Jesus Fuck! More Garbage Than You Can Possibly Fucking Imagine!

[brazil84]

@jjimm

As had been clarified earlier in the thread (“plastic soup”). Hence my confusion.

The clarification seemed to be saying that you can’t see this so-called rubbish dump because it’s translucent and under the surface of the water. I would guess that a bigger reason is that it’s just not very concentrated at all.

[jjimm]

@brazil84

The clarification seemed to be saying that you can’t see this so-called rubbish dump because it’s translucent and under the surface of the water. I would guess that a bigger reason is that it’s just not very concentrated at all.

That’s OK then! Phew.

[brazil84]

@jjimm

That’s OK then! Phew.

Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t, but “rubbish dump” is hyperbole.

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

Just wish to point out that “footballs, kayaks, Lego blocks and carrier bags” is not “garbage”–it is a garage sale.

[Tabithina]

I’m glad to see that more people are starting to talk about the North Pacific Gyre garbage patch. I first heard about it a few months ago from a friend on another board who is an environmental scientist. After she mentioned the phrase “twice the size of Texas”, I had to go googling, and I was surprised how few people were talking about it at that time. Maybe it would do some good if Britney were shipped off to some remote Pacific island, and the paparazzi would follow her out there?

Anyhow, here is an interesting, and scary, youtube video about the patch:

- YouTube

[Loach]

Leave the damn thing alone. Right now it’s staying in one spot. If we start poking at it we’ll only make it angry.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

I, for one, welcome our new giant oceanborne waste pile overlords.

[Wile_E]

I think we need to gather it all up and put it in a rocket and shoot it into space. If it eventually comes back to earth in another 1000 years it will be someone else’s problem.

[Tabithina]

Actually I read about this company that is turning plastic back into oil. I wonder if it will ever become viable to harvest this floating dump. And who owns the plastic, since its in international waters?

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn12141

I’d love to learn more about this. I thought about starting a GQ thread about turning the garbage patch back into oil, but I’m just not brave enough. Heehee. Any takers who can frame a question better than I can, go for it!

[aruvqan]

@Canadiangirl

Check out the website garbage revolution…there’s a couple pretty neat experiments and they are promoting less garbage and sending the garbage back to companies who overpackage.

We throw very little garbage…a couple of small shopping bags every two weeks. Otherwise, it’s compost, recycle.

I work in waste industry and am very aware of the problems of overpackaging … annoying to get a little tiny plastic doodad and have to throw away 3 or 4 times as much packaging as teh item itself…

We try to compost and recycle as much as possible. We have a small vermicycle pit for meat/animal products and the vegie stuff that doesnt get fed to the chickens [they are seriously fantastic at eating veggie peelings, and even assorted leftovers but dont seem to like stuff that is really greasy, or the fat trimmings off meat, which worms adore or at least seem to thrive on.] Cans and bottles get recycled, paper gets composted or used as tinder in the wood stove. It is the nonrecyclable plastic that drives me nuts.

On the interesting side, I was talking to a facilities manager at one of the Walmarts we broker for, and they are [at a corporate level] seriously hammering teh recycling and reduction plans. They have a couple pilot locations that have plastic pelletizers and have a number of locations that feed the recyclable plastic to them and they prep it for sending right to the plastics remanufacturer [cutting out the middleman] unfrtunately it is not really practical at this time - he said that the equipment was seriously expensive [in the range of $50K US] and unfortunately the pelletized plastic from 12 stores was just now after almost a year filling a semi trailer, and the kickback from selling it to the plastics place would take something like 15 years.

It is roadblocks like this that keep the crap going into landfills=(

[Man_With_a_Cat]

Let’s nuke it.

[blinkingblinking]

The Wiki link includes this:
Quote:
Some sources have incorrectly reported that there is a “floating continent” of debris that is roughly twice the size of Texas, however no scientific investigation, including [ocean researcher Charles] Moore’s, has verified this.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@blinkingblinking

Some sources have incorrectly reported that there is a “floating continent” of debris that is roughly twice the size of Texas, however no scientific investigation, including [ocean researcher Charles] Moore’s, has verified this.

I would like to amend my previous post to read, “I, for one, welcome our new giant unverifiable invisible continent-sized oceanborne waste-pile overlords.”

[SmartAleq]

@brazil84

The clarification seemed to be saying that you can’t see this so-called rubbish dump because it’s translucent and under the surface of the water. I would guess that a bigger reason is that it’s just not very concentrated at all.

Did you read the linked articles? How’s this strike you for “not very concentrated at all”:

@Linked Article

Bad enough. But Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of trash were only the most visible signs of the problem; others were far less obvious, and far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and arrived at the following conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.

You don’t consider seawater that contains more plastic than the basic food building block of the ocean to be a major problem?

But hey, just keep on dumping them plastics–it’s no skin off our noses, right? Yeah, okay, until it just messes us up to the point that we can no longer breed effectively. Who needs a super flu or doomsday virus when we can just bottled-water ourselves into reproductive incompetence and die out quietly?

@Linked Article

It’s not fair, however, to single out fast food and new cars. PBDEs, to take just one example, are used in many products, incuding computers, carpeting, and paint. As for phthalates, we deploy about a billion pounds of them a year worldwide despite the fact that California recently listed them as a chemical known to be toxic to our reproductive systems. Used to make plastic soft and pliable, phthalates leach easily from millions of products—packaged food, cosmetics, varnishes, the coatings of timed-release pharmaceuticals—into our blood, urine, saliva, seminal fluid, breast milk, and amniotic fluid. In food containers and some plastic bottles, phthalates are now found with another compound called bisphenol A (BPA), which scientists are discovering can wreak stunning havoc in the body. We produce 6 billion pounds of that each year, and it shows: BPA has been found in nearly every human who has been tested in the United States. We’re eating these plasticizing additives, drinking them, breathing them, and absorbing them through our skin every single day.
Most alarming, these chemicals may disrupt the endocrine system—the delicately balanced set of hormones and glands that affect virtually every organ and cell—by mimicking the female hormone estrogen. In marine environments, excess estrogen has led to Twilight Zone-esque discoveries of male fish and seagulls that have sprouted female sex organs.

On land, things are equally gruesome. “Fertility rates have been declining for quite some time now, and exposure to synthetic estrogen—especially from the chemicals found in plastic products—can have an adverse effect,” says Marc Goldstein, M.D., director of the Cornell Institute for Repro-ductive Medicine. Dr. Goldstein also notes that pregnant women are particularly vulnerable: “Prenatal exposure, even in very low doses, can cause irreversible damage in an unborn baby’s reproductive organs.” And after the baby is born, he or she is hardly out of the woods. Frederick vom Saal, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia who specifically studies estrogenic chemicals in plastics, warns parents to “steer clear of polycarbonate baby bottles. They’re particularly dangerous for newborns, whose brains, immune systems, and gonads are still developing.” Dr. vom Saal’s research spurred him to throw out every polycarbonate plastic item in his house, and to stop buying plastic-wrapped food and canned goods (cans are plastic-lined) at the grocery store. “We now know that BPA causes prostate cancer in mice and rats, and abnormalities in the prostate’s stem cell, which is the cell implicated in human prostate cancer,” he says. “That’s enough to scare the hell out of me.” At Tufts University, Ana M. Soto, M.D., a professor of anatomy and cellular biology, has also found connections between these chemicals and breast cancer.

And if that weren’t enough, maybe it’s not just high fructose corn syrup that’s making us so fucking fat–check this little tidbit out:

@Linked Article

As if the potential for cancer and mutation weren’t enough, Dr. vom Saal states in one of his studies that “prenatal exposure to very low doses of BPA increases the rate of postnatal growth in mice and rats.” In other words, BPA made rodents fat. Their insulin output surged wildly and then crashed into a state of resistance—the virtual definition of diabetes. They produced bigger fat cells, and more of them. A recent scientific paper Dr. vom Saal coauthored contains this chilling sentence: “These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contributing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world, associated with the dramatic increase in the amount of plastic being produced each year.” Given this, it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that America’s staggering rise in diabetes—a 735 percent increase since 1935—follows the same arc.

I may be regarded in some circles as a bit of a crank regarding packaging, overpackaging and the prevalence of plastics in everyday life but there are days when I feel pretty damned vindicated about my stance on the subject–not that it brings me any happiness, mind you, just more of a Marvinesque depressive joy at being proven right.

Oh, and the rate of recycling on plastics? About 3-5%. Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it!

[brazil84]

@SmartAleq

You don’t consider seawater that contains more plastic than the basic food building block of the ocean to be a major problem?

Not without more information. What exactly is the problem, anyway: That the fish will eat plastic instead of zooplankton and end up malnourished?

just more of a Marvinesque depressive joy at being proven right.

Ahhh . . . things become clearer now.

[SmartAleq]

@brazil84

Not without more information. What exactly is the problem, anyway: That the fish will eat plastic instead of zooplankton and end up malnourished?

Ahhh . . . things become clearer now.

Yes, it is a huge problem that fish and birds and animals mistake plastic for food, because it kills them. It’s also a huge problem because plastic bonds with lots of environmental toxins like leftover DDT, which turns the little plastic nurdles into poison pellets. Fish eat the plastic, absorb the toxins and then people eat the fish–do I have to spell it out further?

I’d be more than happy to exchange my Marvin outlook for one of unalloyed sunshine and rainbows, assuming that some of these issues can be ameliorated–anybody care to help the process along? You, for instance?

[brazil84]

@SmartAleq

Yes, it is a huge problem that fish and birds and animals mistake plastic for food, because it kills them.

Ok, then there should have been a massive drop in the dolphin and whale population in the North Pacific due to this “huge problem” right?

I’d be more than happy to exchange my Marvin outlook for one of unalloyed sunshine and rainbows, assuming that some of these issues can be ameliorated–anybody care to help the process along? You, for instance?

Here’s a thought: Examine the evidence critically and go where it leads you. Be skeptical of alarmists.

[Antinor01]

@Mr Bus Guy

Let’s nuke it.

But but…isn’t there another way to be sure?

[SmartAleq]

@brazil84

Here’s a thought: Examine the evidence critically and go where it leads you. Be skeptical of alarmists.

Ah, so you haven’t read anything on this subject, gotcha. :rolleyes:

[brazil84]

@SmartAleq

Ah, so you haven’t read anything on this subject,

I’m happy to consider, within limits, whatever you would like to cite and quote.

Certainly you could try to answer my question:

Ok, then there should have been a massive drop in the dolphin and whale population in the North Pacific due to this “huge problem” right?