Worms fail to thrive in soil containing microplastics: study
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The consumer end source of the problem comes from tires and the use of synthetic fabrics. As far as I know there is no effort at all to do anything about tires (using regular vulcanized rubber presumably would help). Synthetic fabrics, you actually can do something about. Stop buying them; your spandex pants are destroying the environment.
The other sources are pellets and coatings used industrially.
https://storyofstuff.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IUCN-rep...
https://www.bridgestonetire.com/tread-and-trend/tire-talk/ai...
Uh... leaded gasoline has been phased out since the '70s, despite being demonstrably better for car engines (no anti-knock agent as good as tetraethyl lead has yet been invented), precisely because the American motorist is not unassailable!
Disclaimer: family affiliation
I think this is the problem. It’s not them doing it, it’s us. We need to change what we are doing.
The people enabling it are the consumers, but also the thousands of smaller companies buying and producing plastic packaging, who have a much bigger say than the small amount of consumers you can convince to give up their luxuries.
This is why we need to deal with the issue as a society, instead of blaming it onto individuals. We did precisely that for decades now and it doesn’t seem to work.
It's not us choosing to end use of a sustainable packaging to replace with plastic, or having mainly artificial fibres in the clothes stores, or setting policy on inappropriate methods of disposing of plastic. It's not us subsidising oil at the expense of renewables, or approving planning permission on a factory making single use plastic packaging, or a fracking site or refinery. They need to change with far more urgency, as these acts are orders of magnitude larger, and cancel out all acts and change of millions of individuals.
Your consumer + education focus is an approach that takes generations, time we don't have. Coincidentally or not, it also lets the manufacturers completely off the hook.
That's just one example. Everyone can reduce some. The more you start, instead of just accepting and throwing your hands up, the easier each next step.
The producers will see the trend and stop buying plastic.
Of course there are other ways to act: legislation, creating healthier alternatives.
The point is: everyone can act starting here and now and they will find joy in it. It may take time, but acting on one's values is rewarding.
People have too many terrible things in their life to worry about without taking responsibily for this too. Its great for people to recycle but to me its more like being and early tech adopter, it doesnt really work for the masses yet but the lessons learned are invaluable.
I bring bags with me.
I dumped a lot of plastic into the trash compactor. I dumped a ton of styrofoam into the trash compactor.
Sure, it might show a desire to the producers of food if we shop better - but I doubt your food is as plastic-free as you imagine. And I tossed more plastic daily than the average household did in months.
The supply chain needs to be plastic free before we stop having a problem.
It makes me think of a smaller scale example I witnessed as a cashier. I saw cashiers throwing away plastic bags by the hundred regularly, because they failed to load them onto the holding racks (you've seen them, but probably paid little attention to them) properly and it was simply easier to toss dozens of bags in the trash and load a full package of bags.
Meanwhile, at home my mom rebuked me for throwing one used and damaged bag in the trash instead of recycling.
I feel like we all can help with rising sea levels by filling a jar with sea water and keeping it in our house. That's a little less water in the seas. I'm helping.
Instead of hoping 7 billion people change their habits, we should change the habits of a few hundred companies. Everyone will pay the price somehow, but companies are vehicles of large scale change, and our markets can efficiently make the changes if we shape them correctly.
Besides there is this point regarding recycling:
“It was propaganda that did not appear propagandistic. It also shielded corporate polluters from blame by shifting responsibility onto individuals.”
https://theintercept.com/2019/07/20/plastics-industry-plasti...
https://theintercept.com/2019/07/20/plastics-industry-plasti...
My food coop loads the bulk bins from giant bags.
Grocery stores don't have much appeal to me.
Make sellers take back waste as a condition to sell. Boom. Problem solved.
You've changed the incentive, but doubled the potential number of material transports needed to move packaging back to the source.
In the interim period, while businesses figure out how to deal with less packaging, you end up with all the current stuff going back and forth all over the country, or you end up with attempts to set up a shadow infrastructure designed to ensure the right amount of packaging is in the right place at the right time to optimize on minimization of cost of the end product which is now priced with material handling in the equation.
Instead of actually changing things the way you hoped, you may just reorganize the supply chain to a slightly more distributed model where packaging doesn't happen until the latest stage in the process.
You've also invoked change in regulatory framework. Do we end up having to get FDA approval on alternate forms of food packaging or plasticless food transportation systems?
Do the details of the implementation threaten some national security metric with regards to food availability?
I'm mot saying I disagree with the intent at all, mind, but broad strokes without focusing on the nagging details have a way of coming back to haunt one in the long run. There are a lot of metrics and analysis that would need to be done before just declaring one day "Thou shalt!"
Which is probably no less than what will be needed sadly.
I really wish Amazon would pay their delivery drivers to do this with used Amazon boxes, too.
So your packaging job would likely just be another blip on another trucker's route. But it would increase the need for more truckers since you're essentially (worst-case) doubling the number of deliveries to be done per transaction.
1. Pretending that's a practical way to get the kind and scale of change we need is extremely wishful thinking, to the point that I wouldn't be shocked to see polluting industries promoting it to distract from regulatory solutions.
2. That attitude reflects your economic privilege. Not only is it harder for poor people to make these kinds of choices, living with a scarcity mindset makes you less likely to care and less able to act strategically.
There must be collective action - must.
I am not throwing my hands up, I am saying it's time to attack the root of the problem instead of clipping the topiary into slightly better shape. Waiting for the market to just catch up is failing and discounts the influence of marketers and lobbyists, as well as discounting the possibility of collective action. Don't be a judas goat.
Well, this is happening yet and Annelida are figthing back and contaminating (returning the microplastics to) OUR food. Is ironic if we think about it, and very interesting. Who would expect that from the humble Marphysa?
Well, this is happening yet. Annelida are figthing back and silently contaminating OUR farmed seafood with microplastics. Is ironic if we think about it (and very interesting). Who would expect that revenge from the humble Marphysa?
Few set out to destroy the planet. If you buy fish from fishermen that drop their lines sea it doesn’t matter how many plastic straws, bottles and cutlery you didn’t use. But as a consumer we are so abstracted from the source we are powerless to affect behavior.
Clinical assessment for FTT is recommended for babies who lose more than 10% of their birth weight or do not return to their birth weight after three weeks.
I am not sure if the comparison is relevant here, the numbers are not large but they are significant, something is wrong and it needs investigation. You losing 5% weight may be nothing but if you in the same time have constant pain because of damage do your digestive track is not pleasant at all.
I am wondering if similar tests was done on rats?. -- I google it and it causes cancer
The abstract is here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b03304
And the full paper here: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1021/acs.est.9b03304
After a quick skim, it looks like a well written paper with a small dataset. They took 40 1.2L plastic pots and filled them with 1kg of local soil. In 10 of the pots, they then added 1 g of PLA microplastic; in another 10 they added 1 g of HDPE microplastic; in another 10 they added 10 mg of acrylic and nylon fibers collected from a washing machine; and in the last 10 they added nothing.
In half of the pots (5) from each of the 4 categories, they then planted ryegrass. Then they added 2 earthworms to each of the 40 pots, waited for a month, and then measured the results. They found (Figure 3) that the 10 earthworms in the 5 unplanted control (no plastic) gained about 5% weight, that the 10 earthworms in the 5 planted HDPE containers lost about 5% of their weight, and all the rest had no significant change.
Overall, it seems like a solid paper, with all the information one would need for a replication attempt. Nicely, they report the average weights for the two each of the individual pots, but unfortunately they don't seem to report the intra-pot variation of the individual worms, which would be helpful to know in assessing the likelihood of replication.
The Guardian article, though, which mentions only the two "significant" results and ignores the 6 results that showed no particular difference, seems more intent on generically sowing fear than on informing the public about recent scientific results. I guess it's better to have a soft-science article like this than another "did you see what the idiot tweeted", but sometimes I'm not sure.
ps. Did you know that in much of the northern US, all of the native earthworms were killed by the glaciers, and that practically all the current earthworms in these areas are invasives? The northern hardwood forests evolved without these earthworms, and may in fact be harmed by their presence: http://theconversation.com/silent-partners-are-earthworms-cr.... I wonder if the same true for England (where the study was done) since it was also mostly glaciated?
I remember a Park ranger talking about flowers in Minnesota which didn't grow as well because of earthworms and were thus Endangered. I wonder how these flowers would do if Plastics were added to their soil.
I can't recall the name of the flower, but that the reason they couldn't flourish was that Earthworms were eating the nutrients they needed to grow.
I found two sources https://kstp.com/news/u-of-m-researchers-find-earthworms-are... And https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/09/000904130558.h...
I don't believe this is the same flower (I feel like I'd remember the state flower). So the impact of earthworms is interesting, as I'd never heard of a way (or suggestion to) treat and remove earthworms from an ecosystem.
That made me think of an alternative title for this article: "Microplastics are an effective solution to invasive earthworm control."
...that is, if a 5% difference in some of the results is even considered significant.
Plants are only temporary carbon sequestration. The actual sequestration is in the standing-wave of growing, living, dying, decomposing material.
How does that compare to what is seen in nature that seems like an incredibly high plastic load.
Reminds me of other studies that say “X causes problems” and then you learned they force fed rats 1000x any reasonable exposure doesn't necessarily tell you a lot.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b03304
There’s a slightly better summary, which at least references the paper, here:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190911193303.h...
Do you happen to have access to the paper through the pay wall? I'm interested in the data itself, the abstract certainly doesn't match up to "worms fail to thrive [..]", I want to see some numbers. There are enough environmental disasters on the horizon without the need to manufacture more.
(I didn't see an ungated version.)
I wonder what concentration they used?
It’s quite interesting to determine something like the LD50 of microplastic in earthworms and grasses which grow in that soil. It would be great if we could see a log-graph of plastic density versus when the effect drops off.
It’s also a good question to ask if it’s the plastic itself, or the impact of the plastic on pH. So for example if they added lime to keep the pH the same in both samples, does the effect in the plastic laced sample persist?
0.1% by mass seems like an incredibly high level. A cubic yard of topsoil (100 sq feet at a depth of 3 inches) weights about 1,000 pounds so 10 pounds of diffuse plastic in that area would be extraordinary.
Some people will argue that the solution to both is similar and linked but I'm not so sure.
Regarding plastics, it could be a solution to put a very hefty tax on plastic, that's partially refundable if you return it to recycling/proper disposal. This might reduce the incentives to produce single-use items out of plastic, but would not ban it (because for some use cases plastics is perhaps the only viable option, not just the cheapest).
It's potentially a major inconvenience, but if we pretend it's as big a threat as CO2 pollution then civilization will have collapsed before it happens, so that's one way to avoid the problem.
Science fiction from 1971. The main effect hypothesized was the disintegration of electrical insulation, which destroyed power distribution, communications, and electronics.
It's probably best to work on these problems together while people are actually worried about the future of the planet. If we manage to address one and ignore the other, we'll have plenty of people thinking we've saved the world and anything else is needless alarmism. I mean, we already have that problem, and those 50% of people won't be convinced either way.
“Worms are 5% smaller in this study” is a shade better than a conspiracy theory, not something that will motivate massive changes in global manufacturing and packaging standards.
We do know it can be done, because we’ve worked historically to make big changes. Unfortunately there’s been a lot of lost credibility in environmental science over the last few decades, and at the same time society seems to be significantly more divided over issues that at first blush might smell like a crusade.
The rules are you need something that’s equally as good at perhaps a slightly higher initial cost (an adequate replacement) and a clear and present danger (e.g. there’s a massive hole in our ozone layer, we can measure it directly, we know exactly what’s causing it, and if it keeps getting bigger we can’t ever go outside again).
“We should fix X first” is rhetoric from people who don’t want to fix anything or are more interested in being in charge. Don’t contribute to the foot dragging.
There was another interesting article on HN yesterday about the depletion of soil minerals as a result of monocultural planting and a corresponding (and horrifyingly steep) drop in the mineral content of fruits and vegetables. This was news to me but not really surprising; I've felt for years that much American food is just not that great based simply on the experience of eating it.
Ultimately these are all problems of the industrial model that developed countries in general and the UK/US in particular have exported very successfully (which is not to say that other countries and cultures haven't also catastrophic environmental decisions). While the reductionist approach of identifying, selecting for, and then maximizing particular quantities has yielded great dividends, it does so at the expense of the system as a whole; just like a diet consisting of abundant refined ingredients allows rapid growth but eventually leads to obesity and sclerosis.
Adam Smith, revered by many as the father of modern capitalism, offered a famous example of a pin factory to show how the division of labor into multiple parallel tasks yielded far greater outputs than would be possible if one laborer had to serially perform all the different jobs involved in the manufacture of a pin, and generations of industrialists have applied his advice to great profit. But they have also ignored his caveat that an excess division of labor is both soul-destroying due to boredom, and weakens the laborer through overspecialization and a concomitant loss of flexibility and thus economic bargaining power by allowing the buyer of the labor to determine 'value' of the laborer's skills by limiting the opportunities for their development.
The basic problem is the pursuit of maximal yield through endless division without regard to the structural integrity of the overall system; industrial economists' tendency to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator of fungibility through division and offloading of externalities is just as dangerous to the biosphere and the social body as a diet of high fructose corn syrup and vitamin pills would be to the individual animal. Those who insist on wealth maximization at the transactional and the blind operation of market forces as the distributive mechanism of wealth are in the grip of a cognitive addiction little different from an infant hooked on sugar, and responsible people must steel themselves to ignore the screams of dissatisfaction which will greet a transition to a more sustainable diet.
Plastic in the oceans comes from poorer countries where a huge population lives next to rivers or beaches and the waste management systems are inadequate. In fact, "90% of plastic polluting our oceans comes from just 10 rivers" [1]
Our efforts should be directed there, financially and politically and not locally be it via individual effort or local government pressure.
This is a unique type of issue as, generally speaking, enviorment awareness is stronger with liberals yet "meddling" in other countries internal affairs (waste management in this case) is not.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...
But China shut that down and we haven't had a surge of western plastics in the oceans. They just go to landfills instead.
Much plastic also goes in garbage, not recycling. This doesn't end in the oceans.
I wish we'd move our supply chain off plastics for most things. But, the post you linked to isn't very persuasive on ocean plastic.
And also arguably, if they buy trash to recycle and then don't it's their responsibility to see it through and ours to make sure they do.
Low and middle income countries need better public services - including waste and waste water management - and enforcement of environmental laws. High income countries need less waste and enforcement of environmental laws.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15611.pdf
[2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/768.full https://jambeck.engr.uga.edu/landplasticinput "There is one high income country on the list, the United States, and while our waste management systems are well-designed and very effective, and the only mismanaged waste is from litter, we have a large coastal population and a large waste generation rate."
There is a little psychopath in each one of us.
Local populations can be impacted, but far more damaging is tilling and the commercial farm practices: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170508095152.h...