“EXCEPT FOR A SMALL AMOUNT that’s been incinerated,” says Tony Andrady the oracle, “every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last fifty years or so still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.”
That half century’s total production now surpasses 1 billion tons. It includes hundreds of different plastics, with untold permutations involving added plasticizers, opacifiers, colors, fillers, strengtheners, and light stabilizers. The longevity of each can vary enormously. Thus far, none has disappeared. Researchers have attempted to find out how long it will take polyethylene to biodegrade by incubating a sample in a live bacteria culture. A year later, less than 1 percent was gone.
“And that’s under the best controlled laboratory conditions. That’s not what you will find in real life,” says Tony Andrady. “Plastics haven’t been around long enough for microbes to develop the enzymes to handle it, so they can only biodegrade the very-low-molecular-weight part of the plastic.”
_________________ "Thank you for attending the oil age. We're going to scrape what we can out of these tar pits in Alberta and then shut down the machines and turn out the lights. Goodnight." - seldom_seen
Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 7:02 am Post subject: Re: The poisoning of the seas: Polymers are forever
This is very depressing.
We really should go back to fashioning things from wood and (recycled) metal. Few people know how to do this any more, but wood and metal stuff worked just damned fine.
And plastic crap isn't even repairable. When it breaks, and it usually breaks fairly soon, we just toss it away. And it doesn't biodegrade, it just breaks into little chunks and ends up in the ocean.
For stuff like shopping bags, we need to go back to basket-weaving. Hell, this would give people something constructive to do, too.
Yeah, the plasticizing of the oceans is the single most depressing thing I've ever read about. _________________ There's still freud in Schadenfreud!
Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 10:14 am Post subject: Re: The poisoning of the seas: Polymers are forever
Polymers are often biologically inert materials, but they are often photo degradable. Ayway, they do not do any harm and will in the end settle on the bottom of oceans and become sedimentary rock of the future to come.
I've heard numerous theories about the toxicity of plastic from people like Helen Caldicott. As you say, we're making the last of the stuff right now anyway. Back to mugs and plates of treen. _________________ Cogito, ergo non satis bibivi
I will not abide another toe.
Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 7:21 pm Post subject: Re: Converging Catastrophes
I suspect that we will be missing plastic a lot. We treat it as disposable now, but in the future it will be reused endlessly. What other material does what it can do? A plastic cup will become an heirloom.
Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 2:32 am Post subject: Re: Converging Catastrophes
Revi wrote:
I suspect that we will be missing plastic a lot. We treat it as disposable now, but in the future it will be reused endlessly. What other material does what it can do? A plastic cup will become an heirloom.
Very often I have to buy/use plastic items, but it is only because equivalents made of better quality materials are not available or difficult to get.
If I spot any non-platic equivalent of usual plastic household appliance I will buy it assuming it must be a better quality one.
So far it always worked.
There are relatively few consumer items (computer equipment is one of examples), where plastics are optimal materials.
There are also some areas of applications of certain high performance polymers like polycabonates, PTFE etc, where no viable substitutes exist.
Othervise there is not much to miss, once plastic is gone.
PS. I disposed of my & my wife's CC few years ago and we are only getting richer as a result.
Life without a "plastic" is a better one.
Joined: May 24, 2004 Posts: 3429 Location: California, USA
Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 6:34 am Post subject: Re: Converging Catastrophes
Plastics, used properly, can be recycled indefinitely.
Back in the days of the Bell Telephone System (and GPO Telephones in the UK, etc.), telephone sets belonged to the utility and were reconditioned and returned to service with an average life of 40 years. If the plastic components were damaged, they were stripped off, ground down, and melted into new raw material for replacement parts.
On a typical telephone you had a plastic housing, plastic handset shell, plastic dial number plate and finger wheel. In the UK, the 706 sets were made with plastic baseplates for a while but switched to metal in the 746 sets. All of this stuff was recyclable, and took about a minute to strip from the metal bits and circuit assemblies and so on.
We could do the same with computer housings and so on today, except that the supply chain is open-ended instead of closed-ended. The way forward is to require that manufacturers take back old products and strip them down for recycling. But as with most things, what engineers design and what politicians & bean counters allow, are two different stories.
---
As for the wheat rusts and so on: I guess that moves Pestilence and Famine back up there to running neck & neck with Plague in the Dieoff Derby. And here I was betting on Plague to win the first round.
---
Plantagenet, do you have a reference for your item about magnetic field decrease? If this turns out to be true, there's nothing we can do about it. If the Earth's magnetic field collapses entirely, that's the end for all life as we know it, except possibly various extremophiles shielded by rock or water. (Hey, maybe that's why the Bushies et. al. don't give a hoot about the climate crisis or anything else: they have the secret data that prove we're doing to die of cosmic rays anyway!:-)
On the other hand, it could also be that the Earth's core is heading toward a pole shift, which would be a pain in the butt and no doubt cause some extinctions (e.g. birds that navigate by biological compass) and some seismic nastiness (bye bye San Francisco Bay Area), but would be a recoverable event. (It may require "fallout shelter living" for a few months, but that's survivable.)
---
As for the predictions of +5C by mid century: those get us into the range of Lovelock's worst-case scenario.
Hey, whoever it was a few pages ago who said they used to live in Maine and moved to North Carolina: you'd better move back to Maine and re-establish yourself ASAP. Main is one of the places that will get by in Lovelock's scenario. North Carolina most assuredly is not.
---
I'm starting to take on an attitude of Buddhist detachment toward all of this. We're all going to die some time, so between now & then, we may as well do what we can to save the planet and at the same time not be attached to outcomes.
Keep a diary. Print it on archival paper, and seal the printed volumes in plastic ziploc bags. Some day an archaeologist may find it.
Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 6:45 am Post subject: Re: Converging Catastrophes
Plantagenet wrote:
There was another great catastrophe mentioned in the new ECONOMIST.
The earth's magnetic field is decreasing in strength by a few percent per year, and may collapse. The magnetic field protects everything on earth from cosmic rays.
Mutation time is coming. Get ready for some new species to develop.
Thats interesting.
Do you have more data about that.
Few % per year means close to 100% within our lifetime.
Joined: May 24, 2004 Posts: 3429 Location: California, USA
Posted: Wed May 30, 2007 6:30 am Post subject: Re: Converging Catastrophes
Sounds like we're just approaching a possible pole reversal, if that. And since these have happened so frequently without wiping the proverbial slate, it's likely that the worst we'll see is the scenario I mentioned above. A few species extinctions and some seismic nastiness.
On the overall doomerosity scale, this one rates low.
Joined: Aug 23, 2007 Posts: 52 Location: SE Michigan
Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 9:48 pm Post subject: Re: The poisoning of the seas: Polymers are forever
Olle wrote:
Polymers are often biologically inert materials, but they are often photo degradable. Ayway, they do not do any harm and will in the end settle on the bottom of oceans and become sedimentary rock of the future to come.
This is a real non issue
Plastic breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces over time in the ocean. Eventually it becomes powder-like small and just about all tiny lifeforms in the ocean like zoo-plankton could swallow them mistaking them for food. In an aquarium experiment by Richard Thompson using bottom feeding lug-worms and sand fleas. He provided them with bite-sized plastic and they promptly swallowed them. The lodged particles in the intestines of the subjects resulted in terminal constipation. (See Chapter 9, Polymers are Forever, of The World Without Us by Alan Weisman).
This could end up being a huge problem at the bottom of the oceans food chain.
Edit: From Weismans Article above: "“When they get as small as powder, even zooplankton will swallow them.”
Joined: Oct 23, 2005 Posts: 1788 Location: East of Eden
Posted: Sun Sep 02, 2007 8:47 pm Post subject: Re: The poisoning of the seas: Polymers are forever
tecumseh wrote:
Plastic breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces over time in the ocean. Eventually it becomes powder-like small and just about all tiny lifeforms in the ocean like zoo-plankton could swallow them mistaking them for food. In an aquarium experiment by Richard Thompson using bottom feeding lug-worms and sand fleas. He provided them with bite-sized plastic and they promptly swallowed them. The lodged particles in the intestines of the subjects resulted in terminal constipation. (See Chapter 9, Polymers are Forever, of The World Without Us by Alan Weisman).
This could end up being a huge problem at the bottom of the oceans food chain.
Damn, there's one that didn't occur to me. If that's true, then it deserves a solid place on the list.
We have for so long ignored the health of the world's oceans, and especially their humblest and most important lifeforms, as something so vast that it could never be really damaged by anything we do. We also, I think, tend to think of the ocean as a place that is 'other' -- not related to our own survival -- but as in so many other things, we will learn otherwise.
Welcome to po.com, tecumseh. Nice handle, and good first post. _________________ "If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst." — Thomas Hardy
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