Category Archives: Plastic Pollution Articles & News

An emerging domain of research shows that plastic consumption and pollution harms human health — particularly for the world’s lower-income communities.This builds on a growing field of research revealing the dangers of plastic on the environment — especially marine ecosystems. Of the over 8 billion tons of plastic produced since the 1950s, less than 10 percent has been recycled.“Plastic threatens human health at every stage of its production pipeline — from the extraction of the fossil carbon, oil and gas, that is plastic’s main constituent, to its manufacture, use and disposal,” said Philip Landrigan, director of the Global Observatory on Pollution and Health and lead author of the Lancet Commission on pollution and health.The connection between plastics and health was also highlighted in Africa by researchers from Stanford and the Technical University of Mombasa. After decades of hunting for mosquito-borne viruses in coastal Kenya, they received one of their greatest tips from a group of elementary schoolchildren.The scientists had been trying to uncover the breeding grounds of mosquitoes causing a number of illnesses that regularly sicken over half of Kenya’s coastal population — including dengue, chikungunya and others that can cause severe fevers, headaches, rashes, joint pain, life-threatening bleeding and death.With these diseases on the rise, researchers were teaching schoolchildren about the life stages and habitats of insects that serve as vectors. On a homework assignment to find immature forms of mosquitoes in their communities, the children discovered something unexpected — disease-carrying mosquitoes breeding in nests of plastic trash around their homes.“We were astounded,” said Stanford pediatrician and researcher Desiree LaBeaud, who led the project. “The children’s discovery helped us realize that the majority of mosquitoes were breeding in plastic trash and other containers littering streets and people’s yards.”The world created about 8 million tons of pandemic plastic waste, and much of it is now in the oceanEnvironment and healthIt made sense: Plastic is watertight and can take hundreds of years to break down, creating a perfect habitat for mosquitoes. This groundbreaking discovery built on other recent findings connecting environmental degradation to human health — including the health effects of wildfire smoke, heat stress and the risk of pandemics caused by deforestation and other ecological disruptions. With climate change driving an increase in mosquito-borne illnesses, the need to limit their breeding grounds felt more important than ever to the researchers.“We realized that we needed to look far beyond just treating the sick,” said LaBeaud, who is senior author on an upcoming publication in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases on the topic. “To stop these diseases at their source, we needed to tackle the plastic problem.”Plastics are closely tied to climate change, which the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) has recognized as “one of the most pressing existential threats to human health,” in the words of NAM President Victor J. Dzau. Plastics use the same amount of oil as the entire aviation industry — and are expected to more than triple in their oil consumption in the next 30 years.Moreover, the pollution caused by petrochemical plants — which are most often in lower-income settings — threaten the health of communities. “Plastic manufacture is inequitably distributed, with virtually all plastic production facilities located either in low- and mid-income countries or in poor and minority communities within high-income countries,” Landrigan pointed out.EPA just detailed all the ways climate change will hit U.S. racial minorities the hardest. It’s a long list.After plastic products are released into the environment, they can break down into smaller pieces of plastic known as microplastics. While more research is needed, some findings suggest these virtually ubiquitous tiny plastic particles — that have been found in human blood — have the potential to disrupt immune and endocrine systems, damage organs, cause inflammation, increase cancer risk and possibly affect pregnancy outcomes.Disposing of plastic waste also poses challenges. In places such as sub-Saharan Africa, as much as three quarters of all waste is burned, releasing toxic compounds and carcinogens into the air.The infectious-disease research in coastal Kenya is a critical new dimension. Plastic pollution is exacerbating an already dire public health challenge — over 50 percent of people in coastal Kenya are regularly exposed to dengue and chikungunya, and at least 10 percent of febrile illness in the region is probably because of undiagnosed mosquito-borne viral infections. This pattern seems to be widespread — similar findings have emerged in South America and Asia.The problem is not only the potentially deadly diseases themselves. With symptoms for some illnesses such as chikungunya lasting for up to months or years, getting sick could also mean missing school and days of work — and communities being kept in poverty, creating what some scholars call the “disease-poverty trap.”“The case of plastics vividly illustrates how the industrial practices of the high-income world are intimately tied to the health and development of lower-income communities around the globe,” LaBeaud said. “Maintaining a healthy planet requires thinking carefully about how we produce, consume, and waste — knowing that downstream health impacts, especially on marginalized communities, won’t always be immediately apparent.”From national parks to the deep sea, plastic pollution is showing up wherever scientists lookFighting a growing problemCombating the plastic pollution in Kenya and other African countries involves addressing both exported recycling from high-income countries and an influx of new plastic products, especially single-use materials.Kenya, along with 95 other countries, received more than 1 billion pounds of foreign plastic waste from U.S. exporters in 2019 alone. This roughly equates to a line of 18-wheeler semi-trucks full of plastic trash backed up for about 350 miles, stretching nearly the entire length of Florida. And it’s not just plastic trash imports — Nairobi also saw a quadrupling in plastic consumption over the same 25-year period that its population only tripled.In response, Kenya banned single-use plastic bags in 2017 and banned all single-use plastic in protected natural sites in 2020. This is part of a larger movement to reduce plastic waste in Africa. The African Union, for example, has set a goal that 50 percent of waste used in African cities be recycled by 2023.Communities across Africa have also started exploding with locally designed solutions — exploring opportunities to rethink waste management and recycling in ways that also support local economies.For example, LaBeaud and Kenyan partners launched a nonprofit organization, HERI-Kenya, to engage policymakers, communicate the plastic-disease connection, and build business opportunities that allow for more locals to make a living collecting and recycling trash. This, they hope, can build the foundation for what is known as a circular economy for plastics, where the reuse and recycling of materials create a sustainable system of zero waste.“When we remove plastic litter, we not only improve local environments — we improve human health, beautify our community, support local entrepreneurs and boost tourism,” said Francis Mutuku, a researcher at the Technical University of Mombasa and LaBeaud’s long-term collaborator. “Everyone stands to gain.”Yet, despite the will to act, activists and lawmakers in Africa have found that the solution is not as simple as recycling or banning plastics.One way to tackle our huge plastic pollution problem: Turn it into fuelWith fossil fuels increasingly falling out of favor, actors such as the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and large oil companies are reportedly moving toward a new strategy, opting to turn oil into plastics and distribute them to external markets, including countries in Africa. While the ACC has denied efforts to undermine bans on single-use plastics in places such as Kenya, many of the companies it represents are still expanding their production and distribution of plastics.Oil and chemical companies were reportedly planning to spend an estimated $400 billion on expanding plastics production as the biggest anticipated driver of oil demand — up to 95 percent by some forecasts — from 2020 to 2024, according to a 2020 Carbon Tracker analysis. From reporting around that same time, almost 350 new chemical plants were being planned in the United States alone.In 2019, Chevron Phillips Chemical, a joint venture partially owned by Chevron, called petrochemical collaborations with Qatar Petroleum, now called QatarEnergy, “some of the safest and most successful assets in Chevron Phillips Chemical’s global portfolio” — including a new $8 billion project to develop a Gulf Coast petrochemical plant.“From delivering fresh water and preventing food waste to supplying medical products used every day in hospitals worldwide, our materials help people live prosperous and healthy lives,” Chevron Phillips Chemical said in an emailed statement.Chevron’s 2021 annual report noted that petrochemical projects on the Gulf Coast and in Qatar were ongoing. In a March presentation to investors, a Chevron executive said that demand and margins for petrochemicals are expected to continue to grow over the long term.“With growing recognition around the negative health and environmental consequences of plastics, we do need to ask — why produce more?” Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health Director Michele Barry said. “Where are these new chemical plants being built, and which communities are the intended recipients of these products?”Beyond recyclingRecycling is one of the most talked-about solutions for the plastics crisis.“ACC supports scaling up advanced recycling,” said Stewart Harris, senior director of Global Plastics Policy at the ACC, in an email, referring to recycling technology that breaks down used plastics into their basic building blocks to create new, often reusable, products. “Since 2017, 70 advanced recycling projects representing over $7 billion in investments have been announced or are already operating.”A wide range of companies have begun to invest in improved waste collection and recycling — for example, Chevron Phillips Chemical’s investments in circular plastics and Coca-Cola’s PETCO campaign in southern and eastern Africa.“We encourage responsible disposal of PET packaging and recycling of the same to create a circular economy, which has an economic impact on those involved throughout the recycling value-chain,” said Scott Leith, a spokesperson for Coca-Cola, who acknowledged that the challenge of plastic waste requires multiple approaches.While some local community organizations, such as Clean Up Kenya, have criticized Coca-Cola’s approach, advocates have noted that initiatives such as this one could allow simultaneous improvements in waste infrastructure, financial incentives for collectors and worker safety.“Partnerships between governments and the private sector are critical to achieving universal access to waste collection, which forms the foundation of a circular economy,” said Harris, in an emailed statement. Other groups such as the Alliance to End Plastic Waste are also trying to engage a variety of companies and organizations to accelerate community-engaged solutions.Do you wishcycle? If so, you’re actually not helping to recycle.Yet researchers and policymakers have pointed out that recycling is no silver bullet, because of limitations in recycling capability and the environmental costs of producing plastics in the first place.Moreover, according to a recent Reuters analysis, plastic recycling itself is forestalled by ongoing production: “Less than 10% of plastic is recycled, partly because new plastic produced by the oil industry is so plentiful and cheap.” For context, the $7 billion investment in recycling cited by the ACC is less than 2 percent of the $400 billion Carbon Tracker’s 2020 analysis ascribed to expanding upstream plastics production.Kenyan activists, including Clean Up Kenya, are calling for more comprehensive upstream solutions — including banning single-use plastic bottles overall.A 2020 report by SYSTEMIQ frames plastic collection and recycling as just one dimension of a strategy to reduce 80 percent of plastic pollution by 2040. Other critical channels of action noted in the report include reducing plastic consumption, substituting materials, redesigning products, securely disposing of the near-quarter of plastic that cannot be recycled — and, particularly relevant to Kenya’s plastic challenges, reducing “waste exports into countries with low collection and high leakage rates by 90%.”“There is an urgent need to simultaneously rein in plastic production and use in countries at every level of income,” Landrigan said.In line with this, the United Nations Environment Assembly agreed on March 2 to begin writing a global treaty that would restrict the expansion of plastic use. Industry members such as Coca-Cola and the ACC have signaled support for such a treaty in emailed and online statements, saying it would provide needed certainty to industries.At the same time, some nongovernmental organizations have expressed concern about the treaty’s lack of global regulations. The ACC’s Harris has said his organization does not support overall caps on plastic production, contending that plastics play a necessary role in providing critical medical services. Health and environmental researchers, however, worry about the enabling of ongoing petrochemical expansion — and the health risks this brings.“We can’t recycle our way out of our global plastic problem,” Barry said. “Without a fundamental reimagining of global industrial practices, we will continue to see dire impacts on the climate, the planet and our health.”Erika Veidis serves as the planetary health program manager for the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, where she leads the Action Lab for Planetary Health, a program focused on moving Stanford environmental and health research to solutions.Jamie Hansen serves as communications manager for the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, helping to amplify the work of the center and its fellows through storytelling and multimedia communications.

Share on PinterestMIcroplastics’ newest vessel, according to new research, is human blood. pcess609/Getty ImagesScientists have been concerned about possible harm from microplastics for many years.In a new study, researchers developed a method of detecting microplastics in human blood.The scientists found microparticles of four common plastics in blood samples from 17 out of 22 healthy adults.Further research could determine whether microplastics in the blood will impact health.Plastics are everywhere. Although, in theory, much of it can be recycled, a lot of it ends up in landfills, or worse, in watercourses and marine ecosystems.Many people are too familiar with distressing images of turtles and dolphins trapped in plastic bags or fishing nets. But there is a less visible effect — microplastics, tiny plastic particles formed when plastics break down and during commercial product manufacturing. Several studies have found evidence of plastics in the human body. One revelation came after scientists detected plastic additives such as bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates in human urine. Researchers have also found microplastics in human feces. However, until now, no published study has directly examined the effect of these tiny plastic specks on human health.In a new study published in the journal Environment International, researchers in the Netherlands developed a method of analyzing human blood to detect microplastics. They then used this method to analyze blood from 22 healthy volunteers.Microplastics are specks of plastic. By definition, they are less than 5mm in any dimension, but many are invisible to the naked eye. There are two types of microplastics: primary microplastics and secondary microplastics. The former are the particles used in some cosmetics, and the latter comes from the breakdown products of larger plastic items.Much concern about microplastics has previously focused on their effect on the marine environment, as they are found in oceans worldwide. Many marine organisms, such as fish and shellfish, have been found to contain microplastics. “It’s highly probable given the prevalence of microplastics in air, water, wildlife, the food chain, that they will also be entering the human body, but the technical difficulties of measuring microplastic particles in the human body has made it hard to confirm this.”– Prof. Tamara Galloway, chair in ecotoxicology at the University of Exeter, the U.K.For this study, the researchers looked for particles that could be absorbed across membranes in the human body. They filtered the blood to collect any plastic particles between 700 nanometers(nm) and 500,000nm. To avoid any plastic contamination, the researchers used glass fiber filters.The researchers looked for five common plastics: The samples from the filters were processed by double-shot pyrolysis to produce chromatograms from which scientists could identify the contents.“Human biomonitoring methods for measuring plastics additives have been available for several years […] But measuring microplastics, especially at the small size that would likely circulate in blood vessels (7 microns), is very hard,” Prof. Galloway told Medical News Today.“This paper is good news because it describes a method that is sensitive enough to do this in blood samples and combines size fractionation and mass measurements,” she added.More than three-quarters of the blood samples contained a quantifiable mass of plastic particles. The researchers found PET — which most drinks bottles are made from — in the blood of more than half of those tested. They did not detect PP in any of the samples.Researchers found at least 3 different types of plastic in some blood samples.Prof. Galloway was unsurprised by the findings: “The fact that just about everyone has microplastic in their blood isn’t so surprising when you consider that just about everyone has plastics additives in their bodies.”The researchers suggest several ways the plastics may have entered the bloodstream — via air, food, water, personal care products such as toothpaste and lip gloss, dental polymers, and tattoo ink residues. What happens to the microplastics once they enter the bloodstream is unclear.In vitro studies have shown the effects of microplastics on cells. A recent study in Germany found that microplastic particles can destabilize lipid membranes — the barriers that surround all cells — which may affect their functioning. Another study found that microplastics had many effects on cells, including cell death.The current study was based on a sample size of only 22 people, so the authors stress the need for further research: “It remains to be determined whether plastic particles are present in the plasma or are carried by specific cell types.” However, they believe that “[i]t is scientifically plausible that plastic particles may be transported to organs via the bloodstream.”What effect they might have on organs is, as yet, unknown.

Sonika Agarwal
Tarleton State University researchers have demonstrated that food-grade plant extracts, especially those from okra, have the power to remove microplastics from wastewater.
The health effects of ingesting microplastics are unclear, but studies suggest that people unintentionally consume thousands of particles every year.
They can be released from your clothing in the washing machine and end up in the city water treatment facility
In the typical wastewater treatment process, microplastics are removed from water by adding flocculants, or sticky chemicals that attract microplastics and form large clumps. The clumps then sink to the bottom of the water and can be separated from it.
Dr. Srinivasan, the Endowed Munson Research Professor of Chemistry at the Texas university, and her team have been investigating more healthy alternatives to the commonly used flocculant, polyacrylamide.
“We think that microplastics by themselves may not be much of a health hazard, but anything they get into or any type of toxic substance that gets attached to them could go inside our bodies and cause problems,” said Associate Professor Dr. Rajani Srinivasan, the principal investigator for the project.
She has studied the use of food-grade plant extracts as non-toxic flocculants to remove textile-based pollutants from wastewater. “I was working with the removal of microorganisms and things like that, and I thought, ‘Why not try microplastics?’”
So she and a team of undergraduate and environmental science master’s students tested polysaccharide extracts from 7 plants: fenugreek, cactus, aloe vera, okra, tamarind, and psyllium. They tested compounds from the individual plants as well as in different combinations.
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They found that polysaccharides from okra worked the best. Paired with fenugreek extract, microplastics could be removed from ocean water, and the okra paired with those from tamarind worked best for freshwater samples.
Overall, the plant-based polysaccharides worked better than, or as well as, the traditional flocculant polyacrylamide.
Importantly, the plant-based flocculants can be implemented in existing water treatment processes.
“The whole treatment method with the non-toxic materials uses the same infrastructure,” said Dr. Srinivasan. “We don’t have to build something new to incorporate these materials for water treatment purposes.”
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She and her team will continue tailoring the ratios and combinations to optimize removal of different microplastic types from a variety of water sources. They also plan to scale up the removal process in field studies outside the lab.
Ultimately, they hope to commercialize the method and remove microplastics from water on an industrial scale.
The study and its results, funded by the National Science Foundation and a water development district in Lubbock, were presented at the March 20-24 spring meeting of the American Chemical Society, according to the University.
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As long as there has been marine life, there has been marine snow — a ceaseless drizzle of death and waste sinking from the surface into the depths of the sea.The snow begins as motes, which aggregate into dense, flocculent flakes that gradually sink and drift past the mouths (and mouth-like apparatuses) of scavengers farther down. But even marine snow that is devoured will most likely be snowfall once more; a squid’s guts are just a rest stop on this long passage to the deep.Although the term may suggest wintry whites, marine snow is mostly brownish or grayish, comprising mostly dead things. For eons, the debris has contained the same things — flecks from plant and animal carcasses, feces, mucus, dust, microbes, viruses — and transported the ocean’s carbon to be stored on the seafloor. Increasingly, however, marine snowfall is being infiltrated by microplastics: fibers and fragments of polyamide, polyethylene and polyethylene terephthalate. And this fauxfall appears to be altering our planet’s ancient cooling process.Every year, tens of millions of tons of plastic enter Earth’s oceans. Scientists initially assumed that the material was destined to float in garbage patches and gyres, but surface surveys have accounted for only about one percent of the ocean’s estimated plastic. A recent model found that 99.8 percent of plastic that entered the ocean since 1950 had sunk below the first few hundred feet of the ocean. Scientists have found 10,000 times more microplastics on the seafloor than in contaminated surface waters.Marine snow, one of the primary pathways connecting the surface and the deep, appears to be helping the plastics sink. And scientists have only begun to untangle how these materials interfere with deep-sea food webs and the ocean’s natural carbon cycles.“It’s not just that marine snow transports plastics or aggregates with plastic,” Luisa Galgani, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University, said. “It’s that they can help each other get to the deep ocean.”Marine snow-makingPlastic waste washing up on a beach in Bali, Indonesia. Surface surveys have accounted for only about one percent of the ocean’s estimated plastic.Agung Parameswara/Getty ImagesThe sunlit surface of the sea blooms with phytoplankton, zooplankton, algae, bacteria and other minuscule life, all feeding on sunbeams or one another. As these microbes metabolize, some produce polysaccharides that can form a sticky gel that attracts the lifeless bodies of tiny organisms, small shreds of larger carcasses, shells from foraminifera and pteropods, sand and microplastics, which stick together to form larger flakes. “They are the glue that keeps together all the components of marine snow,” Dr. Galgani said.Marine snowflakes fall at different rates. Smaller ones have a more languid descent — “as slow as a meter a day,” said Anela Choy, a biological oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Bigger particles, such as dense fecal pellets, can sink quicker. “It just skyrockets to the bottom of the ocean,” said Tracy Mincer, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University.Plastic in the ocean is constantly being degraded; even something as big and buoyant as a milk jug will eventually shed and splinter into microplastics. These plastics develop biofilms of distinct microbial communities — the “plastisphere,” said Linda Amaral-Zettler, a scientist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, who coined the term. “We sort of think about plastic as being inert,” Dr. Amaral-Zettler said. “Once it enters the environment, it’s rapidly colonized by microbes.”A sample of South Atlantic water containing plankton and microplastics. Ocean plastics commonly develop a filmy “plastisphere” of distinct microbial communities.Morgan Trimble/AlamyMicroplastics can host so many microbial hitchhikers that they counteract the natural buoyancy of the plastic, causing their raft to sink. But if the biofilms then degrade on the way down, the plastic could float back up, potentially leading to a yo-yoing purgatory of microplastics in the water column. Marine snow is anything but stable; as flakes free-fall into the abyss, they are constantly congealing and falling apart, rent by waves or predators.“It’s not as simple as: Everything’s falling all the time,” said Adam Porter, a marine ecologist at the University of Exeter in England. “It’s a black box in the middle of the ocean, because we can’t stay down there long enough to work out what’s going on.”To explore how marine snow and plastics are distributed in the water column, Dr. Mincer has begun to sample deeper waters with a dishwasher-size pump full of filters that dangles on a wire from a research boat. The filters are arranged from big mesh to small to filter out fish and plankton. Running these pumps for 10 hours at a stretch has revealed nylon fibers and other microplastics distributed throughout the water column below the South Atlantic subtropical gyre.But even with a research boat and its expensive and unwieldy equipment, an individual piece of marine snow is not easily retrieved from deep water in the actual ocean. The pumps often disturb the snow and scatter fecal pellets. And the flakes alone offer little insight into how fast some snows are sinking, which is vital to understanding how long the plastics linger, yo-yo or sink in the water column before settling on the seafloor.“Is it decades?” Dr. Mincer asked. “Is it hundreds of years? Then we can understand what we’re in here for, and what kind of problem this really is.”Instant marine snowExperimental “mesocosms” created by the researcher Luisa Galgani and her team on the Greek island of Crete, to mimic and observe marine snow. “In the mesocosm, you are manipulating a natural system,” she said.Luisa Galgani, Chiara Esposito, Paraskevi PittaTo answer these questions, and work within a budget, some scientists have made and manipulated their own marine snow in the lab.In Exeter, Dr. Porter collected buckets of seawater from a nearby estuary and loaded the water into continuously rolling bottles. He then sprinkled in microplastics, including polyethylene beads and polypropylene fibers. The constant churning, and a squirt of sticky hyaluronic acid, encouraged particles to collide and stick together into snow.“We obviously don’t have 300 meters of a tube to make it sink,” Dr. Porter said. “By rolling it, what you’re doing is you’re creating a never-ending water column for the particles to fall through.”After the bottles rolled for three days, he pipetted out the snow and analyzed the number of microplastics in each flake. His team found that every type of microplastic they tested aggregated into marine snow, and that microplastics such as polypropylene and polyethylene — normally too buoyant to sink on their own — readily sank once incorporated into marine snow. And all the marine snow contaminated with microplastics sank significantly faster than the natural marine snow.Tubes of marine snow in the lab of Adam Porter at the University of Exeter in England. “It’s not as simple as: Everything’s falling all the time,” Dr. Porter said.Adam PorterDr. Porter suggested that this potential change of the speed of the snow could have vast implications for how the ocean captures and stores carbon: Faster snowfalls could store more microplastics in the deep ocean, whereas slower snowfalls could make the plastic-laden particles more available to predators, potentially starving food webs deeper down. “The plastics are a diet pill for these animals,” said Karin Kvale, a carbon cycle scientist at GNS Science in New Zealand.In experiments in Crete, with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research program, Dr. Galgani has tried mimicking marine snow on a larger scale. She dropped six mesocosms — huge bags that each contained nearly 800 gallons of seawater and recreated natural water movement — in a large pool. Under these conditions, marine snow formed. “In the field, you mostly make observations,” Dr. Galgani said. “You have so little space and a limited system. In the mesocosm, you are manipulating a natural system.”Dr. Galgani mixed microplastics into three mesocosms in an attempt to “recreate a sea and maybe a future ocean where you can have a high concentration of plastic,” she said. The mesocosms laden with microplastics produced not just more marine snow but also more organic carbon, as the plastics offered more surfaces for microbes to colonize. All this could seed the deep ocean with even more carbon and alter the ocean’s biological pump, which helps regulate the climate.“Of course, it’s a very, very big picture,” Dr. Galgani said. “But we have some signals that it can have an effect. Of course, it depends on how much plastic there is.”A plastic feastVampire squids, which live in deep waters, were collected from a contaminated patch of the Atlantic Ocean and found to have alarmingly high levels of plastic in their stomachs. Steve Downer/Science SourceTo understand how microplastics might travel through deep-sea food webs, some scientists have turned to creatures for clues.Every 24 hours, many species of marine organism embark on a synchronized migration up and down in the water column. “They do the equivalent of a marathon every day and night,” Dr. Choy said. Guilherme V.B. Ferreira, a researcher at the Rural Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, wondered: “Is it possible they are transporting the plastics up and down?”Dr. Ferreira and Anne Justino, a doctoral student at the same university, collected vampire squids and midwater squids from a patch of the tropical Atlantic. They found a plethora of plastics in both species: mostly fibers, but also fragments and beads.This made sense for midwater squids, which migrate toward the surface at night to feed on fish and copepods that eat microplastics directly. But vampire squids, which live in deeper waters with fewer microplastics, had even higher levels of plastic, as well as foam, in their stomachs. The researchers hypothesize that the vampire squids’ primary diet of marine snow, especially meatier fecal pellets, may be funneling plastics into their bellies.“It’s very concerning,” Ms. Justino said. Dr. Ferreira said: “They are one of the most vulnerable species for this anthropogenic influence.”Ms. Justino has excavated fibers and beads from the digestive tracts of lanternfish, hatchetfish and other fish that migrate up and down in the mesopelagic, 650 to 3,300 feet down. Some microbial communities that settle on microplastics can bioluminesce, drawing in fish like a lure, said Dr. Mincer.In the Monterey Bay Canyon, Dr. Choy wanted to understand if certain species of filter feeders were ingesting microplastics and transporting them into food webs in deeper water. “Marine snow is one of the major things that connects food webs across the ocean,” she said.The large, mucusy house of a deep-sea larvacean. When the larvaceans move out, their microplastic-laden houses sink into the deep.NOAA Ocean ExplorationDr. Choy zeroed in on the giant larvacean Bathochordaeus stygius. The larvacean resembles a tiny tadpole and lives inside a palatial bubble of mucus that can reach up to a meter long. “It’s worse than the grossest booger you’ve ever seen,” Dr. Choy said. When their snot-houses become clogged from feeding, the larvaceans move out and the heavy bubbles sink. Dr. Choy found that these palaces of mucus are crowded with microplastics, which are funneled to the deep along with all their carbon.Giant larvaceans are found across the world’s oceans, but Dr. Choy emphasized that her work was focused on the Monterey Bay Canyon, which belongs to a network of marine protected areas and is not representative of other, more polluted seas. “It’s one deep bay on one coast of one country,” Dr. Choy said. “Scale up and think about how vast the ocean is, especially the deep water.”Individual flakes of marine snow are small, but they add up. A model created by Dr. Kvale estimated that in 2010, the world’s oceans produced 340 quadrillion aggregates of marine snow, which could transport as many as 463,000 tons of microplastics to the seafloor each year.Scientists are still exploring exactly how this plastic snow is sinking, but they do know for sure, Dr. Porter said, that “everything eventually sinks in the ocean.” Vampire squids will live and die and eventually become marine snow. But the microplastics that pass through them will remain, eventually settling on the seafloor in a stratigraphic layer that will mark our time on the planet long after humans are gone.

Air Date: Week of April 1, 2022

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East Antarctica is typically seen as very stable; the recent ice shelf break up is the first humans have ever observed in the half-century since satellites began to imaging Antarctica. (Photo: NASA, Public Domain)
On this week’s trip beyond the headlines, Host Steve Curwood is joined by Environmental Health News’ Weekend Editor Peter Dykstra to discuss an ice shelf break-up in typically stable East Antarctica. Then, the two look at the promises of fast-food companies to get PFAS chemicals out of their packaging. Finally, the pair look back in history at how plastic pollution in the Indian Ocean complicated the search for debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Transcript

CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Steve Curwood.
And on the line now from Atlanta, Georgia is Peter Dykstra. Peter’s an editor with Environmental Health News, that’s EHN.org and DailyClimate.org. And he’s here to tell us what’s going on beyond the headlines. Hi there, Peter. How you doing?
DYKSTRA: Well, hi, Steve. We got some foreboding news this past week from East Antarctica, considered to be the most stable region in the face of climate change of either the Arctic or the Antarctic. An ice shelf the size of New York City collapsed in East Antarctica. And that can only mean bad news for the contributions of the Arctic and the Antarctic, to global warming or climate change, or whatever we want to call it. But it’s a crisis.
CURWOOD: Yeah. And it’s funny this happened right around the equinox, the sun shining equally on the southern hemisphere, and the northern hemisphere in the polar regions. And there were heat waves in both places, Peter at this time.
DYKSTRA: Up to 70 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal in parts of Antarctica. And less than that, but still near-record setting warmth in the Arctic at the end of the Arctic winter.CURWOOD: And of course now this is the collapse of an ice sheet already on the water that’s not going to raise sea levels. But this trend continues, the glaciers behind it, that’s not good news, Peter. Maybe you have something to cheer me up?
DYKSTRA: Well, if you’re a fast food consumer, and I’m not saying that you are: Burger King, and Chick-Fil-A committed to removing those so called forever chemicals from their food packaging. Restaurant Brands International, which is the company that owns Burger King, and Popeyes, and Tim Hortons, those delightful doughnuts from Canada, announced plans a week ago to eliminate both per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the ones we know as PFAS, from all consumer packaging by the end of 2025.
CURWOOD: Hey, Peter, my excuse for hitting those fast food places: you know, as a reporter out there doing journalism and you’re there late at night and guess what’s open late at night or the first thing in the morning?

Several fast-food corporations have made commitments to removing PFAS and other toxic chemicals from their packaging. (Photo: Marco Verch, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

DYKSTRA: Yeah, I’m a bit of a hypocrite too, because we know the different ways that particularly consumption of beef can hurt our global climate as quickly as it can hurt our own bodies. There are other firms that have been on top of this as well. McDonald’s last year, said that they had eliminated quote a significant subset of PFAS in its packaging. They committed to removing it all by 2025. And a couple of years ago, Taco Bell made a similar pledge, stating that quote, PFAS, phthalates and Bisphenol A will be removed from all consumer facing packaging materials,
CURWOOD: Which of course leaves open what happens in the kitchen and in the back office. Now, PFAS chemicals aren’t good for us. They’re associated with cancers and low birth weight and and that sort of thing.
DYKSTRA: All manner of reproductive issues, as well as some types of cancer. We’re finding out just how damaging they are. We’re also finding out just how absolutely ubiquitous they are in the supply chain for so many food products.
CURWOOD: Well, Peter, I’m waiting for you to tell us a story as to how we can get that stuff out of our bodies. But for now, take a look at your history books there and tell me what you see.
DYKSTRA: We’re only going back eight years for an item that you’d be surprised has such a big environmental connection. But in March 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 went down over the Indian Ocean, triggering an absolute frenzy of searching and an equal frenzy in the media. But then on April 2, 2014, the searchers for the wreckage of Malaysian Flight 370 reported a new problem. Radar and satellite imagery couldn’t distinguish between all of the routine floating garbage we had put in the Indian Ocean and the floating garbage that could indicate the wreckage of a Boeing 777 aircraft. It’s a troubling precedent for search and rescue. It’s another troubling precedent, for that matter, for ocean-borne garbage. And to me, it’s just one stunning way that we’ve managed to fill the oceans with our own garbage.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing in March of 2014, and search-and-rescue efforts were stymied by an overabundance of marine garbage. (Photo: Laurent Errera, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)

CURWOOD: Right, and a lot of it that’s floating there is made from plastic, which comes from fossil fuels, and we also have a bunch of carbon dioxide garbage in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. One has to wonder how helpful fossil fuels are for our civilization these days.
DYKSTRA: Well, consider this. It was only a quarter century ago that we began to realize that the oceans were suffering from those two things. We thought the oceans were much too huge for little old us to pollute them with garbage or acidify the oceans with fossil fuel deposition, particularly from coal. But both of those things have revealed themselves to be serious problems as we look to the future environmental health of Earth.
CURWOOD: Okay, Peter. Well I’m looking for a fossil-free, PFAS-free and Arctic friendly burger someplace.
DYKSTRA: Make mine to go.
CURWOOD: Peter Dykstra is an editor with Environmental Health News, that’s EHN.org and DailyClimate.org. We’ll talk to you again real soon.
DYKSTRA: All right, Steve. Thanks a lot. We’ll talk to you soon.
CURWOOD: And there’s more on these stories at the Living on Earth website. That’s LOE.org.
 

Links
AP News | “Ice Shelf Collapses in Previously Stable East Antarctica” KTLA 5 | “Fast-Food Chains Vow To Nix ‘Forever Chemicals’ Found In Wrappers” The Christian Science Monitor | “Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Search Reveals Extent of Ocean Garbage”