Plastic. Fantastic?
Can we learn to live with (and even love) plastic?
As the most visible evidence of a disposable, trash-addled society, plastic has become the emblem of a world swimming in waste. Reportedly, plastic shopping bags are used an average of just 12 minutes before being thrown away. Every year, more than 500 billion plastic bags are discarded worldwide; they wave from tree branches so abundantly that South Africans have dubbed them their "national flower," and no fewer than six countries have enacted bans. ... Full Story »
Posted by Kaizar Campwala
In the embedded article "Where plastics go to kill", micro plastic was mentioned. It is produced on high energy beaches where the plastic detritus is ground finer and finer and then refloated to drift, suspended in the top few tens of meters of the ocean. Zooplankton which ingest these particles die if they can't pass them through their gut. This could be a major disrupter of the food chain from phytoplankton to macrofauna in the ocean and it is long lasting. It almost seems better to burn waste plastic with all the down-side doing so entails than allow it to enter the ocean.