In 2023, 221 shipping containers were lost at sea, out of a total of 250 million shipped. That's a loss rate of 0.000088%.
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.
A plastic pellet is typically 3-5mm in diameter. I think I'd notice that in my food. Even if I did enjoy swallowing fish guts whole, a plastic pellet is just going to pass straight through my digestive system.
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.
Well, probably not the nurdles themselves unless they're scooped from the oceans and used as a food additive, but they'll break down into microplastics and enter the food chain that way. The damage of said microplastics is still being researched, at the moment (I believe) it's still fairly vague, not unlike asbestos or smoking. IIRC they have been found to mimic hormones though.
Wow, Texas seems to be one of the worst offenders here. How do you collect close to 1000 nurdles in 10 minutes? Do people wade through them on the beach?
That doesn’t necessarily mean they are all coming from Texas though does it? It could mean ocean currents are carrying them there. I think the idea here is we have maps of ocean currents and can trace them to their likely source.
Imagine a beach completely consisting of nurdles. Imagine an ecosystem of bacteria, microorganisms, fish and other seafood creatures adapted to living on it. I feel like as humanity we could totally reach a point where evolution to that kind of ecosystem becomes the only choice. Same for our immune, digestive and lymph system. We could end up at a point where most of life NEEDS microplastic to survive! Then we can finally stop caring about micro plastics and start loving them instead.
"Evolve" here is a neat word for "countless trillions of creatures die preventable deaths or otherwise fail to reproduce over geological time". If your terminal goal is to "finally stop caring about micro plastics" rather than "protect Earth's existing ecosystem", why wait? Just nuke the planet to glass. Microplastic worry over.
(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.)
There's a broad read on the definition of "social Darwinism" I like to remember.
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.
I think the good news is that we can adapt to enjoy how warm it is in hell. So it’s bad news that we’re going to hell, good news is that we’ll eventually like it.
The trouble with that notion is this: imagining that a plastic-based ecosystem arises (horrifying thought!) it means that there are life-forms capable of deriving energy from plastics, breaking them down. That makes plastics useless to us humans, because any time we try to use plastics for all the things we currently do with them, those life-forms are going to come along and attack, break down the stuff we deem "useful plastics"; the critters will make no distinction between nurdles lost on the beach and the plastics holding your car/house/clothes/aeroplane together. i.e. It's Game Over for plastics use.
I mean sure, with issues like plastics, global warming, ozone layer hole, melted polar caps, extreme weather events, bug collapse, etc etc etc, life will find a way. It's not a "final" extinction event per se, nor one as catastrophic as the meteor strike from back when.
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.
Fast forward to that future, someone says: imagine a world where we don't have to live in our own waste ... how much more efficient would our biology be?
Readit News
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.
https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
Nurdles are everywhere... https://www.nurdlehunt.org.uk/nurdle-finds.html
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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.