Guest Essay by Kip Hansen
The New York Times has treated us to another episode of the Great Plastics-Last-Forever Urban Legend in their recent article “The Immense, Eternal Footprint Humanity Leaves on Earth: Plastics” by the incredible Tatiana Schlossberg (here and here).
The New York Times’ article breathlessly reports:
“From the 1950s to today, 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have been produced, with around half of it made since 2004. And since plastic does not naturally degrade, the billions of tons sitting in landfills, floating in the oceans or piling up on city streets will provide a marker if later civilizations ever want to classify our era. Perhaps they will call this time on Earth the Plastocene Epoch.”
“Their findings suggest that staggering amounts of near-eternal litter is present in the environment — the oceans, landfills and freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems — and the numbers are quite likely to increase, with 12 billion metric tons accumulating in landfills or in the environment by 2050.”
“Scientists estimate that five million to 13 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean each year, according to previous studies. New data suggests contamination in rivers and streams, as well as on land, is increasingly common, with most of the pollution in the form of microscopic pieces of synthetic fibers, largely from clothing.”
Concluding with:
“Dr. Geyer said there was not enough information on what the long-term consequences of all this plastic and its disposal would be. “It accumulates so quickly now and it doesn’t biodegrade, so it just gets added to what’s already there.”
“Once we start looking” Dr. Geyer said, ”I think we’ll find all sorts of unintended consequences. I’d be very surprised to find out that it is a purely aesthetic problem.”
The bolded phrases (my bold) are the Scientific Urban Legend. It simply is not true that “plastics are eternal” or that “plastics don’t bio-degrade”.
This Urban Legend is even less true than the entirely fallacious “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” created whole-cloth, apparently, in 1997 the imagination of Charles J Moore, which he described as “I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.” Of course, there were no photographs.
Slate magazine says “Moore’s Garbage Patch would grow in size and fame in the years that followed. The plastic-plankton soup he’d first discovered in 1997—which oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer dubbed the “Eastern Garbage Patch” or the “Pacific Garbage Patch”—gained notoriety in a 2006 series for the Los Angeles Times that won a Pulitzer Prize. Its area had doubled: Now the patch was “twice the size of Texas.” (Some reports went even bigger.) As coverage intensified—the patch’s media profile peaked between 2007 and 2009—the soup coalesced into a garbage landmass with a more official name: the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” In 2007, the San Francisco Chronicle called the patch “a massive, eternal, slowly swirling vortex of noxious garbage the size of a continent and the shape of death itself, just floating out there in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, mocking life, humanity, God.”
Typical of Scientific Urban Legends, the Garbage Patch grew and grew, in size, nature and villainy, each re-telling adding to the size and content and magnifying the horror of it all.
Key to the Legend is the falsehood repeated by Tatiana Schlossberg in her NY Times piece — that plastics are somehow magically eternal, that they do not degrade in the environment, and incineration is the only way to destroy them. A falsehood oddly supported by Dr. Roland Geyer — who ought to know better.
The simple fact is that plastics do degrade in the environment, especially in the ocean (and lakes, streams, rivers).
When real scientists went out to investigate the marvelous Pacific Garbage Patch imaginatively described by Charles Moore, they found — well, almost nothing. They found this:
That’s what I found in the supposed mirror- image Atlantic Garbage Patch…basically nothing showing, nothing to see.
In a previous essay here on this subject, An Ocean of Plastic, I related an email conversation with Dr. Jenna R. Jambeck, one of the world’s leading experts on oceanic plastics and ocean debris, in which she shared with me that on a recent voyage from Lanzarote (in the Canary Islands off the shore of Africa) to Martinique (one of the Windward Islands of the Caribbean), a trip of 3,200 miles, they recorded sighting 15 floating items – “mostly buckets and buoys, with at least one bottle too”. A far cry from Charles Moore’s wholly imagined garbage patch.
The missing garbage patch was such a surprise (outside of portion of society taken in by all things environmental no matter how unlikely to be true) that we began to see some real science on the topic, such as National Geographic’s piece “Ocean Garbage Patch Not Growing—Where’s “Missing” Plastic?” which tells us “It’s possible some of the trash is just too small for researchers to catalog, study leader Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association (SEA) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts said: “Our net only captures pieces larger than [a third of a millimeter] in size, and it’s certain that the plastic breaks down into pieces smaller than that.” [That was in 2010, Kara Lavender Law is still a leading researcher and advocate in the field of oceanic plastics and oceanic debris.]
Smaller than a third of a millimeter?…..how small is that when the sun comes up in the morning? That’s about 1/4th the thickness of a US dime (10 cent piece) or three sheets of 20 lb. inkjet printer paper. That is really small, in other words. If one was snorkeling in the water with these suffused with particles of this size, with the tropical sunlight shining down through the water, they would appear as little flecks of something — just like all the other little flecks and bits and incredible little plants and animals that live the floating life in the sea.
This aspect is a real problem actually. To sea life food is often identified by size — moving objects in a certain size range are food and are eaten without further thought or inspection. This is why fishing lures pulled through the water catch fish — right size, right shape (even just sort of), colored to attract attention and right movement equals food. As a result, lots of these little bits are being ingested by fishes and other denizens of the deep. Luckily, most animal life forms are built on the same topology as a tube — what goes in the front (eating) end generally is capable of coming out the other (pooping) end. Things that don’t come out the other end have ways of getting back out the eating end (think cats and hairballs).
There are unfortunate exceptions, like the vanishing small percentage of albatross chicks whose mothers bring them too many shiny bits of colored plastic, as I explained in a previous essay: “Just to clarify, I’ve counted about a dozen different pictures of dead albatross chicks from Midway on the internet, some of them look to be several seasons old. Midway Atoll is the winter home of nearly a million nesting albatrosses. Roughly 450,000 pairs wedge their way into a scant 2½ square miles of land surface. Not very many albatross chicks are dying from being fed plastic. In a Darwinian sense, mother albatrosses who feed chicks too much plastic don’t get to pass on their genes, thus improving the species.”
Some biologists are concerned because some plastics have a tendency to absorb other chemicals from the environment and that organisms ingesting the plastic pieces might be adversely effected by these chemicals. There is as yet no reliable science on this point — it may just be an unfounded fear or it may have some validity.
So, with the studies we have, we can be fairly sure that much more plastic inadvertently ends up in the ocean than can be found and accounted for. The Geyer paper discussed by the NY Times basically is adding up all the plastic produced, subtracting the amounts estimated to be incinerated, recycled and landfilled giving a very broad estimation of how much plastic goes missing and might eventually end up in the ocean. When that plastic is searched for — and believe me, if you review the literature, they have searched and searched for it, there is plenty of research money for this topic — they do not find it. Thus the question remains: Where is that missing plastic?
The studies that search for oceanic plastics, these sea-sifting projects, I believe are ride-alongs, one of many projects being done from a research vessel on its various voyages for various purposes, and consist generally of net-tows (towing sieves with differing sized-holes) through the water for set distances. The contents of the net are then washed, sifted, and sorted by picking through the captured material with long pointed needles and tweezers.
Here is what two different studies find:
Compare that image with this from an earlier study:
The thing to notice in both of these images is the shape of the curve. There are very few big pieces — above 15 mm (about ½ in) (see the bottom scale of the bottom graph) — Isobe finds more of these ½ to 1 inch (15 to 30 mm) pieces in his areas closer to the shores of Japan. The number of pieces rapidly grows as size decreases, as we would expect if items are breaking into 2 or more bits, then those bits breaking in two, etc. Until…..the size hits a seemingly magical point of 1.5 to 1 mm. Then the absolute number of pieces decreases rapidly until we find very few pieces under 0.3 mm (1/3 mm). With our understanding that these bits of plastic are breaking up into smaller and smaller pieces, we would have expected the graphs to show increasing numbers as size decreased. The finding is not a fluke; two independent voyages find the same general pattern.
What can we know from this? It is obvious that the floating plastic items in the sea rapidly break apart into smaller and smaller pieces — objects big enough to be seen from a distance are very rare and seldom turn up in net-tows. But something strange happens when the pieces are reduced to sizes below about 1mm — they start rapidly disappearing. What happens to them? Where do they go?
The potential fate of plastics that have escaped into the wild or landfilled were studied by Swift in 2015, focusing on ways to improve their breakdown in landfills. The potentials fates are shown in this little tree diagram:
Micro-organisms living on the surface of plastics contribute to the degradation of plastics in two ways, as explained in the 2015 paper by Graham Swift (2015):
“It should be recognized that testing of the degradation of plastics and polymers relates to physical and molecular property changes that may be promoted by physical, chemical, and biological processes. The latter is where oxidation is promoted exo-cellularly by certain enzymes with the products generally consumed by the bacteria present, but not necessarily. Biodegradation is distinctly different and is considered to be biological consumption of the plastic or polymer and is measured by the rate and amount of gases, carbon dioxide in aerobic conditions and carbon dioxide together with methane in anaerobic conditions, evolved during metabolic processes.”
In short, one pathway is when the activity of bacteria and other microorganisms aid oxidative degradation which leads to physical degradation which exposes more area to oxidative degradation. In this pathway, the bacteria may or may not consume the products of the breakdown. The second pathway is when the bacteria actually consume the plastic itself.
Ultimately, some plastic may remain unchanged. The common, ubiquitous building material, PVC – polyvinyl chloride, has been found to be almost impervious to breakdown. This is, of course, a good thing and the very reason that it is used for modern plumbing, siding for houses, window frames and as a replacement for lumber in some cases.
PVC is pretty good at standing up to the Sun’s UV — I used some PVC moulding as a replacement rubbing strake on my sailboat about ten years ago and it has performed well despite the tropical sun.
Most other plastics breakdown faster or slower depending on their environment. In landfills, plastic degrades and biodegrades faster when there is plentiful oxygen, and slower where there is not — but, in the end, most common types degrade — they are NOT eternal, they are NOT forever.
As we have seen, floating plastic in the sea rapidly breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces — being exposed to sunlight and the motion of the waves. When the size of the pieces reach a seemingly critical points, smaller than 1 mm, the plastic disappears.
Simply put, it has been known for the last ten years of or so that the missing oceanic plastic is eaten. Not just by fishes, although certainly some is ingested and re-excreted by fishes, but actually consumed as food by microorganisms.
Swift refers to this as bio degradation (“ Bio-degradation is distinctly different and is considered to be biological consumption of the plastic”).
Here’s what they have found is happening:
The tiny animals actually consume the plastic itself, much in the same way that they ate the oil from the Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill. (Scientific American magazine ran this piece: “Meet the Microbes Eating the Gulf Oil Spill”. )
The same principle involved in the melting of crushed ice vs. cubed ice operates here: the smaller bits have a greater surface area compared to their total volume, and at a critical size, the microorganisms eating away at the surfaces just eat it all up.
The natural pathways for the degradation and biodegradation of plastics have been know since 2008-09 or so, splashed about in the major journals. This is not secret information.
It does not surprise me that that the NY Times author, Tatiana Schlossberg, does not know this — she is not a science journalist. It does not surprise me that the NY Times environmental desk editor does not know this (or chooses not to know) — the NY Times has long been a bastion of environmental pseudo-science propaganda, and seldom publishes straight science. It does surprise me that Roland Geyer, at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, would say something as foolish as “It accumulates so quickly now and it doesn’t biodegrade, so it just gets added to what’s already there.” — this is his specialty.
Bottom Line:
It is a Scientific Urban Legend that “plastics are forever”. Most plastics both degrade and biodegrade in the environment — whether in the oceans or in landfills.
Some plastics — such as PVC — resist degradation and thus are useful as building materials replacing such things as metals in plumbing and lumber in siding and building.
The “floating rafts of plastic garbage”-version of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a pernicious myth that needs to be dispelled at every opportunity.
The “missing 99% of the plastic in the oceans” has been eaten, mostly by bacteria and other microbes. These little critters will continue to eat the plastic and if we reduce the amount of plastic going into the oceans, they may eventually eat it all up. Microbes are also eating up the plastic in landfills — albeit, much more slowly.
Take Home Message:
Kindergarten rules apply at all stages and areas of life:
Pick up after yourself — clean up your own messes:
We need to do all we can to keep every sort of trash, including plastics, contained and disposed of in a responsible manner – this keeps it out of the oceans and the rest of the natural environment.
Plastics are valuable and should be recycled whenever possible into useful and valuable commodities, such as replacements for lumber in decking, shipping pallets, etc.
Volunteerism to clean up beaches and reefs is effective and worthwhile.
Responsible outdoor recreation, including boating, includes keeping your trash (and especially plastics) under control and disposed of properly ashore.
Tell the truth — it is always better in the long run.
The modern mass media’s abandonment of journalistic ethics is disturbing and dangerous for our society. The replacement of news with propaganda promoting “correct thinking” threatens to turn us into a society of ignorant, mis-educated and misinformed citizens. We all need to do our part to correctly and truthfully portray important issues.
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Author’s Comment Policy:
I’ll be happy to answer your questions and give more references if anyone wants them. I have worked on this issue off-and-on for the last year to satisfy my own curiosity and I find the work of Nature to be truly fascinating.
I wrote about his here at WUWT a couple of years ago in An Ocean of Plastic. Larry Kummer followed up with a piece debunking Charles Moore’s “floating island of plastic” eco-myth.
All this said, plastics need to be recycled or disposed of properly, like all other trash — just because it’s the right thing to do.
Thank you for reading here.
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Besides basic chemistry of water, dissolved chemicals, temperature, and UV light acting up plastics, there are likely to be little organisms that love the stuff. If it contains energy and can be “enzymed” to give it up, then something is going to eat it. So you have mechanical wearing, chemical degradation, and likely bio-activity to remove plastic from the environment.
I have several different types of plastics out in my back yard, and some are in good shape (PVC pipes), some are in bad shape (plastic tarp), and some are so rotten you can’t pick them up without turning them into tiny fragments. My own laboratory, and its telling me plastics degrade (especially the ones in my cars that I wish would stop degrading).
That doesn’t mean I want to go dumping plastic into the environment, it just means it isn’t a permanent problem.
I am all for better recycling of materials including plastics.
If you are a green activist and want to do something about all that plastic, stop buying bottled water – talk about a complete waste of resources.
As you say, documentaries show marine wildlife using floating plastic as a hiding/breeding spot. Such “debris” is rare in open oceans and much valued by marine-life.
Robert of Texas ==> The bottled water craze is the result of misinformation from the beverage industry supported by the Health Fad. There is no reason whatever for normal people to drink 8 glasses/bottles of water a day (that is another Scientific Urban Legend — and a marketing scheme).
OTOH, 8 glasses of whiskey That is an horse of a different color.
http://oz.wikia.com/wiki/Horse_of_a_Different_Color
It has more to do with laziness, misinformation about the quality of tap water, and taste free of chlorine.
MJ, we have heavily chlorinated ‘green’ (joke, everglades alligator piss) water here in Fort Lauderdale. Even changed the dogs muzzle color. Solution was simple. All drinking water is Brita filtered, changing activated charcoal filter every 2 months. Water quality does matter, but there is much individuals can do about it.
Walter Sobchak… I have had this gem in my possession for at least 25 years… and it still makes me laugh, especially when I recall those younger, less responsible days…
The Obedient Husband.
I had eighteen bottles of whisky in my cellar and I was told by my wife to empty the contents of each and every bottle down the sink… OR ELSE!!! So, I said I would and proceeded with the unpleasant task.
I withdrew the cork from the first bottle and poured the contents down the sink, with the exception of one glass, which I drank. I extracted the cork from the second bottle and did likewise with it, with the exception of one glass which I drank. I then withdrew the cork from the third bottle and poured the contents down the sink which I drank. I pulled the cork from the fourth bottle down the sink, and poured the bottle down the glass which I drank. I pulled the bottle from the cork of the next and drank one sink out of it, then threw the rest down the glass. I pulled the sink out of the next glass and poured the cork down the bottle. Then I corked the sink with the glass, bottled the drink and drank the pour. When I had everything emptied, I steadied the house with one hand, counted the glasses, corks, bottles and sink with the other, which were seventy-nine, and as the house came by I counted them again and finally had all the houses in one bottle, which I drank. I am not under the affluence of incohol, way the by, though some thinkle peep I am. I am not as thunk as you might drink. I fool so feelish, I don’t know which is me, and the drunker I stand here the longer I get.
Cheers.
We have a well. Water is potable but not very desirable. So the input goes through a “whole house filter”, then a conditioner. Water to the heater goes through a second filter. There is also a drinking water setup that stores 3 gallons after passing through 4 filters, the last one a reverse osmosis filter.
Water is called the “universal solvent” because it dissolves more substances than any other liquid. Thus, creating and keeping pure water is a difficult thing to do.
However, the system we have produces drinking water that is about as good as one can get.
[Some plastics fall apart too soon. Many white plastic garbage bags and the off-while milk containers are two of these.]
Robert – thanks for including UV light with the list of things that degrade plastic. You also mentioned a plastic tarp degrading – in the sun, I presume, since you mentioned back yard. However, I was recently dismayed when the plastic tarp in my attached garage mild Orange County, CA., disintegrated. No sun, relatively mild temperatures, yet when I pulled it downed, it started shattering into pieces. The large ones I could put into the trash can, but most it went there via a dust pan. I didn’t even try to unfold it – it just shattered.
Plastic (not necessarily including PVC) has a pretty short life span, which explains why auto manufacturers almost all include UV protection in windshields – to protect the dash.
And just try to leave a grocery bag outside for a bit. Won’t hold its own weight.
Don’t try to tell me plastic lasts forever. These were just a few examples, but plastic left outside breaks down very quickly. Anyone who says differently is woefully unobservant.
But PVC… now there is a product I like! Constant replacement not required.
ABS holds up better than PVC which gets brittle.
Oops, I had it backwards
https://www.hunker.com/13417160/abs-pipe-vs-pvc
Ozone is also a god degrader of plastics. The open cell foam; often grey or black used in things like fancy camera cases, that you fit to your equipment, will quickly turn to powder and mess up everything, including your optics, if you keep it in any place where you can get ozone. Any sort of DC motor with brushes is an excellent source of ozone.
The pink (or white) closed cell foam used for packing materials, is much better for lining camera cases. It’s also excellent for trout fishing with “power bait”. A tiny piece of CCF no bigger than 3 mm^3 will float a #8 gold hook, and when you smear it with power bait it will stay afloat until the last of it dissolves, instead of sinking to the bottom, where the trout will never find it.
I have two three gallon bottles that I carry across the street to a strip mall where a local water vendor fills them for me for 40c per gallon. It used to be 25c per gallon, and then the politicians raised the minimum wage to $15 per hour so now water costs me 40c.
The get it by reverse osmosis, and it is the best tasting water I have ever had. I can easily drink eight glasses a day if I wanted to; specially if I add lemon juice to it.
My wife will buy water in 4 ounce plastic bottles and throw them away; she’s a school teacher, so you know what the kids are learning.
G
There IS one plastic that DOES last forever.
The Federal Government’s CREDIT CARD !
Indestructible and it NEVER runs dry.
G
Most credit cards are made of PVC…
Ferdinand’s comment piqued my curiosity.
“The polymer used in credit cards is called polyvinyl chloride acetate (PVCA) and is made by combining vinyl acetate and vinyl chloride and then adding some special chemical plasticizers for flexibility. The result is a plastic that’s dense, water resistant and durable. Sheets of PVCA are made and sent to special manufacturing facilities to be turned into individual cards.”
How Are Physical Credit Cards Made?: http://www.cardrates.com/advice/how-are-physical-credit-cards-made/
The Chemistry of Credit Cards: http://www.elementsdatabase.com/the_chemistry_of_credit_cards.php
Thanks Gregory,
Learned something new, thought that it was pure PVC + some softener, but they blend in VA monomer with the VC monomer for some reason (may work as plasticizer itself in the endproduct)…
My knowledge was based on actions of Greenpeace, which could convince one UK bank to use “99% PVC-free” cards, Greenpeace and the bank were convicted by the Advertising Standards Authority for false claims:
http://home.scarlet.be/~ping5859/en/cases/en_gp_asa.html
Here at 2500m in the Front Range most plastics degrade rapidly if exposed . Otherwise they effectively just become part of the somewhat rocky soil .
Interesting and informative article, but I can’t resist adding this:
The best way yet discovered to degrade PVC is for the state Transportation department to store large amounts of it in the fenced areas under highway overpasses, then allow vagrants to set fire to pieces of furniture stuffed in shopping carts. That completely degrades the PVC, along with a sizeable chunk of the highway above it.
LOL…are you from Hotlanta? 😉
Kudos to GADOT for getting it fixed in record time, though. I was amazed when I heard they had fixed it in just over a month.
Must be ctm dealing with trolls. Well done!
Alan Watt ==> I had not heard that story — nice video.
Technically, the plastic that burned there was not PVC — it was high-density polyethylene, or HDPE conduit.
That’s good. PVC is deadly when it burns.
I saw that. I heard from another source that the state DOT had described the contents as “non-flammable PVC”. In truth there were probably several types of materials stored there.
So I presume that un-technically, PVC and HDPE are essentially the same thing.
It has been known or some time, that you can actually make plastics that have quite satisfactory Optical properties so you can make some quite respectable optical elements out of them. for certain purposes.
I have designed plastic optical systems that have been sold world wide in numbers exceeding two billion, so every fourth human has at least one of my lens systems.
So today’s gee whizz gizmo, is a three D printer, that prints in multilayer plastics.
Not surprisingly plastics that are good for three-D printing have been developed.
And some of them can actually transmit visible electromagnetic wave energy.
So how many wizards do you think have come up with the idea of three-D printing plastic optical elements.
Well there are orders of magnitude more of such people than there are Optical plastics that are also three-D printable. Every second potential customer I get to design some custom plastic optics for their product, says they will 3-D print the parts themselves, instead of tooling te part with a reputable optical plastic molding house of which there are very few competent ones.
A lot of people think that molding plastic bottles, and plastic lenses is pretty much the same thing they both transmit visible radiation.
There are a lot of failures among entrants into the plastic optical product fields.
G
G ==> There is a good comparison between the two plastics here.. PVC is better for pressurized systems, like water supply. HDPE is often used for conduits (no pressure) — which is what burned in Atlanta — HDPE conduit.
I Came I Saw I Left,
That’s good. PVC is deadly when it burns.
That is another urban legend,,,
Most of the chorine in PVC is released as HCl, hydrochloric acid, which is about as toxic as CO, carbon monoxide. With several important differences: HCl e.g. from an overheated electric wire system has a strong odour, thus warning effect, long before there is a real fire, while CO is odorless. Further HCl readily dissolves in water (sprinkler, extinguishing water), while CO is not.
The main cause of dead in non-burned persons is, besides the heat of the inhaled air, 90% CO poisoning and 10% poisoning by cyanide-like chemicals caused by natural products like leather, wool, silk,… and synthetic materials like poyurethane (matrasses, insulation foam). None are known from HCl poisoning.
Hard (PVC pipes) and semi-hard PVC (wire insulation) is self-extinguishing (*): it only burns as long as the source of the fire burns around it. Take the source away and PVC stops burning. And it has only half the caloric potential of most other plastics…
Greenpeace made a lot of noise about the potential of dioxin formation when PVC burns. Sooth from a huge soft PVC (flooring) fire at Lengerich (Germany) showed less dioxins from the fire on the streets than inside houses with an open fire place… Wood contains ~0.25% chlorine (salt), hard PVC contains 67% chlorine…
Moreover, fire tests show that other plastics (and wood,…) form 10,000 times more PAH’s by weight (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), of which the total toxicity and carcinogenity is much higher due to the amounts released…
(*) As PVC electric wire insulation contains about 10% burnable plasticizer, it is only self-extinguishing in horizontal layers, in vertical layers on needs to add fire retardants to the plastic and fire-safe passages between floors.
I had a friend whose husband worked in a PVC-mfging factory. He would clean solid PVC off of tanks and such by burning it off using a blow torch. He was in his 20s and died of lung cancer. Not an unusual occurrence in the PVC industry. Quite toxic stuff. So don’t pee on my foot and tell me it’s raining. Thank you.
I Came I Saw I Left,
The most stupid way to get rid of -any- plastics is by burning them in open air. Everything burning gives nasty byproducts if burned at (too) low temperatures, PVC as good as PE, PP, wood or tobacco: PAH’s and tars as direct proven cause of lung cancer. That is not specific for PVC, it is specific for low-temperature burning…
I Came I Saw, please review the difference between anecdote and data.
DEADLY PVC? ==> There is a comprehensive CDC report: “A Study of Causes of Death at a Rubber and Plastics Chemical Manufacturing Company“
LOL! Don’t you just love Atlanta? 🙂 Living in Gwinnett…
But, but it’s such a good meme that ‘plastics last forever’. It proves how much irreversible damage man is doing to earth. Add CAGW and plastics last forever to overpopulation and you have the trifecta of man’s evilness.
I am SOooo disappointed. When I read that plastics NEVER degrade my first thought was that “Here is a material we can replace the pyramid’s with” It will be a monument to the existence of man forever!. Much better than mere rock! And we know this must be true because the Times said it was so.
That’s what I found in the supposed mirror- image Atlantic Garbage Patch…basically nothing showing, nothing to see.
Nothing to see? Man, I see beautiful rolling waves stretching to a glowing horizon. I doubt I’d grow tired of that view. 🙂
Paul ==> I never gew tired of it either …. I did finally “age out” of blue water sailing.
total BS…..everything I need to work..that’s made of of plastic…..cracks when I need it the most
It doesn’t biodegrade eh (?). Well then send Tatiana on a journey to the center of a large Waste Management landfill site that is producing biogas. Let’s just see how much bio degradation there is on plastics there and on Tatiana from her trip. And let’s also have a reality photojournalism trip to rivers in third word countries to see what’s flowing into the oceans. That would be a good use of ex-EPA employees as well.
Just a few decades ago, activists helped destroy the timber industry in my state, encouraging the use of plastics.
Today, the mission is to destroy the plastic industry (among others).
They always have to be attacking or destroying something – usually because of some tripe-based paranoia.
And this is what gives them the warm fuzzy – the self-defined moral high-ground.
Very insightful article. Plastic pollution is one of the biggest challenges of our civilisation and tackling it is perhaps no less important than climate change.
“… and tackling it is perhaps no less important than climate change.”
Technically, you got it half right.
Had you said, “… and tackling it is perhaps no less important than trimming my toenails”, your statement would have been just as accurate.
Don’t you acept the threat of pollution?
Rod L: We don’t accept your definition of what pollution is.
RodL, it’s the “climate change” bit you got wrong. Do keep up.
Yet you did read the article correct? The main jist is there is no great ocean garbage patch and the plastics dissolve until gone.
Since neither is a problem, why bother.
Thinking that climate change and plastic pollution are not very serious problems is stupid. Good luck in life
To describe plastic pollution as one of the ‘greatest challenges of our civilization’ is beyond stupid, but a good insight into the moronic mentality that opposes the progress and ultimate survival of the human race.
I live within spitting distance of a major private science university,
Were I to speak of this article in public I will be outcast..
Science and the educational system have failed to take us beyond our propensity to trade in tales of monsters.
They probably do last a very long time buried in landfills. But, so what? They’re buried. If they broke down rapidly and the byproducts leached into groundwaters, that would be a problem.
The absence of oceanic garbage island is astonishing – not only tsunamis are practically an annual event –
only 6 years have passed since Tōhoku tsunami, which reached a total height of 40.5 metres (133 ft). And only 13 years after the massive Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed about 230,000 people. The amount of material they have swiped into the ocean is unimaginable.
An excellent point.
No wonder sea levels are rising! /sarc
Most plastics are heavier than water.
Throw some plastic stuff in a pool or bathtub, and observe how much of it floats.
There’s a effort underway on UK beaches to count plastic litter fragments using drone technology.
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/theplastictide/the-plastic-tide/about/research
Gary ==> Eco-nuttiness at its highest — an utter waste of time and effort for absolutely no value returned to society.
It would be nice if someone were out there picking up plastic off the beaches and taking it to be properly disposed of — that has value.
Re-instituting street cleaning to collect plastics otherwise washed into storm drains feeding to the sea would also be of value.
Why not close the loop and have the little dronies pick up the litter they find on the beaches. What god is diagnosing it if you don’t fix it; to plagiarise a TV ad campaign.
g
This would be really funny if someone pointed out that the drones are, themselves, made of plastic!
When I found myself arguing this with someone on social media, I got back the argument that the micro-fragments were poisoning the food chain via the critters consuming the petrochemicals locked up in them. IE, an extension of the frog ‘environmental chemicals’ thing. I don’t know how you prove or disprove this argument if researchers are determined to p-hack until they find a population or two which is crashing in the environment under ‘stress’.
Counter argument is that petrochemicals are carbon hydrogen and some oxygen… and traces of sulphur.
After digestion that’s indistinguishable from an apple.
Kip;
Have you tried contacting Dr. Geyer to see if he would clarify his remarks? It is, I suppose, barely possible his remarks were taken out of context.
Hawkins ==> The full paper is online at http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782.full.
quoting directly from the paper:
“None of the mass-produced plastics biodegrade in any meaningful way; however, sunlight weakens the materials, causing fragmentation into particles known to reach millimeters or micrometers in size (32).” [The reference (32) is the book “Plastics and Environmental Sustainability” by Anthony L. Andrady ]
He does seem to be ill-informed, does not differentiate between degradation and biodegradation.
Ordinary water degrades Nylon. just ask any fisherperson how long its fishing line lasts.
g
Plastics are just polymers.
UV has enough energy to break the polymeric bonds. It will keep doing so no matter how small they are, until they are monomers.
Other things break these bonds as well.
Note that degradation to tiny fragments occurs in a matter of years…months in some cases.
Even for PVC, degradation occurs.
Anyone who has ever worked on old PVC knows it gets brittle…that brittleness is due to destruction of the polymeric bonds.
PVC pipe used in overhead irrigation in a Florida plant nursery shadehouse becomes too brittle to support its own weight in less than tens years. It starts to crack when stressed sooner than that.
And besides for bulk brittleness, the surface begins to get powdery…a sure sign that molecules are becoming separated from the polymer.
Take a section of PVC pipe that has been in direct sun for a few years and wipe it with a black cloth…it will be covered with white power of a particle size too small to discern.
My guess is that pipe left out in direct sun for a few centuries will be gone.
Nice followup article, Kip. More NYT fake news. In Fort Lauderdale, all the beach trach container holdersare made of recycled plastic ‘lumber’. With the strong UV, they last 10-15 years before having to be replaced as they fall apart.
ristvan ==> Yes, recycled plastic lumber (with UV protection added) makes terrific outdoor building material — decking, planking, posts for signs (as 4x4s), benches, boardwalks, etc.
About as long as pressure treated lumber then? Or maybe not even as long.
The mem should be “Creosote is forever”. Now that crap will kill you.
At least the stuff they pressure treat retail lumber with is not so bad as it used to be, chromated copper arsenate.
But they still use CCA for marine applications, agricultural buildings (like plant nursery shadehouses) and the like.
Perhaps. My wife and I dutifully take our plastics to the recycling center. But I have a gnawing suspicion that for most “recyclables,” including plastics, the recycling effort has the net effect of making society poorer, i.e., that time and money dedicated to that would do more for human welfare if they were otherwise allocated–and the plastics were just thrown in the regular trash and disposed of at a landfill.
Does anyone have any reliable information on that?
Joe Born ==> i have had my suspicions as well, but in Ulster County, NY, we have single-stream recycling and I know for a fact that it does get separated — cardboard, plastic, paper, etc — often by persons who suffer various handicaps whose salaries are subsidized by State and Federal programs, I believe. What happens after separating, I don’t know.
I read an article a few years back, where a reporter followed the materials that had been separated. They were sent, in different trucks, to the same landfill.
MW, IIRC that was Chicago. Explains much. See comment just following for more info.
Penn and Teller covered this well.
My brother was a mechanic/welder at a single stream trash separator company that separated out plastic, paper, glass and metals. I’m a consultant in mineral processing (making concentrates of valuable minerals – metallic and non metallic from mined ores). Trash separation machines aren’t perfect (nor are mineral concentrators) but our supply of world mineral raw materials all comes from such work.
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-07/how-it-works-recycling-machines-separate-junk-type
YES! See the Penn and Teller episode. You won’t think of recycling the same ever again.
1) Unnecessary. Landfill space is not rare. Take a 35 mile by 35 mile square 200 yards deep. It would hold all the US’s trash and recycling for… 1,000 years.
2) Expensive. Only aluminum is cost-effective to recycle. Cities pay a LOT of money for their recycling programs. My city pays around $150 million per year.
It makes people feel like they are doing something good. We have been thoroughly brainwashed and coerced. Even smart, rational and logical people in this comment thread…
The Tompkins County Recycling Center is the only county agency to turn a profit. Of course, that could be because of the dumping fees for the garbage/trash part of it. But the folks who run the center claim to make a profit off the recycling part of it.
Yes. Looked into this rather intensively while finishing Gaia’s Limits back in 2012 . Answers: aluminum cans always make sense to recycle, since smelting aluminum from alumina is so electricity intensive. Remelting is ~5% of smelting. Steel cans ditto, but partly because so easy to sort out of waste streams, compact, and ship to the now very common electric arc scrap furnaces like Nucor. Paper depends. Large volume pure cardboard and such (think stores), always pays to recycle. For consumer paper, depends on the waste stream because the sorting may or may not be worthwhile ( and paper composts in landfills). For plastics, depends on the type. Here in South Florida, they do not recycle styrofoam (poor volume/weight ratio) but do all the other common types. The surprise is glass. In theory, recycling makes sense because making glass from old glass cullet uses 1/4 the heat energy of a new glass melt from raw materials. But glass is heavy, so the cost of moving color sorted crushed glass usually means there is no economically viable glass plant within an economic range. So glass is location dependent. (And since glass melting is almost always gas fired, in the US with low nat gas prices the problem is just compounded). Here in South Florida (no glass plants) it is crushed into ‘sand’ and used in concrete and asphalt–not because Florida lacks sand, but because it conserves landfill volume in a region where almost everything is either built, rock mines, or Everglades.
A complicated horses for courses big picture.
A note on Aluminum can recycling: there is no truth to the urban myth that the tabs are separately worth more than the rest of the can, or that turning them in will get someone free time on a dialysis machine. My wife and I for years had been dutifully separating the tabs and turning them in to someone at our kids’ school. A kitchen remodeling project caused me to examine this behavior and discover it is completely wasted. Reference here.
So I guess for folks in Florida, the time spent separating glass by color for recycling is totally wasted.
AW, very perspicatious. So my understanding down here in South Florida about how recycleables are sorted (our building has two chutes, refuse (including styrofoam) and recyclables) is as follows, since We drive by the huge landfill sorting complex west of Florida Turnpike in Palm Beach County on our way to the North Georgia mountain cabin), Moving belt low pressure air blast to sort paper. We see trucks loaded with paper bales leaving. Then magnets for tin cans. Then more higher pressure air blasts/hand sorting for plastics/aluminum. What’s left is glass. That we don’t sort by color, we just crush to make artificial construction sand. Now where glass recycling might make local sense, dunno what is done. In Canada ( my former fishing vacation cabin) and Wisconsin (my dairy farm) they make you sort into clear (white), brown, and green glass prior to going to the recycling dump. So I, not the recycling center, does the glass color sorting. For my hunting gang on the farm it is simple: clear means bourbon or Irish or Scotch whiskey, brown means beer, and green means usually wine. I make the guys and gals sort it out the next day rather than charging hunting fees. They also buy the groceries. Fair trade.
That isn’t the only objection to recycling glass. Different glasses have different expansion coefficients and if you aren’t careful, the recycled glass will disintegrate at the first sign of stress.
Rud, if marketers and customers didn’t care what color their mayonnaise jars were, there would be nothing wrong with mixing them. Also, in Canada, beer bottles are returned to the beer store for a 5 to 10cent return fee. They are reused by breweries. In Quebec, there is a broad range of beverage bottles returnable for cash. This generates a cottage industry of poor folks from Quebec coming to eastern Ontario on garbage days on bicycles with homemade trailers to pick out tons of bottles for return cash.
Mixed color can be be browned with addition of iron if you are near a glass container plant that makes dark bottles.
Interestingly in Canada, at least, for beer bottles for Western Canada, the bottles are made darker because of abundance of sunshine. Glass is also used in asphalt as noted for Florida.
BTW, for those who’ve noted I’ve called myself a geologist in other threads, I am a geologist, mining engineer, and metallurgist.
On the BBC’s Country File program (which these days is just a vehicle for pushing climate change, anti-Brexit propaganda, and other PC thought adjustment programming), they had a ‘scare’ about the fibres released into the sewerage system from washing synyhetic fleece clothing. The tiny fibres get into the sewage, the sewage gets made into land fertilizer, the fibres build up on the farmland, and the chemicals from the ‘microplastics’ contaminate the crops.
There was no actual proof as far as I could tell, but they were ‘worried’ it might happen.
It seems scientists and greens have lost all touch with reality and the ability to actually quantify risk, and no longer bother building up any actual evidence before demanding action, they just act on and exploit emotion.
MrGrimNasty ==> Polyester, polyamide, and acrylic (PP&A) fibers make up a lot of the plastic found in the sea as well, along with polypropylene fibers (degraded ropes used in the fishing industry and nets).
The disconnect is that the propagandists want to claim that plastics don’t degrade but they also want to claim that degrading plastics somehow get into our food (crops or fish or whatever).
Fish do eat (ingest anyway) plastics bit in the water thinking they might be food — since most plastics are unaffected by fish digestion, they come out in the end. There is no evidence that I have seen that any particular harm comes from this — except in rare cases in which excessive ingestion causes blockages. So far ……
And of course there was the recent fish-eating-microplastics paper retraction.
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/05/03/authors-initiate-retraction-debated-science-pollution-paper/
MrGrim ==> Thank you for that — I was aware of the original paper, but not its retraction.
Plastics in the main are largely hydrogen, carbon and oxygen with inert mineral fillers for strength enhancement and for other physical properties.
I remember a paper a couple of decades ago where a researcher found, IIRC, 3 ppb antimony in plastic water bottles stored more than a couple of months. Antimony is used as a catalyst in polypropylene(?). It created some alarm, even though teaspoonfuls were used as a medicine for certain gut parasites for about a century or more. This is what you get when brilliant assay technology gets into the hands of nimrods.
The first author of the retracted paper has also written papers about ocean acidification and coral bleaching. One may wonder if her fraudulent behavior was just one time act or modus operandi. Furthermore, if there is something fishy is her other research – and she is highly regarded “rising star” (got “future research leaders” grant in Sweden) in her field, does that tell us something about ethics and/or research practices in ecology?
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/groundbreaking-study-dangers-microplastics-may-be-unraveling
Excellent article.
It has been known for a long time, by those who want to know, that all plastics will ultimately degrade in an atmosphere with oxygen and UV light from the sun. All. Some will degrade faster than others, but they will all go.
They may certainly be unsightly in large amounts, but there is generally no evidence that they are any more harmful than indigestible pieces of wood or rock. People know this instinctively: We eat food out of plastic containers that are always breaking down into smaller fragments which cause us no harm.
The only merit in the latest plastics obsession of the environmentalists is that it
a) distracts them from their love of sabotaging the worlds energy supplies based on fossil fuels, and
b) gives me an excuse to post this famous movie clip again about something that serves mankind so well in so many ways:
michael hart ==> And it was very good advice for a young MBA at the time…..
I would have considered such advice blasphemous when I was in college, but in retrospect, as much as I’ve grown to love plastics, I think that plastics engineering would be a fascinating field.
I hate to admit it but years ago I wrote a long blog article about massive islands of plastic in Earth’s oceans. Obviously, I was duped, and I just deleted that article, after it probably has been misleading people further all these years.
Plastic cloths pins definitely degrade in sunlight, I’ve noticed. Also, plastic film that I use to solarize my garden soil always seems to degrade in the sunlight after some time. AND plastic cable ties that I use to secure wiring to my raised-garden-bed fences degrade in sunlight, … so much so that I will no longer use them, but rather change over to stiff wire, which takes a lot longer to secure, but I hate the plastic zip ties snapping off after a year or so, on a structure that I want to last for many years with little re-building.
If I am not mistaken, I believe that there are today a variety of plastic products designed to degrade more rapidly than traditional plastics.
Robert Kernodle ==> Industry is working on rapidly degradable plastics for use in shopping bags and packaging that is destined to be landfilled. It is a difficult balancing act, but there are some good products out there, albeit a bit more expensive still. Some companies are using readily degradable “plastic beans” — those foam packaging peanuts — and substitutes for the plastics like these:
Biodegradable Peanuts
Decomposes in water leaving no toxic waste. FDA compliant.
Static-free organic starch.
Dispenses and vacuums like traditional peanuts.
Yup. Made from soybeans after pressing. Makes great garden compost. Much better than styrofoam peanuts. Just have to keep them dry until after shipping use. Watching them ‘melt’ in water after is fun.
@Rud Istvan;
Are you sure about soybeans? I understood that biodegradable packing peanuts were made from cornstarch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foam_peanut
Zip/cable ties are made of nylon which doesn’t last long in sunlight. Why some are not made from something more resistant to UV, I don’t know. Seems like they would be very popular.
ICISIL ==> UV Resistant cable ties are available on the open market — see here.
Well shut my mouth…
I had to look up the origin of this saying after I used it
George Carlin on why we have plastics: https://youtu.be/NBRquiS1pis
“It does surprise me that Roland Geyer, at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, would say something as foolish as “It accumulates so quickly now and it doesn’t biodegrade, so it just gets added to what’s already there.” — this is his specialty.”
You may wish to ask Dr. Geyer directly what he told the NYT. As you say, jounalistic ethics is at a nadir. It would not surprise me to find he has been misquoted or had remarks taken out of context. A colleague recently spoke extensively to a Popular Science writer casting all sorts of shade on the notion of Global Warming making hurricanes more numerous. The final article, full of warmunitst propaganda, contained a ‘pull quote’ from him but absolutely NONE of his GW skepticism.
SOP for the MSM.
Sorry. Once I posted my remarks the page refreshed and I see someone has already made this point above. I just *knew* that would happen.
Mumbles ==> No worries. I answer this point in comments above here.
the “staggering amounts of near-eternal litter” is Ms Schlossberg and her ilk.
There seems to be a large element of what I call “temperate climate syndrome” in this. Here in the tropics, nearly all plastics degrade very rapidly. Supermarket singlet-type bag is gone in a few hours, 3 days max. Blue “UV protected” tarp lasts 1 month maximum. “Full UV protected” silver finish tarp will not last more than a year.
Doesn’t PVC sink?
Good point. It passes through Gaia’s intestines and exits clean. As such a renewable resource.
MarkW –> Yes, PVC has a specific gravity generally about 1.4 — and sinks readily (if not an air trapping tank or bottle). I have lost PVC items off my boat — dang!
That said, it has been my experience nearly everything that sinks into the sea gets used by something — if even only as shelter. The Kiptopeke Breakwater in Chesapeake Bay, Virginia… is formed by nine sunken concrete ships built in World War II.
MarkW ==> Counter-intuitively, nearly everything plastic made for boats (fuel tank caps for instance) sink when dropped in the water……double dang!
Kip writes:
“nearly everything that sinks into the sea gets used by something — if even only as shelter.”
also:
“Volunteerism to clean up beaches and reefs is effective and worthwhile”
As an enthusiastic young man some 30 years ago I was involved in a number of beach and bushland cleanups in Perth, West Australia and that was the beginning of the end for me. As we removed glass bottles, bike frames, car parts and so forth which pleased my fellow beach cleaners, I saw us destroying habitats, killing plants and animals and displacing myriad little critters from their homes. When we were done, the areas were left aesthetically clean and effectively sterilized of life. None saw the contradiction of our actions.. Even attempts at the time by me to relocate bits of corals that’d settled on our artificial substrates was met with a ‘don’t worry about that’ as everything went into trucks to be sent to landfill.
landfill? ‘What were we doing here?’ I wondered .. wasting all this energy in moving junk from point A where it was useful but displeasing to the eye to point 2 where it was hidden – and would take longer to degrade..
I was a weird kid, got told that a lot too .. I thought about things too much and didn’t “see” the picture (others had in their heads). No I didn’t see the picture, because it was senseless – all we were doing was making things pretty for us and killing and destroying environments which benefited small life forms. The ideology was that scattering waste (rubbish) about was bad.. but I figured dissipating things is a more effective way of disposal than concentrating. If I had a ton of poison to get rid of, spreading it across the world at sub-toxic levels would be more effective than leaving a pile of it in one spot where it has the potential to do the most harm (thinking here of the plastic recycling plant fires that occur occasionally).
glass was deemed ‘forever’ too, but I can’t find any evidence of glass on beaches any more all these years later.. It’s absurd. Every stack of old newspapers in the bushland was riddled with termites, every old half rusted car body a home to spiders and lizards – heck I can’t even keep my back yard weed free no matter how much pesticide I spray about yet somehow folk intuitively think everything humans do is forever. I don’t get it, I really don’t.
” The solution to pollution is dilution.”
Generally true.
There is the old adage, “If it bleeds it leads”. The more horrific the event, the more likely it is to make the front page with a big headline.
The media has no reason to publish a boring old story that there is no garbage patch. Nobody’s going to read that.
The other old adage is, “Sex sells”. If you want the media to cover a relatively boring science story, make sure you have a bikini clad lab assistant hauling up the sample bottles.
Commie ==> NOAA has a page “debunking the garbage patch” but has sometime in the last two years added a new graphic debunking its own debunking….see the image they use here.
The text reads; “The name “Pacific Garbage Patch” has led many to believe that this area is a large and continuous patch of easily visible marine debris items such as bottles and other litter—akin to a literal island of trash that should be visible with satellite or aerial photographs. This is not the case. While higher concentrations of litter items can be found in this area, much of the debris is actually small pieces of floating plastic that are not immediately evident to the naked eye. “
cb — Regarding you observation that ‘sex sells’. It is obviously true therefore the media editors need to be sure that the size (in square inches) of the bikini’s worn by the lab assistant(s) is directly proportional to the amount of garbage found.
And inversely proportional to the amount of garbage in the article?
Amen, CB! The other day I was driving downtown on a busy 2-lane, alongside of which was strip of wild green perhaps 50 feet wide–sandwiched between this road and the Connecticut Turnpike. Happily browsing alongside of zipping traffic were a 6-point buck and a Great Egret who was patiently waiting for his browsing to flush something juicy. Now I was 15 or 16 years old before I EVER saw either a deer or an egret, let alone perfectly adapted to a barely suburban area (almost urban, for sure). There is more amazing wildlife you can see from the windows of Metro-North than you could find in a Roger Tory Peterson book, and yet; you will NEVER HEAR GOOD NEWS ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT, EVER! Which is why I’m on sites like WUWT, doing my own research.
King of the Typos here.
I think you meant, “Simply put, it has been known for the last ten years or so that the missing oceanic plastic is eaten.”
Gunga Din ==>
Good eye, Gunga Din!