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Show Me the Seas of Plastic!
All of this kerfuffle over plastic straws, pollution of plastics, etc… hides a fundamental problem: the oceans do not have a problem with plastic! There are no massive floating islands of plastic bottles and straws or anything else. The ocean breaks plastic down, bacteria live on the stuff, and it all goes back into the food chain, with no lasting impacts at all. Arguably, as plastics sustain other life forms, putting plastic into the ocean may well enhance aquatic life. And it all happens very quickly — days and weeks, not millennia.
Here’s my challenge: Are there any satellite or aerial photos showing the seas choked with human-produced garbage? (There are some staged photos.) Or has the “Party of Science” once again created a crisis from whole cloth? And if so, we should be making this the core argument: Just as CO2 is plant food, plastics may be sea food.
Published in General
Yeah, I’d like some more information on this too.
I think I read somewhere that the plastic breaks down on a macro-level, but the plastic molecules are still around and cause some harm to something or other.
Yeah, I know I’m not very informative. That’s sort of the point. I’d like to be informed!
There’s always the “pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness,” the bronze sea, and the sea of glass.
There are two kinds of “science” in America today. There is traditional science, where scientists gather evidence, conduct tests, and make all of their data public so that it can be reviewed and replicated by other scientists. And then there is lefty science, where the Washington Post interviews five lefties with advanced degrees in something or other, and then proclaims that there is a “consensus” in the scientific community and that the time for debate is over.
According to the very informative article linked in the OP most plastics do degrade and/or biodegrade, an important exception being PVCs. Information like this is helpful in re-educating those who are too quick to use psuedo-science as a cudgel to ‘reform’ our collective behavior. Unfortunately most media outlets, including websites, see little value in correcting their click-bait misinformation stories.
And Alph, the sacred river.
This was the kind of garbage (pun intended) I was hearing in the last Buddhist community I left–seas of garbage. I can assure you that they would not be interested in these stories!
I don’t have sources – just bits and pieces from articles I’ve read over the past couple of weeks. This is my takeaway from those articles: 1) the straws that are being banned in the developed world make up an extremely small portion of the waste that winds up in the oceans, 2) the waste comes primarily from 7 river systems that drain non-developed countries, and 3) the redesigned Starbucks lid to “solve” the problem has more plastic than the old lid.
So, the cities and countries of the developed world banning straws are once gain just practicing the art of virtue signalling.
90% of the plastic in the oceans today comes from ten rivers: two in Africa (Nile and Niger) and eight in Asia (Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, Yellow, Pearl, Haihe, Mekong, and Amur). You could ban all plastic straws and plastic grocery sacks in the US and not make a dent in the total tonnage.
You know, we have a problem with media when google can’t tell us the basics of what’s going on.
My point is more basic: plastic in the ocean is gone weeks later, anyway. So where is the harm?
Indeed, the assumption that plastic in the ocean is necessarily a net negative is itself unsupported by the data we have.
Agreed, but my point is if their concerns were real (and not just an attempt to control their immediate neighbors so they can feel good about themselves) and if the threat were as dire as they claim it is then they should be advocating the occupation and colonization of the nations actually creating the pollution. If the world’s survival is really at risk is anything less than that an adequate response?
Because the West is more clean and envionmentally sound. Third world nations are cesspools
Environmental concern is a product of wealth.
And knowledge of cause and effect. Non-Western cultures don’t understand it like we do.
About ten years ago we took our boat across the Gulf Stream from Florida to the Abacos islands. We went through customs and the next day headed to a unpopulated island to anchor over night. We were traveling with our dogs. I took the dogs to the island for them to take care of business. It was a mangrove island but had many small beaches. Everywhere you looked there were flip flops. I mean not a few, maybe 50,000 of them at least. There were also many water bottles. I have no explanation for the flip flops. The island was probably 20 mile from the Gulf Stream.
So what does the actual science say about plastic in the ocean?
Where do you get your data showing that plastics in the ocean go away in weeks? Many plastics take hundreds of years to biodegrade, although the speed depends somewhat on exposure to UV radiation.
I’m in favor of doing what we can to reduce plastic waste in oceans or anywhere else. Private campaigns against drinking straws seem to me a strange place to start, and perhaps not the most effective, but I’m willing to support them at a reasonable level. I’m even willing to support government regulation that doesn’t make the deep state bigger.
I’m not willing to support silly nonsense, though.
But not in the water. The ocean degrades all the junk.
Read the link I provided. Plastic in the ocean breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. No biggie.
And it is not hard to find support for my skepticism: there are no fields of floating plastic or garbage in the open sea.
It is completely ineffective given the trivial amount of waste produced by plastic straws. It is also extremely harmful to the disabled. When my wife was ill about the only way she could drink fluids was using a bendable plastic straw. Disposable straws were cheap and sanitary.
A ban on disposable plastic straws would have made her life miserable. I never realized how important they were (I never use straws, even at restaurants) until I ended up in bed with a bad sore throat. During the worst of it the only way I could keep myself reasonably hydrated was sticking a bendable straw in a glass or bottle of water.
I normally do not use straws. I think they are silly. Yet using straws should be a personal choice. I would not impose my values or choices over something like that. Yet, to me the attempt to ban plastic straws is typical of the environmental virtue signalers. Do something completely useless that will make the lives of disabled people even more miserable than they currently are. And the banners will get to feel soooo good about themselves.
Please read the link I shared. Sunlight and seawater and all the goodies in that brew do the trick. Which is why for all the press about plastic in the oceans, nobody can find actual supporting pictures.
Sodium chloride in solution in water is a phenomenal solvent.
I haven’t the faintest.
A census of the free-floating plastic in the Pacific Ocean found that almost half of it was itty bits of fishing nets, and most of the rest is other fishing gear.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a19574763/garbage-patch-fishing/
Many people in certain 3rd world [redacted]-holes believe that drinking through a straw is more sanitary. My guess is that they have a point. When in Rome…
Easy solution: Don’t ban disposable, bendable straws.
I read the article. It was informative and level-headed. I wish you would read it, too.
Except that is exactly what they are trying to ban.
The straws you get in most fast food places are not the bendable kind.