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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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