Tiny particles are undesirable tokens from the Plastic Age | Sam Venable
First of two parts
Here’s some gallows humor to consider tomorrow on the 54th celebration of Earth Day:If you’re fishing way off in the future and catch a world-record specimen, you won’t need to take it to a taxidermist. Just nail it to the wall as is. The poor thing will be so full of plastic, it can hang there for decades without going bad.
OK, that’s a simplistic, cornpone way of looking at a serious pollution problem. Guilty as charged.
But maybe it’s not as far-fetched a notion as it seems. If you follow environmental news, you know what I’m talking about.
Microplastics.
By multiple bazillions.
Microplastics are itty-bitty souvenirs from the Plastic Age. They are what’s left from the slow deterioration of all the resins, polymers, vinyls, styrenes, ethylenes, xylenes and whatever other “-enes” go into the making of plastic. Lord knows there’s a bunch of ’em out there.
They’re in the air, in the ground, in the water. Microplastics have been detected atop 29,032-foot Mount Everest and at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, more than 6 miles deep in the western Pacific Ocean.
It’s beyond the limits of my C-in-high-school-chemistry brain to comprehend this mess, let alone explain it. To provide a glimmer of perspective, I yield the floor to New York journalist Tatiana Schlossberg, award-winning author of “Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have,” who penned this example for the Washington Post:
“Between 1950 and 2021, humanity produced about 11 billion metric tons of virgin plastic — the weight of 110,000 U.S. aircraft carriers. Only 2 billion tons of this is still in use. The rest is waste: 71 percent has ended up in landfills or somewhere else in the environment, including oceans; 12 percent has been recycled; 17 percent has been incinerated. At the rate we’re going, plastic waste will rise 60 percent by 2050.”
We eat, drink and breathe microplastics. So do all living things on this planet.
How much micro misery are we talking about?
Consider this estimate from the National Center for Biotechnology Information: It’s possible that the average human “is consuming around 39,000 to 52,000 microplastic particles per year, with age and gender impacting the total amount.”
Researchers aren’t certain how this will ultimately affect life on Earth. It’s going to take untold years of study. But, stupid fishing jokes aside, you’ll never convince me there’s any remote “benefit” to Homo sapiens, et al., from this foreign matter in our systems.
NEXT: Drip, drip, drip.
Sam Venable’s column appears every Sunday. Contact him at sam.venable@outlook.com.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Sam Venable: Tiny particles are undesirable tokens from Plastic Age
