Watch This – No Don’t

Posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007

By ahedgehog

Alex Scholz

Our Synthetic Sea
One reason people avoid reading sites too focused on the environment is that they tend to go heavy on the bad news. When I saw the video that follows I almost had to laugh at the immensity of it. Another problem – almost worse than the other ones. Funny if you enjoy black humor. Maybe not, if you don’t. Researchers at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation trawled large swaths of the North Pacific Gyre with fine nets to discover that they were pulling up 6 pounds of plastic for every pound of bio-matter. The plastics aren’t biodegrading as had been popularly thought, but like diamonds, are forever.



No naturally occurring organisms can break these polymers down. Instead, plastic goes through a process called photodegredation, where sunlight breaks down plastic into smaller and smaller pieces until there is only plastic dust. But always plastic remains a polymer. When plastic debris meets the sea it can remain for centuries causing untold havoc in ecosystems and appears to be bio-accumulating toxins, and getting broken down into such tiny particles that even the smallest organisms are injesting them, causing death or further bio-accumulation up the food chain.Oil is heading up towards a $100 a barrel and petroleum based plastic isn’t going anywhere. Might be what gives us the push we need for corn based plastics to become widely used.

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  • Algilita Research Crew has Publicized New Findings, November 23rd, 2007 on 4:49 am

    [...] in less than a decade, and for those of you who may have already appreciated the black humor of Watch This – No Don’t, the results are alarming. Basically, every bit of plastic ever produced seems to be staying with [...]

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