Nurdle Patrol(nurdlepatrol.org) |
Nurdle Patrol(nurdlepatrol.org) |
Plastic pellets are a visible pollutant on beaches. I have not seen any evidence that they're a particularly harmful pollutant. A single 20 tonne containerload of plastic pellets can leave a visible residue on hundreds or thousands of beaches, but the 15 tonnes of CO2 emitted by the average American every year is entirely invisible.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ff6c5336c885a268148b...
Additives can leach out of plastics and enter the food chain, but pellets lost at sea are a completely insignificant factor because the total volume of waste produced by this route is so small. The majority of marine plastic is either post-consumer waste dumped in rivers in developing countries, or fishing gear that is lost at sea. If you're really worried about this, then you really need to take it up with the government of the Philippines and the global fishing industry.
Nurdles are everywhere... https://www.nurdlehunt.org.uk/nurdle-finds.html
I for one love nurdles!
(A similarly nihilist viewpoint comes from the people who pontificate that "the planet will be fine, it's humans who will suffer". Sure, if by "the planet" you mean "a lump of mass orbiting the sun". Low bar for your ethical framework.)
Or highest. Puts overall species diversity ahead of the future of a single species (us).
Natural selection is a scientific concept and process. When people hijack these concepts for social or political aims, it's no longer scientific, and it's something else entirely.
But we are living in a mass extinction event. Billions of crabs died. Bug population has collapsed. Biodiversity has nosedived.
Humanity hasn't suffered yet in terms of total population, but that's because we're able to adapt our environment accordingly. That said, we will see famines and scarcities in our lifetime. Hell, we already do, but it mainly presents itself in day to day life (in "the west") as some products going out of shelves (the UK having supply problems due to brexit / long border queues) or prices spiking (e.g. produce from Ukraine). But worldwide we will see more of that.
As for (micro)plastics, IIRC we've yet to determine the full impact. But we know these nurdles break down into microplastics over time due to UV exposure and the like, but they don't disappear completely and find their way into everything. We'll only know the full impact looking back in a few hundred years.
They are a natural way to break down wood. And they can eat your house. Thus we have come up with ways to mitigate them. Now there is an entire industry around preventing termites, fixing termite damage, etc..
So, the problem is, we find some microbe that eats plastics. Boom, now we have a new problem, we need an entire industry to prevent them from eating the plastics we don't want them to eat. Think of traveling with your laptop, 'oops, got a little bit of plastic eating microbe, guess i'm buying a new laptop'
Through the mechanical grinding action of weather and tides (the same mechanisms that make sand out of rock and coral), these chunks can become much much smaller, small enough to cross the intestine into the bloodstream and small enough to cross the blood brain barrier or pass up your nose, lodging in your brain.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10141840/
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
That isn't how food processing works.
There are many steps of grinding, pulverizing, mixing, re-forming, de-forming, extruding, heating, cooling.
The 3mm plastic pellet becomes a thousand smaller bits.
Also, you'd be surprised how many bugs are in your creamed corn, and you don't notice those either.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-impor...
e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-48444874
And to just back up one of their minor points — "Recycling is a lie invented by the packaging industry"
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-...
https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
The first is that that is actually crazy late to me. Asbestos has been in use since antiquity. I am genuinely surprised that something so toxic wasn’t noticed earlier. Then again, in times where tuberculosis was common I suppose it wouldn’t have looked that odd.
The second is that you’re viewing it through a modern lens, where of course literally everyone should believe and know that it’s bad the very first time someone notices it. The reality is that it would be much more murky. I would not be at all surprised if microplastics are viewed the same way in 100 years; how could they not have immediately known it was bad? Because we need to quantify how bad, and we can’t just force feed it to people so we have to wait until we naturally get case studies.
We knew smoking was bad, we knew plastics were bad, we knew PFAS was bad.
But it’s cheaper than the alternatives, so we pretend we need studies to show “how bad exactly”. We don’t. We really, really don’t.