approval?
Because the manufacturers of plastics have always known that the material was very poorly suited for recycling, but they still touted recyclability as the major advantage of plastics compared to other materials. Perhaps somebody should have taken a closer look at this claim back in the 1970s, and perhaps the large chemical companies shouldn't have been allowed to get away with this blatant falsehood for the better part of 50 years.
Getting it out of the environment is going to be extremely difficult. Cleaning up the Pacific garbage patch may turn out to be the easiest target by far, compared to removing the plastics already embedded in all sorts of living organisms all over the globe.
A good start would be to stop all the misguided efforts to "recycle" plastics, as the processes involved generate a huge amount of microplastics which even the best filtering technologies can't prevent from being released into the environment via wastewater.
The truth is, the only sensible way to deal with used plastics is to burn it. And as you said, we managed just fine in all those years before plastics were introduced, so I'm sure we could replace most plastics with paper, cardboard, glass, and/or metals.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 11 2023, @05:19PM
>and independent scientific analysis before approval?
This whole concept of "approval" is relatively new, and has a lot less teeth to it than most people seem to think it does.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 11 2023, @05:17PM (3 children)
Plastics are, basically, a cheap by-product of the petroleum refining process.
Back when, kids' playgrounds, and major automobile components, were made from metal - because it was the cheapest and best material for the job.
Over the decades, that has evolved to become a lot of plastic, because plastics have become abundant and cheap, because they're mostly what's left over after you turn your barrel of crude into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, WD-40, etc. Not to mention: because plastics degrade more quickly than many metals and drive a replacement economy.
At least plants have developed a system to metabolize the CO2 released from burning fossil fuels.... plastics are a relatively new player in the biome. There are some plastic digesting bacteria already, but are we ready for a bloom of those bacteria sufficiently large to get the environmental plastics reduced to something acceptable to the rest of life on Earth? I'm thinking now about the "red tide" blooms in the summers off the Florida coast... that's not a fun time for anything but the blooming algae.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by istartedi on Tuesday July 11 2023, @06:48PM (2 children)
Plastics are, basically, a cheap by-product of the petroleum refining process.
I was given to understand that it was stuff that was formerly burned at the refinery because there was no use for it; but a quick search reveals that the primary feedstock is naptha, which is commonly used as a fuel for camping lanterns, lighters, etc. So it's not a waste product, it's useful which leads me to think that the market for those fuels may have been overly saturated, and the industry moved towards plastics because they would produce a high-margin product while also preventing over-supply of those fuels--a win-win from their PoV economically, but a loser for the rest of us.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 11 2023, @08:16PM (1 child)
Good points... it really hit home for me in 2003 when we got a hand-me-down backyard playset that originally sold for $59.99 at Wal-Mart, and the damn thing was 100% plastic and probably weighed 40lbs. Big plastic box the kids could hide under / stand on, slide, stairs, parapet... $59.99 manufactured and delivered in cardboard. Friends used it for a year, gave it to us, we used it for a year, gave it to friends... but how many of these things went to the landfills, washed out to sea, etc.?
https://www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134923863/moby-duck-when-28-800-bath-toys-are-lost-at-sea [npr.org]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Wednesday July 12 2023, @02:11AM
You're not the problem, at least at your scale [theverge.com]. When it comes to technology ... can evolutionary or selection adaptation (even if artificially introduced) at the cellular level count as "technology"?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 14 2023, @04:35AM
Given that capitalism is heavily regulated on Earth, maybe we need a better class of straw man in this story.
Our massively overregulated American death care health care system, that is. I find it remarkable how people can straight-faced advocate for more regulation by citing some of the worst examples possible.
Well, we aren't actually. Dose makes the poison and all that.
There's a mental fix. Less hysteria.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 12 2023, @12:52AM
Why would anyone think that the Arctic Ocean would be immune to pollution? Anyone who suffers with poor geographical awareness needs to look at a map, or a globe real quick. The Arctic borders two of the largest oceans in the world, the Atlantic and the Pacific. Currents flow into, and out of, the Arctic from both oceans.
With few exceptions, pretty much all of the world's seas and oceans are connected. Whatever we dump into one body of water, is going to spread into all of those bodies of water, given time.
We might reasonably expect that the Arctic is less polluted with some pollutants than other oceans, but it's only a matter of degree.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday July 12 2023, @01:35AM (1 child)
Some bacteria can already degrade many plastics into their constituent monomers. My idea is collecting the enzyme(s) in question made by said bacteria and using *those* to do the recycling, which would effectively give us virgin feedstock for re-manufacture. I'm thinking of some kind of fractional-distillation process to separate the different monomers by weight.
What scares me is the idea that someone will just breed a bunch of plastic-munching buggies and let them loose, where God knows they'll have more than enough food and will likely consume every last little bit of plastic there is. This is a big, big problem in cases of things like medical implants or many types of storage.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Wednesday July 12 2023, @02:13AM
Why scare yourself when you can sit back and let a professional writer [stackexchange.com] do it for you?