NEWS: It's a Plastic Fantastic World!

I like to think of myself as a fairly well-informed person. But this . . . I had no clue. Thanks?

Oh, and "nurdle" is my new favorite word.

Holy garbage, that's disgusting.

Thanks for the article. Like Squire said, I had no frakking idea.

My first reaction to the article was "I'm going to cut back on the amount of plastic I use!"

But then I realized how much of my stuff is plastic. At least half the stuff sitting on my desk contains at least some plastic.

I'm definitely going to be a lot more careful with the stuff that I buy.

I remember seeing footage of the garbage patch about a year ago. Fucking mind boggling is what it is.

If you want to look at this gyre through a larger lens, I recommend you read The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. The book focuses on what would happen if we all suddenly disappeared.

Long story short, we done fucked up the planet. It is believed that this plastic will continue to pollute the food chain until some organism evolves to the point that it can eat these tiny bits of plastic, as a source of nutrition, not pollution. How long do you think that will take?

People might as well stop having kids, because there isn't going to be anything left for them to eat, drink, or breathe.

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

yeah, I know I'm exagerating, but if sometimes feels like it

coyotemike said:
People might as well stop having kids, because there isn't going to be anything left for them to eat, drink, or breathe.

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

yeah, I know I'm exagerating, but if sometimes feels like it

People should stop having kids because of human over-population, which is one of the causes of the problem.

Eventually, we'll all get shrugged off this planet.

Oil, plastic, global climate change, food shortages..... all connected people.


ps- Thanks, Flux, for keeping us informed. These things need to stay at the forefront of our conciousness, so that we don't "out of sight, out of mind".

this is just mind blowing. holy crap. i know landfill would be the lesser of 2 evils here methinks.

Someone told me about Garbage Island and I thought he ws joking or quoting an urban myth. I wish I'd been right.

You know, ecological destruction won't be solved by science. It's a problem of the human heart, and until we are willing not to let people starve in other countries so that we can grow biodiesel crops on their lands, we are all fucked. Like, prison rape fucked.

I gave up on humanity a long time ago. Somewhere around the introduction of "Lunchables" and/or the concept of bottled water.

It's water. In a little plastic bottle. That costs more than gas. Anyone see a problem here???

love it. hahaha....

GILLIGAN!!!



(to hell in a plastic handbasket)

Wow. This is quite depressing. I hate plastic now.

I am surprise that people don't know, I have known for years and I know Greenpeace has been on about it for some time. You would think this would make the news more often.

Also there are several more.

This was brought to my attention a while ago, it is trully shocking. The beeb recently featured some stories about it, and awareness over here the UK is growing. One significant contributor is single use plastic grocery bags, which there are now moves to restrict or ban in the UK, though we are definitely trailing others in the regulation of this kind of pollution. And everyone should already be recycling plastic bottles, right?

The things that we humans do to the sea are truly horrifying. Especially becasue there's really no good reason for it, it's just our laziness and greed. Dragnets that scrape the sea floor and destroy all living things on it (which the fishing industry calls "bycatch" and just throws back becasue it has no "economic value", even though its already dead), pollution by fertilizers and other man-made chemical nutrients that creates huge dead zones of hypoxic water where nothing can live, 100 to 200 million sharks killed every year just for their fins, the rest of the body thrown back into the water (often alive) agan because it has no "economic value." I could go on and on.

Maybe we'll be lucky someday and some naturally-occurring bacteria (like Flavobacterium) will finally evolves to eat all of the plastic that we have littered the world with. Maybe the Earth will be even luckier and that bacterium will continue to evolve to eat humans as well and rid the planet of the pestilence that we are.

Voting for Obama isn't going to do shit for the environment.

As long as we leave environmental matters in the federal government's inept, oily hands, we will continue to see this kind of muck spread. The only positive thing to do is what we've always been told: Reduce, Re-use, and Recycle. Don't leave it up to government.

Yep, we're a pestilence alright. Vote Obama!

which would be awesome if anyone knew what it meant...
elitist!

Ooh Ooh! I know! Pick me, pick me!!! Teacher! I know!!!!

Kiss-ass

I heard about this in an anthropology class a while ago when we were talking about possible hypotheses for the spread of early apes and monkeys westward to the "new world." Apparently a lot of the grist of the hypothesis is based on the weirdly adapted eco-system (if it can even be called such) of the garbage in the Pacific.

Naturally, it's hard to swallow families of monkeys or apes making the trip on floating debris across an ocean, even given the narrower Atlantic ocean of ten million years ago.

...and speaking of millions of years? That's about how long speciation to select for digestion of microscopic plastic would take. It wouldn't take long for bacteria or the like (and may well have already happened, based on some other research in that area that I've read) but for it to move much higher on the food chain (complex animals that can make use of what the microscopic creatures convert the plastic into) would easily take "a very long time."