Re:Important issue of Plastics - oceans thick with it
Good stuff annunaki.You post some great ones! I doubt I can add much, but there is one story I heard on the news lately.
Plastics are getting into everything, including the sex/reproduction lives of most living things, you said that clearly. Then there is the issue of dumping our garbage and industrial leftovers into the oceans, and the plastics in that that do not disintegrate completely.
There is a large area of the central pacific ocean where plastics that are partly disintegrating.
These stringy threads of plastic - made from petrochemical processes - are swirling around and getting into the fishes and other lifes there. The ocean life eats the plastic strings while trying to consume their regualr diet, and they bring it into their gills.
This 'pool of plastic threads' is 100s of miles across and goes down several hundred yards [meters]. It is safe to assume that there is plastic in every square meter of the main pacific ocean.
Jelly fish are swimming around with a dark spot in their flesh that is visible from the outside - plastic!
Whales feeding on plankton pick up a ton of plastic , and that could be the source of PCBs in these largest of all creatures, PCBs that have made cancers in almost every whale over 10 years old.
Really! The natives in the arctic see the tumors on every whale they catch. The natives are warned that pregnant and breastfeeding women not to eat the flesh of them, and all others are warned not to eat it often. Whale meat has been their staple food fo millenia.
We cannot continue to think of the ocean as a good place to put leftover plastics and our garbage and sewage. The most advanced nations all do it, no effort at all in a lot of big cites on the ocean shores to dispose of garbage and sewage properly. It could be done but the ocean is too handy.
Politically, every extra infrastructure project needs to get in line behind road improvements, and good roads get the votes better than sewage and garbage treatment plants.
Jawg