DAILY TRIFECTA + 1: We're Swimming In Plastic ... Literally
Nurdles Uber Alles
TITLE: Spain declares environmental emergency over plastic pellets spillage from ship
https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/01/09/spain-investigates-spilage-of-millions-of-plastic-pellets
EXCERPT: Millions of tiny plastic pellets are washing up on the shores of northern Spain prompting local authorities to declare an environmental emergency.
Officials believe the plastic comes from a shipping container which fell off a ship last month.
“These little balls of plastic are an environmental problem because fish confuse them with fish eggs and eat them and they enter the food chain … and end up on our dinner tables,” Cristobal López, spokesperson for the Spanish environmental group Ecologistas en Acción, told The Associated Press from a beach in Galicia.
The regional governments of Galicia, which has borne the brunt of the pollution, and neighbouring Asturias, have asked Spain's national government for help. On Monday, Spanish state prosecutors opened an investigation.
Prosecutors fear that the pellets could have toxic properties and said there are indications that they had also been found on French shores.
Spain’s government representative for the Galicia region said that the container ship Toconao, sailing under a Liberian flag, lost six shipping containers off the coast of Portugal, some 80 kilometres to the west of Viana do Castelo.
One of the six containers contained 1,000 sacks of pellets, with each sack holding 25 kilograms of the tiny plastic balls. They are used in the manufacturing of plastic products.
The spill was first reported to authorities on 13 December, when hundreds of thousands of tiny white balls began washing up on Spain’s Atlantic shoreline.
Greenpeace and other environmental groups calculate the total amount of pellets lost to be in the millions. They say that the pellets represent a danger for marine and human life since they can break down into even smaller microplastics that can be consumed by fish that are later caught by fishermen.
TITLE: Volunteers frantically clean up hazardous plastic beads found washed onto Lake Tahoe beach
https://fox40.com/news/local-news/lake-tahoe/volunteers-frantically-clean-up-hazardous-plastic-beads-found-washed-onto-lake-tahoe-beach/
EXCERPT: Dozens of people made their way to the shore lines of Lake Tahoe on Monday not to take a dip or take pictures, but to conduct a rapid clean up of thousands of plastic beads that were spread across the beach near Incline Village, according to Incline Village Parks and Recreation.
While conducting their frantic clean up of the environmental hazards, a rouge dock was found to have been knocked free during the recent storms and burst open, releasing tens of thousands of small plastic Styrofoam beads into the lake.
Large waves caused by high winds washed the beads 15 to 20 feet from waters edge into the sand and fresh snow near Incline Village, according to parks and recreation.
“These Styrofoam beads are the hardest things to clean and one of the worst polluters for a lake already suffering from terrible levels of microplastic pollution,” Incline Village Parks and Recreation wrote in a social media post.
Parks and Recreation staff were not the only people cleaning up the mess. The entire 25 to 30 person staff from nonprofit Clean Up The Lake also pitched in along with countless community volunteers, staff from Diamond Peak Ski Resort, members from a local rotary club and countless other volunteers.
Clean Up The Lake wrote in a news release that workers used “pasta strainers, shovels, leaf blowers and tarps, shop vacuums, sifts, screens and buckets” and any other methods they could think of to collect the plastics.
An estimated 100,000 plastic beads are believed to have been collected, which accounts for around 90% of the pollutant that was found on the beach.
“These beads, believed to be made of expanded polystyrene, can have detrimental effects on aquatic life and pose serious threats to the overall health of the environment,” Clean Up The Lake wrote in a news release. “These threats include the further breakdown of these beads into microplastics which aggravate an already troubling issue for Lake Tahoe.”
TITLE: Plastics impact on Florida’s coastal environment may be worse than you think
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article283973478.html
EXCERPTS: In late October, a rare Gervais’ beaked whale washed up on a North Carolina beach. The 11-foot marine mammal had swallowed a plastic balloon, which obstructed its digestive passage, a dire situation. Unfortunately, the animal died soon after.
A Coastal Stewards team member was involved in the necropsy of a stranded dolphin calf and found its stomach filled with plastic. Shockingly, one piece of plastic was marked with the logo of an Indiana retailer, demonstrating how even plastic produced in the middle of the country can make its way to the oceans.
Unfortunately, throughout Florida, countless manatees are suffering from chronic fishing line entanglement and plastic ingestion. Plastic ingestion results in a very sick animal. Fishing line will commonly wrap around their foreflippers. After the initial entanglement, the resulting wound and indented scar predispose the manatee to becoming repeatedly entangled throughout its often unnaturally shortened life.
In South Florida, we see over and over again the horrific effects of plastic in the stomachs of sea turtles. According to an August 2020 research report published in Frontiers in Marine Science, a marine and freshwater biology journal, 90% of loggerhead hatchlings found in Florida waters have swallowed plastic already in their early life.
The problem goes beyond Florida’s shores. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), there are about 50-75 trillion pieces of plastic and microplastics in the ocean today. Microplastics are tiny particles of plastic that can be easily eaten by marine animals. The majority of plastic pollution in the ocean is caused by improper disposal of food wrappings, plastic bags, bottles, etc. According to UNESCO, plastic waste makes up 80% of all marine pollution.
These dangerous particles are entering the food chain and leading to disastrous consequences for the health of our planet and all its inhabitants. A recent study of ocean microplastics by scientists from Duke University found that 68% of the animals researched had at least one microplastic particle inside its body.
Plastic in our ocean is continually increasing. Today, plastic pollution is still one of the main causes of negative environmental impacts, health problems for humans and animals alike, and a leading cause in the destruction of Earth’s diverse ecosystems.
TITLE: Modern Hurricanes Have a Surprise Ingredient
https://hakaimagazine.com/news/modern-hurricanes-have-a-surprise-ingredient/
EXCERPT: As humanity churns out exponentially more plastic in general, the environment gets contaminated with exponentially more microplastics. The predominant thinking used to be that microplastics would flush into the ocean and stay there: washing synthetic clothing like polyester, for instance, releases millions of microfibers per load of laundry, which then flow out to sea in wastewater. But recent research has found that the seas are in fact burping the particles into the atmosphere to blow back onto land, both when waves break and when bubbles rise to the surface, flinging microplastics into sea breezes.
The instrument in a clearing on Newfoundland was quite simple: a glass cylinder, holding a little bit of ultra-pure water, securely attached to the ground with wooden stakes. Every six hours before, during, and after the hurricane, the researchers would come and empty out the water, which would have collected any particles falling—both with and without rain—on Newfoundland. “It’s just a place that experiences a lot of extreme weather events,” says Earth scientist Anna Ryan of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, lead author of the paper. “Also, it’s fairly remote, and it’s got a pretty low population density. So you don’t have a bunch of nearby sources of microplastics.”
The team found that even before and after [Hurricane] Larry, tens of thousands of microplastics fell per square meter of land per day. But when the hurricane hit, that figure spiked up to 113,000. “We found a lot of microplastics deposited during the peak of the hurricane,” says Ryan, “but also, overall deposition was relatively high compared to previous studies.” These studies were done during normal conditions, but in more remote locations, she says.
The researchers also used a technique known as back trajectory modeling—basically simulating where the air that arrived at the instrument had been previously. That confirmed that Larry had picked up the microplastics at sea, lofted them into the air, and dumped them on Newfoundland. Indeed, previous research estimated that somewhere between 12 and 21 million tonnes of microplastic swirl in just the top 200 meters of the Atlantic, and that was a significant underestimate because it didn’t count microfibers. The Newfoundland study notes that Larry happened to pass over the garbage patch of the North Atlantic gyre, where currents accumulate floating plastic.
These new figures from Newfoundland are also likely to be significant underestimates—and necessarily so. It remains difficult and expensive to look for the smallest of plastic particles: this research searched for bits as small as 1.2 microns (1.2 millionths of a meter), but there were likely way, way more pieces of plastic smaller than that falling into the instrument.
“From previous studies, we know that there’s an exponential curve for particle numbers as you go smaller,” says microplastic researcher Steve Allen of the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, coauthor of the new paper. “So we’ve been talking about 113,000 particles per square meter a day of big stuff. It just must be staggering, what is smaller.”
The researchers could also determine what kinds of plastic had fallen out of the sky. “We saw not an overwhelming amount of one certain polymer—there’s a real variety,” says Ryan. “In the ocean, there’s such a mix of particles that you have a little bit of everything. And also because the hurricane came from so far away: it formed off the west coast of Africa, and you could potentially have particles picked up from all the way back there.”
This echoes what other scientists have been finding with microplastics in the environment. Microplastic pollution comes from so many sources—our clothing, car tires, paint chips, broken-down bottles and bags—that it’s all mixed into a kind of multi-polymer soup out there. That’s true both in the oceans and in the sky: in remote stretches of the western United States, microplastic-sampling instruments similar to the one in Newfoundland have been gathering huge numbers of particles falling as plastic rain. Microplastics haven’t just gone airborne, but have become a fundamental component of Earth’s atmosphere.
So microplastics don’t just flush into the sea and stay there—they blow into the atmosphere and back onto land, only to get picked back up again by winds and blown out to sea. Back and forth, back and forth. “It’s becoming quite clear that the ocean-to-atmosphere exchange is a very real thing,” says Allen. “And the numbers in this paper here are just staggering. It’s arriving in Newfoundland at just the time of year when all the biota—in the ponds and things—are all just trying to fatten up and breed for winter.”