Man Caused Global Warming Or Man Caused Plastic Pollution Which one will destroy the ecosystem? …

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”- Cyril Connolly (1903 - 1974)

 

Man Caused Global Warming Or Man Caused Plastic Pollution…

Which one will destroy the ecosystem?  

 

By de Andréa

Opinion Editorialist for    

‘THE BOTTOM LINE’

Posted August 20, 2019

If you would like to write me direct with a question or a comment on this or other articles, you can email me at writedeandrea@hotmail.com

The Problem with Plastics

Those of you who are my regular readers know that I am not a big fan of so-called ecologists. Mainly because ecologists know next to nothing about real ecology. They are just paid political activists.

While “MAN CAUSED” Climate change is a paid scientific hoax just to create a central GLOBAL power base, Climate change itself is and has been a real and natural phenomenon since the Earth began. Just read your book on ancient history. From tropical climate to ice ages and back to a tropical climate or anywhere in between, Earth’s climate has been changing continually throughout history and without any outside influence from you and me.

But one of the most devastating man caused ecological travesties that has been taking place for at least the last 60 years goes unreported by those that claim they are concerned about saving the planet and its wild life ecosystem. But as I said, the truth about ecology isn’t relevant, it is just about Global Power and Control.


From the tiniest plankton to the largest whales, plastics impact more than 3000 species in our oceans.

You’ve probably seen videos of these impacts first hand, like a sea turtle with a plastic straw embedded in its nose or a whale entangled in a plastic fishing net, approaching divers that release it from harm. Some of these incidents have happy endings, but in reality, millions more do not.

Plastic has been found in 100% of all seabirds and their off spring and in 100% of sea turtles species, as well as millions of fish and sea mammals such as whales, porpoise, dolphins and seals that mistake plastic for food. And when animals ingest plastic, it causes life-threatening problems, such as reduced fitness, nutrient intake and feeding efficiency, bowel strangulation, laceration and obstruction, not to mention the toxic effects from the leaching plastic itself. Plastic has been found in the blubber of whales.

Every year, more than 8 million metric tons of plastics enter our ocean on top of the estimated 150 million metric tons that currently circulate our marine environments in the ocean and on island beaches all over the world. Whether by wayward plastic bags or plastic straws and containers winding their way into gutters or large amounts of mismanaged plastic waste streaming from rapidly growing economies, that’s like dumping one New York City garbage truck full of plastic into the ocean every minute 24-7 for an entire year! And that much plastic is having a tragic unreported impact on our ocean ecosystems.

Plastic pollution in the ocean frequently appears as seabird guts filled with plastic cigarette lighters and bottle caps, marine mammals entangled in fishing gear and drifting plastic bags mimicking a gelatinous meal. Last year, a study estimated that around eight million metric tons of our plastic waste enter the oceans from land each year.

But where this plastic ends up and what form it takes is no longer a mystery. Most of our waste consists of everyday items such as bottles, wrappers, straws or bags. Yet the vast majority of debris found floating far offshore is much smaller:  It’s broken-down fragments smaller than your pinky fingernail, termed microplastic.

A newly published study, showed that this floating microplastic accounts for only about 1% of the plastic waste entering the ocean from land in a single year. To get this number – estimated to be between 93,000 and 236,000 metric tons –all available measurements of floating microplastic together was used with three different numerical ocean circulation models.

Getting a bead on microplastics

The new estimate of floating microplastic is up to 37 times higher than previous estimates. That’s equivalent to the mass of more than 1,300 blue whales. The increased estimate is due in part to the larger data set –more than 11,000 measurements of microplastics collected in plankton nets since the 1970s was assembled. In addition, the data were standardized to account for differences in sampling conditions.

The broad range in the estimates (93 to 236 thousand metric tons) stems from the fact that vast regions of the ocean have not yet been sampled for plastic debris. There may be billions of tons more than we even know about.

It is widely understood that the largest concentrations of floating microplastics occur in subtropical ocean currents, or gyres, where surface currents converge in a kind of oceanographic “dead-end.”
These so-called “garbage patches” of microplastics have been well-documented with data in the North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans. The analysis includes additional data in less sampled regions, providing the most comprehensive survey of the amount of microplastic debris to date.
However, very few surveys have ever been carried out in the Southern Hemisphere oceans and outside of the subtropical gyres. Small differences in the oceanographic models give vastly different estimates of microplastic abundance in these regions. The work highlights where additional ocean surveys must be done in order to improve microplastics assessments.

And the rest?

Floating microplastics collected in plankton nets are the best-quantified type of plastic debris in the ocean, in part because they were initially noted by researchers collecting and studying plankton decades ago. Yet microplastics represent just a small part of the total amount of plastic now in the ocean, which means that in the near future as existing plastics become microplastics there will be billions more tons of microplastics floating just beneath the surface with more on the way.

Plastics” is a collective term for a variety of synthetic polymers with variable material properties, including density. This means some common consumer plastics, such as PET (resin code #1, stamped on the bottom of clear plastic drink bottles, for example), are denser than seawater and will sink upon entering the ocean. However, measuring plastics on the seafloor is very challenging in shallow waters close to shore, let alone across vast ocean basins with an average depth of 3.5 kilometers.

It’s also unknown how much of the eight million metric tons of plastic waste entering the marine environment each year lies on beaches as discarded items or broken-down microplastics that are ingested by sea birds and other marine life.

In a one-day cleanup of beaches around the world in 2014, International Coastal Cleanup volunteers collected more than 5,500 metric tons of trash, including more than two million cigarette butts and hundreds of thousands of plastic food wrappers, drink bottles, bottle caps, drinking straws and plastic bags.

We do know that these larger pieces of plastics will eventually become microparticles which may be just a bad or worse. Still, the time it takes large objects – including consumer products, buoys and fishing gear, for example – to fragment to millimeter-sized pieces upon exposure to sunlight is essentially unknown.

Just how small those pieces become before (or if) they are degraded by marine microorganisms is even less certain, in large part because of the difficulty in collecting and identifying microscopic particles as plastics. Laboratory and field experiments exposing different plastics to environmental weathering will help unravel the fate of different plastics in the ocean. And then as the microplastics become smaller and smaller until they are microscopic…are they any safer or are the just smaller versions of the same pollutant that will eventually kill every living creature in the sea. Moreover at that stage it will be impossible to extract from the oceans.

Why it matters

If we know that a massive amount of plastic is entering the ocean each year, what does it matter if it is a bottle cap on a beach, a lost lobster trap on the seafloor, or a nearly invisible particle floating thousands of miles offshore? If plastic trash were simply an aesthetic problem, perhaps it wouldn’t.
But ocean plastics pose a threat to a wide variety of marine animals, and their risk is determined by the amount of debris an animal encounters, as well as the size and shape of the debris.

To a curious seal, an intact packing band, a loop of plastic used to secure cardboard boxes for shipping, drifting in the water is a serious entanglement hazard, whereas bits of floating microplastic might be ingested by large filter-feeding whales down to nearly microscopic zooplankton. Until we know where the millions of tons of plastics reside in the ocean, one can’t fully understand the full suite of its impacts on the marine ecosystem.

Yet we don’t have to wait for more research before working on solutions to this pollution problem. For the few million tons of microplastic floating in the ocean, we know that it is not feasible to clean up these nearly microscopic particles distributed across thousands of kilometers of the sea surface.

Instead, we have to turn off the tap and prevent this waste from entering the ocean in the first place.

THE BOTTOM LINE: What happens and where does our so-called recycled plastics go?
Most, if not all of our recycled plastics are not recycled at all, they are shipped to China, Indonesia and various other countries who either actually recycle or dump it into rivers which eventually make it to the ocean.

The problem with plastics is that they generally don’t breakdown, biodegrade and become inert. Once created they are with us for as long as nuclear waste is. Meaning todays plastics have a half-life of nearly a thousand years, maybe longer.

Cleaning this mess up is not the long term solution. Making plastics used for containers must be made from biodegradable inert substance, or plastic containers of all kinds must be done away with. I can remember when we didn’t have plastic and guess what? We survived with paper and glass containers. Paper straws, bags, paper wrap, corrugated cardboard instead of Styrofoam containers. Juice, soda and beer came in glass containers. Shredded paper and cardboard for packing instead of Styrofoam peanuts.

If industry is going to continue to use plastic single use containers, they must be responsible for recycling them. From the cradle to the grave as they say.

The next time you go the supermarket, take time to look at just how many products come in plastic containers or plastic bags. Nearly everything, and most of it is totally unnecessary and redundant.   When you go to get your hamburger at your local fast food chain, it will come in a Styrofoam container, inside, it is wrapped in a paper wrap and it is all in a paper bag. Is the Styrofoam container even necessary? Probably not, and yet there it is, and it will likely end up in a land fill for a thousand years, or in the ocean to be eaten by some animal or if your real lucky it will wash up on the beach on Midway island in the Pacific where there is already a million tons of it.

I am not going to do what the airhead ecologists do and claim that we only have 12 years left before we all die from Global Warming.  But this my friend, unlike Climate Change that throughout history we have always adapted to, is a real threat to our vast ocean wild life. And yet not a peep from the so-called guardians of our planet. There is now more plastic in the ocean than there are fish and the Albatross are eating it.

What happens in the future when we are unknowingly eating it? Can we survive it any better than the wildlife? Probably not!  

Watch a video of Midway Island plastic sand.

Watch a video of what is called Plastic Beach Hawaii

On a personal note: For the past 5 years I personally have been recycling everything that I possibly can.  Plastics, Glass, Paper, steel and aluminum cans etc. According to the bureau of statistics, the average American produces 1569.5 pounds of household trash per year. What little I couldn’t feasibly or practically recycle, amounted to approximately 37 pounds per year which had to go into land fill.

If all the trash that I sent to the recycler was actually recycled, all that would be left would be 37 pounds, instead of more than 1500 pounds per year. Moreover there wouldn’t be any plastic in the ocean.  

Think about it…

Thanks for listening my friend. Now go do the right thing, pray and fight for truth and freedom. 

- de Andréa

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