Fogbow

Plastic Rain Is the New Acid Rain
Researchers find that over 1,000 metric tons of microplastic fall on 11 protected areas in the US annually, equivalent to over 120 million plastic water bottles.

HOOF IT THROUGH the national parks of the western United States—Joshua Tree, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon—and breathe deep the pristine air. These are unspoiled lands, collectively a great American conservation story. Yet an invisible menace is actually blowing through the air and falling via raindrops: Microplastic particles, tiny chunks (by definition, less than 5 millimeters long) of fragmented plastic bottles and microfibers that fray from clothes, all pollutants that get caught up in Earth’s atmospheric systems and deposited in the wilderness.

Writing today in the journal Science, researchers report a startling discovery: After collecting rainwater and air samples for 14 months, they calculated that over 1,000 metric tons of microplastic particles fall into 11 protected areas in the western US each year. That’s the equivalent of over 120 million plastic water bottles. “We just did that for the area of protected areas in the West, which is only 6 percent of the total US area,” says lead author Janice Brahney, an environmental scientist at Utah State University. “The number was just so large, it's shocking.”

It further confirms an increasingly hellish scenario: Microplastics are blowing all over the world, landing in supposedly pure habitats, like the Arctic and the remote French Pyrenees. They’re flowing into the oceans via wastewater and tainting deep-sea ecosystems, and they’re even ejecting out of the water and blowing onto land in sea breezes. And now in the American West, and presumably across the rest of the world given that these are fundamental atmospheric processes, they are falling in the form of plastic rain—the new acid rain.

Plastic rain could prove to be a more insidious problem than acid rain, which is a consequence of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. By deploying scrubbers in power plants to control the former, and catalytic converters in cars to control the latter, the US and other countries have over the last several decades cut down on the acidification problem. But microplastic has already corrupted even the most remote environments, and there’s no way to scrub water or land or air of the particles—the stuff is absolutely everywhere, and it’s not like there’s a plastic magnet we can drag through the oceans. What makes plastic so useful—its hardiness—is what also makes it an alarming pollutant: Plastic never really goes away, instead breaking into ever smaller bits that infiltrate ever smaller corners of the planet. Even worse, plastic waste is expected to skyrocket from 260 million tons a year to 460 million tons by 2030, according to the consultancy McKinsey. More people joining the middle class in economically-developing countries means more consumerism and more plastic packaging.


https://www.wired.com/story/plastic-rai ... acid-rain/

[Dimetrodon] wrote: ↑Sat Nov 19, 2022 11:36 am Plastic is everywhere at this point. It's becoming an unfortunate component of our bodies as well, as we both inhale and eat this crap daily. Some of these particles are capable of bypassing the blood brain barrier and no doubt cause brain damage.

It's amazing how we poison ourselves and the world we depend on.

Bugs across globe are evolving to eat plastic, study finds
Surprising discovery shows scale of plastic pollution and reveals enzymes that could boost recycling

Damian Carrington Environment editor
Tue 14 Dec 2021 13.52 GMT

Microbes in oceans and soils across the globe are evolving to eat plastic, according to a study.

The research scanned more than 200m genes found in DNA samples taken from the environment and found 30,000 different enzymes that could degrade 10 different types of plastic.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... tudy-finds

Ideonella sakaiensis

Ideonella sakaiensis
Scientific classificationedit
Domain: Bacteria
Phylum: Pseudomonadota
Class: Betaproteobacteria
Order: Burkholderiales
Family: Comamonadaceae
Genus: Ideonella
Species: I. sakaiensis
Binomial name
Ideonella sakaiensis
Yoshida et al. 2016[1]

Ideonella sakaiensis is a bacterium from the genus Ideonella and family Comamonadaceae capable of breaking down and consuming the plastic polyethylene terephthalate (PET) using it as both a carbon and energy source. The bacterium was originally isolated from a sediment sample taken outside of a plastic bottle recycling facility in Sakai City, Japan.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis

humblescribe wrote: ↑Sat Nov 19, 2022 3:54 pm Hay now, don't be dissing the infield fly rule. That is a very good rule, and is nothing to be taken lightly.

I submit that you wrote that sentence while you were half-baked. Once you are fully baked, you will see the folly of your ways.

Foggy wrote: ↑Sat Nov 19, 2022 1:10 pm And hopefully they will avoid some of the most horrible things we've done, like disco and the infield fly rule and ketchup on scrambled eggs.

Off Topic

Disco. 6th grade P.E. class. Our instructor taught us how to "do the hustle". Talk about grooming youngins without parental notification.

Phoenix520 wrote: ↑Sun Nov 20, 2022 11:55 am Bugs that eat plastic: Does that includes the infield flies?