Microplastic
Shorthand for decomposed petroplastic.
Plastics were invented 110 years ago and have become the most extensively used materials in human life. The biggest application is packaging, followed by consumer items, building materials, automotive products, electrical products and agriculture applications. Due to the inert nature, plastics were initially thought to be harmless to organisms and large quantities of plastics were discharged into the environment, especially aquatic environment. It is estimated that 4900 million metric tons of plastic wastes were released into environment from 1950 to 2015, which induced a series of environmental problems.[1]
Snake Oil
This process is taking place all the time, in many different ways. Plastic bags drift into the ocean, where, after being tossed around by the waves and bombarded with UV radiation, they fall apart. Tires today contain a wide variety of plastics; as they roll along, they abrade, sending clouds of particles spinning into the air. Clothes made with plastics, which now comprise most items for sale, are constantly shedding fibres, much the way dogs shed hairs. A study published a few years ago in the journal Nature Food found that preparing infant formula in a plastic bottle is a good way to degrade the bottle, so what babies end up drinking is a sort of plastic soup. In fact, it is now clear that children are feeding on microplastics even before they can eat. In 2021, researchers from Italy announced that they had found microplastics in human placentas. A few months later, researchers from Germany and Austria announced that they’d found microplastics in meconium—the technical term for an infant’s first poop.
... As plastics fall apart, the chemicals that went into their manufacture can leak out. These can then combine to form new compounds, which may prove less dangerous than the originals—or more so. A couple of years ago, a team of American scientists subjected disposable shopping bags to several days of simulated sunlight, in order to mimic the conditions that they’d encounter flying or floating loose. The researchers found that a single bag from CVS leached more than thirteen thousand compounds; a bag from Walmart leached more than fifteen thousand....
Microplastics, meanwhile, don’t just leach nasty chemicals; they attract them. “Persistent bioaccumulative and toxic substances,” or PBTs, are a hodgepodge of harmful compounds, including DDT and PCBs. Like microplastics, which are often referred to in the scientific literature as MPs, PBTs are everywhere these days. When PBTs encounter MPs, they preferentially adhere to them. “In effect, plastics are like magnets for PBTs” is how the Environmental Protection Agency has put it. Consuming microplastics is thus a good way to swallow old poisons. [2]
Cloud Pollution
Japanese scientists have found between 6.7 and 13.9 pieces of microplastic in each litre of cloud water tested. “If the issue of ‘plastic air pollution’ is not addressed proactively, climate change and ecological risks may become a reality, causing irreversible and serious environmental damage in the future,” lead author of the research, Hiroshi Okochi of Waseda University, warned in a statement to Al Jazeera on September 27, 2023.[3]
Sources
- ↑ Fang Wang, Bin Wang, Lei Duan, Yizhe Zhang, Yitong Zhou, Qian Sui, Dongjiong Xu, Han Qu, Gang Yu, Occurrence and distribution of microplastics in domestic, industrial, agricultural and aquacultural wastewater sources: A case study in Changzhou, China, Water Research, Volume 182, 2020, 115956, ISSN 0043-1354, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2020.115956.
- ↑ Elizabeth Kolbert, "How Plastics Are Poisoning Us" in _The New Yorker_, 26 June 2023 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/03/book-reviews-plastic-waste
- ↑ https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/28/japanese-scientists-find-microplastics-are-present-in-clouds