Many people might think something as massive as the ocean is basically unlimited and that there's no way us humans could screw it up.
Not true. Take a sample of seawater from almost anywhere right now and you'll find microplastics. Something like 80% of the world's fish stocks are also gone from overfishing.
It's worse than that. It's showing up in rain and snow, and our water supply because most filtration systems don't catch micro/nanoplastics. It's in our bodies.
I think we will eventually find it's also largely responsible for the tremendous drop off in birth rates and reproductive health that the world has been experiencing the last 10+ years and possibly other neurological and "brain" issues that have increased in frequency. Infertility of people in their reproductive prime is at an all-time high. We already know BPA has a lot of these side effects.
Sorry but I can't abide the scientific ignorance being displayed all over this conversation.
(1) The first article you cite "Microplastic particles now discoverable in human organs" only announces that some scientists made a technique to discover such particles. The only ones they found were ones they inserted on purpose to verify their technique. That headline leads people strongly to incorrect conclusions like you have made. That's one of the main techniques of fake news.
(2) Fertility rate has nothing to do with how many people can't get pregnant who are trying. It's just a variation on birth rate.
(3) Mother Jones - here cited many times as factual - shows a picture of a bird with a plastic mesh around it. That is not what "toxic" is. Maybe powerful lobbyists got Canadian legislators to pretend that plastic straws are "toxic", but again that flies in the face of scientific fact.
Plastic is an amazingly inert substance that is unlikely to cause harm outside of physical constriction. In honor of this thread, I'm going to go eat a Lego. You can rest assured that I'll be back tomorrow to collect my downvotes.
>Plastic is an amazingly inert substance that is unlikely to cause harm outside of physical constriction. In honor of this thread, I'm going to go eat a Lego. You can rest assured that I'll be back tomorrow to collect my downvotes.
This also shows scientific ignorance. Some plastics can be somewhat inert (although their manufacturing process maybe embed random trash in them), but microplastics are a whole other beast. The smaller something is, the more likely its physical properties are to differ from its bigger counterpart.
Ha, your technique worked! It didn't taste like anything - one of those characteristics of non-reactive chemicals. It did get stuck in my throat on the first try, so I got it down with water like a pill. (It was one of those short/round/1-studded pieces.)
About half of the plastic in oceans is from plastic netting used fishing. And that netting causes the vast majority of ecological damage by entangling marine animals or dragging along ocean beds.
The real problem is excessive fishing and plastic waste from fishing, far more than using plastic for a cup or shopping bag.
> Something like 80% of the world's fish stocks are also gone from overfishing.
Is there an estimate that goes along with that number for when 95%+ of all fish stocks will be gone?
Given the extraordinarily fast depletion implied by the 80% figure (the vast majority of which has happened in the past century), it must be very soon. Within 10-20 years there would have to be almost no fish stocks left given the advance of world's population and its collective demand for fish.
I can't understand this perspective at all, but it seems to have been a key philosophy guiding human development for a very long time. Was it just a belief based on convenience?
Up until the time industrial revolution really started to get going, it was true. If you look at the literature, poetry or philosophy of most any culture before 1880s it’s easy to see an unwavering belief of the invincibility of Nature against mankind. Humans have always been able to alter nature, but their ability to alter Nature with the capital N is a very new thing on a geological time scale.
It's a story as old as humanity. There's many examples of humans exhausting their nearby resources because they thought they were effectively infinite. Whether that's a forest, a food stock, a water source, or something else.
Not every time, or at least the solution doesn't always result in everyone surviving. The Mayan civilization, for instance, is thought to have exhausted their local resources and fallen apart as a result.
Not true. Take a sample of seawater from almost anywhere right now and you'll find microplastics. Something like 80% of the world's fish stocks are also gone from overfishing.