Where fore art thou, virtual lover?

Carita Mia:

Do you like to kiss?
Press soft lips behind your ear...
Secrets get whispered

Shivering body
Ticklish, so kiss more firmly!
See nipples rise...

I like to kiss lips.
Pressing, sucking, rubbing, then...
Nibbling each other

I kiss everywhere!
Other parts than lips are nice
Curve of your body...

In sneaks a quick tongue
Strong muscles touch each other
Wet, hot and tasty

Sleep well my delight.

The Future of Plastics - "more plastic by weight than plankton on the ocean’s surface"

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/270/


This is a very nice article about a problem no one is focusing on very much. Plastic is in no way "biodegradable", therefore everything ever made with Plastic still exists in some form on the planet, except for what has burned. As it "erodes" due to the forces of nature, it doesn not "decompose" in any way, except it gets smaller and smaller. At each stage of the food chain, it becomes confused as food from top to bottom...here's a few excerpts from a fairly long and worthwhile article.

Even more exasperating was what his PhD student Mark Browne had discovered while shopping in a pharmacy. Browne pulls open the top drawer of a laboratory cabinet. Inside is a cornucopia of feminine beauty aids: shower massage creams, body scrubs, and hand cleaners. Several are by boutique labels: Neova Body Smoother, SkinCeuticals Body Polish, and DDF Strawberry Almond Body Polish. Others are international name brands: Neutrogena, Clearasil, Pond’s Fresh Start, even a tube of Colgate Icy Blast toothpaste. Some are available in the United States, others only in the United Kingdom. But all have one thing in common.

“Exfoliants: little granules that massage you as you bathe.” He selects a peach-colored tube of St. Ives Apricot Scrub; its label reads: 100% natural exfoliants. “This stuff is okay. The granules are actually chunks of ground-up jojoba seeds and walnut shells.” Other natural brands use grape seeds, apricot hulls, coarse sugar, or sea salt. “The rest of them,” he says, with a sweep of his hand, “have all gone to plastic.”

On each, listed among the ingredients are “micro-fine polyethylene granules,” or “polyethylene micro-spheres,” or “polyethylene beads.” Or just polyethylene.

“Can you believe it?” Richard Thompson demands of no one in particular, loud enough that faces bent over microscopes rise to look at him. “They’re selling plastic meant to go right down the drain, into the sewers, into the rivers, right into the ocean. Bite-sized pieces of plastic to be swallowed by little sea creatures.”

...snip...

The real reason that the world’s landfills weren’t overflowing with plastic, he found, was because most of it ends up in an ocean-fill.

After a few years of sampling the North Pacific gyre, Moore concluded that 80 percent of mid-ocean flotsam had originally been discarded on land. It had blown off garbage trucks or out of landfills, spilled from railroad shipping containers and washed down storm drains, sailed down rivers or wafted on the wind, and found its way to this widening gyre.

“This,” Captain Moore tells his passengers, “is where all the things end up that flow down rivers to the sea.”

It is the same phrase the geologists have uttered to students since the beginning of science.

However, what Moore refers to is a type of runoff and sedimentation that the Earth had hitherto never known in 5 billion years of geologic time-but likely will henceforth.

DURING HIS FIRST THOUSAND-MILE CROSSING of the gyre, Moore calculated half a pound for every one hundred square meters of debris on the surface, and arrived at 3 million tons of plastic. His estimate, it turned out, was corroborated by U.S. Navy calculations. It was the first of many staggering figures he would encounter. And it only represented visible plastic: an indeterminate amount of larger fragments get fouled by enough algae and barnacles to sink.

In 1998, Moore returned with a trawling device, such as Sir Alistair Hardy had employed to sample krill, and found, incredibly, more plastic by weight than plankton on the ocean’s surface.

In fact, it wasn’t even close: six times as much.

...snip...

"Plastic is still plastic. The material still remains a polymer. Polyethylene is not biodegraded in any practical time scale. There is no mechanism in the marine environment to biodegrade that long a molecule.” Even if photodegradable nets help marine mammals live, he concluded, their powdery residue remains in the sea, where the filter feeders will find it.

“EXCEPT FOR A SMALL AMOUNT that’s been incinerated,” says Tony Andrady the oracle, “every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last fifty years or so still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.”

That half century’s total production now surpasses 1 billion tons. It includes hundreds of different plastics, with untold permutations involving added plasticizers, opacifiers, colors, fillers, strengtheners, and light stabilizers.

The longevity of each can vary enormously. Thus far, none has disappeared. Researchers have attempted to find out how long it will take polyethylene to biodegrade by incubating a sample in a live bacteria culture. A year later, less than 1 percent was gone.

...snip...

"Egyptian pyramids have preserved corn, seeds, and even human parts such as hair because they were sealed away from sunlight with little oxygen or moisture,” says Andrady, a mild, precise man with a broad face and a clipped, persuasively reasonable voice. “Our waste dumps are somewhat like that. Plastic buried where there’s little water, sun, or oxygen will stay intact a long time. That is also true if it is sunk in the ocean, covered with sediment. At the bottom of the sea, there’s no oxygen, and it’s very cold.”

He gives a clipped little laugh. “Of course,” he adds, “we don’t know much about microbiology at those depths. Possibly anaerobic organisms there can biodegrade it. It’s not inconceivable. But no one’s taken a submersible down to check. Based on our observations, it’s unlikely. So we expect much-slower degradation at the sea bottom. Many times longer. Even an order of magnitude longer.”

An order of magnitude—that’s ten times—longer than what? One thousand years? Ten thousand?

No one knows, because no plastic has died a natural death yet. It took today’s microbes that break hydrocarbons down to their building blocks a long time after plants appeared to learn to eat lignin and cellulose. More recently, they’ve even learned to eat oil. None can digest plastic yet, because fifty years is too short a time for evolution to develop the necessary biochemistry.

“But give it a hundred thousand years,” says Andrady the optimist—he was in his native Sri Lanka when the Christmas 2004 tsunami hit, and even there, after those apocalyptic waters struck, people found reason to hope. “I’m sure you’ll find many species of microbes whose genes will let them do this tremendously advantageous thing, so that their numbers will grow and prosper. Today’s amount of plastic will take hundreds of thousands of years to consume, but, eventually, it will all biodegrade. Lignin is far more complex, and it biodegrades. It’s just a matter of waiting for evolution to catch up with the materials we are making.”

Frish Sez:

So, it is just a matter of waiting for evolution to catch up! Life "evolves" to take advantage of energy niches, as stated elsewhere on this blog. The potential energy of plastics is simply one more resource for evolution's grinding progress.

However, will the chemicals that plastics have distributed around the planet, and the plastic particles themselves, disrupt biological systems causing chaos or ruin? Seems likely actually, plastics, from bottle caps to the smallest sliver of ground up plastic bag are mistaken for food at every level of the food chain. Krill have been found with plastic inside of them.

This can't be a good thing. They are wasting their energy consuming non-nutritious detritus from our profligate wasteful luxurious but unsustainable lifestyle. And, it is killing them and whales that feed on them...

Here's another source of scientific investigation into the accumulation of plastic in the North Pacific Gyre (a huge part of the ocean between Hawaii and California).

http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Plastic-Plastic-Everywhere-Algalita.htm

Here's a little something from Australia about whales around the world and plastic:

http://www.noosa.qld.gov.au/ServicesFacilities/EnvironmentalHealth/StormwaterQuality.shtml

Plastic Bags and Whales
A Bryde"s Whale became stranded off the North Queensland coast in August 2000. Despite the work of volunteers the whale died. The autopsy revealed 6m2 of plastic in the whale's stomach.

The Bryde's Whale is a member of the baleen whale family. Being a filter feeder their diet mainly consists of small shrimp-like crustaceans called Krill. The plastic bags ingested were not even mistaken as a food source. They were just accidentally swallowed when filtering the Krill.

The whale's stomach contained plastics and other foriegn items.

A dead pygmy sperm whale found on a New South Wales beach had a plug of plastic bags in its gut. Presumably these items were mistaken for squid, the sperm whale"s main food.

A sperm whale found dead on a North American beach was discovered to have starved to death because a plastic gallon bottle which it had swallowed had plugged its small intestine. The animal was full of plastic material ranging from other plastic bottles to 12m of nylon rope.