Some of the difficulty is that they keep getting eroded down to smaller and smaller particles. Ending up with nano plastics that are small enough to be absorbed through tissue in the body and lodge in organs where they can't then be excreted. When these end up in the food chain, you have a potential problem.
Just check Youtube for how stupid dogs are.
One reason for this is that plastic breaking down in sea water gives off a smell/scent very mich like krill which a lot of fish feede on.
and would make fish a bot chewy I'd have thought ;-)
Does it cover up the coral reefs and just because something sinks it doesn't make it harmless either.
That wasn't what I was asking about, you may well be right. I was asking about plastic bits in the gravel at the bottom of a river.
Interesting to see it against that unspoiled landscape :-)
Surely we have all evolved to cope with nano particles? And it's hard to think of anything chemically more benign than polyethylene.
Technology lets us do science now on nanoparticles. If you want to get funding, you need a scare story.
Does it?
Also, it either breaks down, or it doesn't. They can't have it both ways.
Because paper bags are even more likely to break (especially if wet) than the flimsy environmental plastic they use nowadays. Bring back proper plastic bags capable of supporting the weight of what goes in them.
Eh? I recycle 90% of my plastic.
Are you saying you actually support that annoying inconvenient fuckup charge?
You mean that massive china clay pit and spoil heaps?
How do they get in rivers think about that first.
But the sediment is easily disturbed and micro-pastics will take a lot longer than most other non-organic items to sink again - giving a far greater chance of being snapped up by aquatic life.
SteveW
Yes it does.
yes they can. But it does depend what you mean by breakdown.
I fail to see the relevance of how they get there. The report in question is saying that their presence in the river is a problem, it's not saying that how they got there is doing any harm.
That might well be the reason but it wasn't made clear in the report in question.
A damn sight better to use them to heat greenhouses than install area heating in an urban area.
Build one next to harry he is an environmentalist.
Who knows? the electrostatic filters might actually capture some of the even smaller micro particles you will get from burning the stuff.
Yes he does. The whole area above St Austell is heavily scarred by china clay workings, some of which date back over 200 years. It's a very industrial landscape, and has given employment to the local population for very many decades, including me. Unfortunately there's no way of extracting the china clay other than digging huge holes and piling up the waste sand into tips. The ratio of waste to useable china clay varies but is typically in the range 10:1 to 5:1. Much of the sand is washed and graded and used in the local building industry, but transport costs limit how far it can be economically transported. To give them some credit, the company that operates there does make a significant effort to restore the landscape to original heathland when individual pits are finally worked out, and has won awards for its efforts.
Of course you do. Like magic, such things just appear why be concered.
So you don;t think plastic does any harm in rivers then is that your conclu sion ?
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