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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.
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That is because they are more expensive. If you ban non-bendable straws, based on demand for straws, fast food places will replace them with bendable ones.
They might. But if they offer a paper straw option, I’ll take that. If they make it illegal for fast food places to give out any plastic straws, then I’ll take some of the bendable ones with me if I again have to care for people who need the bendable ones. If they try ban the manufacture and sale of such straws, I would have to oppose it.
No need to get snarky! That article wrote:
and
You had written:
So I referred you to the article, which you say you have read, and which you found informative.
Where is the disconnect?
This is fascinating. This myth has been out there for at least twenty years. I got sucked into it too. I’ve been horrified by the pictures of the floating islands of plastic trash.
Thank you.
There is no honor in a den of Democrats.
I understand that localized collections of things may occur when a shipping container falls overboard from a container ship. So, maybe a container of flip-flops being shipped from manufacturing in China to be sold in the US fell overboard. I also understand that scientists follow those overboard container contents to learn about ocean currents.
Why ban plastic straws in the first place? The environmental result of banning them is trivial. The expense and inconvenience is noticeable. The only purpose it serves is to force participation in a weird ritual for a religion to which I do not belong. Oh yes – and having the government intrude further into my life with meaningless laws which then have to be amended to take care of the unintended hardships those meaningless and useless laws cause.
Nothing there supports your statement that plastics in the ocean go away in weeks.
I would not object vey strenuously to such a ban, at last not at local levels, and would not object to your efforts to oppose one on those grounds. But I would be glad to see the mass use of such drinking straws go away.
Not specifically. Here is some specific information on bacteria found in the ocean:
More on it here.The bacteria were found in the ocean.
What fascinates me is that nobody really seems to want to know. After all, this is an easy test: put a transponder in a closed 2 litre bottle, and drop it somewhere far from shore. See how long it takes for the bottle to break down enough to flood (and terminate) the signal.
But I cannot find a single example of this experiment having run…. which makes me think the answer is truly inconvenient.
I am so glad for this myth-dispelling post.
Intuitively, it makes sense that plastic, an oil-based compound, would eventually break down because of the discovery ExxonMobil made in finding a way to remediate oil spills in the ocean. They found microbes that consumed it. If oil was a liquid rock, the microbes wouldn’t have been able to digest it.
If oil is actually an organic substance after all–and why wouldn’t it be if the theory that it was the result of dinosaurs’ extinction as well as several million years of the decay of organic matter–then its decay will follow the rules of decomposition.
That said, I’m waiting for the scientific community to decide that their understanding of “organic” and “inorganic” is screwed up to begin with. There is something in between those two things that has characteristics of both. And that’s where oil is. (This learning curve existed in biology. Biologists believed that there were two types of organisms that made animals and humans sick: bacteria and viruses. Lo and behold, there were things in between those two organisms that had characteristics of both. They had to rethink their organization chart.)
I say that oil may be something in between organic and inorganic because it makes no sense to me that oil is what remains of decomposed organic material. There’s simply too much oil for that to be true, at least in my thinking. And believing that would require that there is a uniform decomposition process that all organic life goes through upon its death, and that’s simply not true. Decomposition is very much determined by the geography of where it is happening. Furthermore, my knowledge of geology doesn’t explain where I see oil deposits–which are in some places that aren’t all that habitable by organic life. I think oil is something else entirely from what we think it is. When we understand it, it will affect our understanding of carbon molecules (and also carbon dating).
Of course the moment may come when some scientists think that oil may be the primordial soup they’ve been searching for since Darwin’s days. If it is the thing that is between rock and plant, then it would give the Big Bang Theory some energy. Maybe it is a blessing that they hate oil so much that they aren’t looking at it.
Thank you, MarciN, for a very thought-provoking post.
I concur. Together with the fact that oil deposits are under enormous positive pressure makes me think that oil is actually being produced in real-time. The amount of oil extracted from old oil wells typically is far in excess of the original estimates.
As it is, we seem to have what is practically an endless supply. We make all kinds of wonderful things from it, and when we burn it, we feed plants.
It’s all good. Until the Gaia Worshippers start making stuff up.
Let’s see if I have this right:
The industrialized world including the United States produces only 10% of the total plastic waste that goes into the ocean. Given that the US pollutes less than any major industrial nation, it probably contributes only 5% of that 10 percent – or 0.5%
Plastic straws produce a trivial percentage of the total plastic waste produced by the US. If it were more than 1/10th of 1% (or 0.1%) – and that is being generous. I suspect that plastic straws provide less than 1000th of 1% or .001%
That means plastic straws from the US produce between 0.005 to 0.00005 percent of the world’s total plastic waste.
Banning plastic straws would inconvenience hundreds of thousands of Americans (given a population of 300 million plus, I don’t think 0.1% of the population being sick enough to requires straws for drinking is unreasonable).
So, you are good with hurting several hundred thousand people in order to cut world-wide pollution by a fraction of 1% to fix a problem that may not be a problem at all? Because that is what you are saying if you want plastic straws banned for environmental reasons.
I’ve wondered about this too. In some places, the oil is under the continental crust. How did this supposed river of decomposing dinosaurs sink that far? :-)
The entire theory about “nonrenewable” oil that was promulgated during the oil-is-running-out craze never made sense to me. :-)
I think we will find that it defies all the laws of matter we know of because it is something else that is not on our present list of choices.
I am beginning to believe petroleum is the output of a process associated with plate tectonics. Organic material is moved to depths far below the surface by plate tectonics and subjected to high pressures and temperatures. They get cooked into petroleum molecules – as simple as methane and as complex as crude oil. If so, petroleum is a renewable resource (albeit on a geological scale).
That would make some sense.
I spent a year learning about plate tectonics. The evolution of our understanding of plate tectonics should be an object lesson in every science classroom. Some of the early theories were necessary stepping stones to our current understanding. Nevertheless, those theories are just plain laughable today.
I hope we see some enlightening research soon.
An accurate understanding of oil and carbon molecules will affect everything we think we know today.
As hard to believe as it is (I personally need to retire to my well worn fainting couch), yes. Yes they have.
Petroleum engineers have known that oil is a product of plate tectonics for something like 150 years. That is what makes oil findable by an understanding of geology. This article (yeah, I know it’s wikipedia, but it’s a remarkably spin-free) will tell you far more than you can stand about the geologic-time processes involved. Specifically for formations popular for fracking, but with links to all kinds of related hydrocarbon-bearing geologies.
Note that deposits starts as peat-like materials near the surface, transform into progressively lighter chemistries as depth and heat increase, eventually yielding very dry natural gases at the highest underground temperatures.
No “soon” required. Oil is already classified by chemists as organic due to its carbon content, and the vast majority we can access originated as surface or marine life mixed with sediment, then transformed/trapped by a variety of geologic processes, including plate tectonics. There is evidence that some trapped dry natural gas may be sourced from the mantle, but it seems to be far less commonly found.
The understanding of oil and related molecules is wide and deep. Start with polymer chemistry to have your mind blown. The issue isn’t scientific understanding of oil and other hydrocarbons, but the willful non-education and mis-education of the general public in government schools.
Keep in mind that our planet’s land area is constantly being resurfaced by wind and water. Archeological researchers’ work is commonly referred to as a “dig” for the simple reason that wind-blown dust adds up to multiple feet per millennia in most of the world. “Sedimentation” doesn’t have to happen under water to give us oil-bearing rock a mile down. After a few millions of years.
I just tell them I don’t need a straw. It’s not that hard.
I think you are replying to somebody else’s comment.
Nope. You made it. It is comment 38.
Have them classified as medical devices. I haven’t heard of anybody trying to ban the sale of plastic band-aids (yet).
Then you better explain what words in that comment you were responding to, because I can’t find a match.
That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
The first report of plastics in the ocean from 1972 cited a concentration of 290 grams of plastic particles per square kilometre in the Western Sargasso Sea.
Does anybody have a citation for the current concentration of plastic particles in the Western Sargasso Sea?
I tried the website of the Sea Education Association, which conducted a voyage in 2010, but it only lists the number of particles counted, not the mass-per-square-kilometre.
A cynic might suggest that you get a more alarming stat if you report the results by number of particles rather than mass-per-square-kilometre.
Anyhoo, the 1972 study cited an average density of 3,500 “plastic particles” per square kilometre (most between 0.25 and 0.5 cm in width).
The MSM reports of the 2010 study cited a maximum density of 200,000 “pieces of debris” per square kilometre (up to 1 cm in width).
That does indeed seem like a pretty big increase, but it’s far from an apples-to-apples comparison.
Here’s a link to the 2010 paper published in Marine Pollution Bulletin. It might provide better data with which to make an apples-to-apples comparison with the 1972 study, but it’s behind a paywall and I’m a cheapskate. If anybody else wants to tackle the question, that’d be just super.
It would also be nice to know if the 2010 paper reports any empirical data on the origins of the plastic? What percentage is post-consumer vs. industrial/fishing? How much is from North America, vs. Europe, vs. Africa, vs. the Caribbean/Central America, etc.
You won’t find any hard numbers, because whatever hard numbers there might be, do not support the hysteria. It is the same reason nobody will admit to putting a tracker in a closed 2 liter bottle to see how long it takes to start to leak once it is in the sea.
I don’t want to sound as if I am minimizing ocean pollution. I don’t like it, and I’ve never understood who had the bright idea of dumping city sewage in the same ocean I get cod, halibut, and haddock from.
But the plastic island hoax is annoying, and it is the kind of thing that drives sane people away from conservation causes.
Everything we do should be evaluated from a cost-benefit perspective. Environmentalism is about choices. Is it a waste of water for me to water my new birch tree? In and of itself, it might appear to be. But where I live on Cape Cod, we have too many scrub pines and pine oaks and not enough tree diversity. Keeping my birch tree alive is a good thing to do for the sake of the wildlife and botanical diversity on Cape Cod’s uplands.
This article gives an idea of the state of research on the subject. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep23501
I think it would be good if both sides f this issue would quit making stuff up, or at least carefully distinguish conjecture from established facts.