The Soup

I remember when I was in elementary school and environmentalism started becoming really big – an ad on Nickelodeon telling us to turn off the water while we brush our teeth, reading books about it in school.  My mom was not pleased when I once put a brick in the back of the toilet to make it a “low-flow” toilet without telling her.

One of the other things I remember was the claim that you should cut the rings of a six-pack so that animals in the ocean don’t get stuck in them.  I did it for years until a few weeks ago, when I thought to myself, surely my plastic rings aren’t getting into the water anymore.

WRONG!

An article came out this week about a garbage patch in the Atlantic that rivals the Pacific one found a few years back.  Check out this foul cloud of teeny bits of plastic researchers found in the Atlantic:

Scientists scoop water from a concentration of plastic in the Atlantic (Courtesy 5 Gyres – via HuffPo)

It makes sense when you think about how much plastic people use throughout the course of their days.  The bad news is that plastic is not easily degradable.  It is photodegradable, meaning light breaks it into smaller pieces, which explains why floating debris in the ocean is so small.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t go away.  This high school student isolated bacteria that could help to degrade the plastic, but as of now, there’s really no accepted method to completely break it down.

Bottom line: reduce, reuse, recycle your plastics