Plastic now pollutes every corner of Earth (UK Guardian)

[inanna]

Sunday 24 January 2016 00.05 GMT

From supermarket bags to CDs, man-made waste has contaminated the entire globe, and become a marker of a new geological epoch

Humans have made enough plastic since the second world war coat the Earth entirely in clingfilm, an international study has revealed. This ability to plaster the planet in plastic is alarming, say scientists – for it confirms that human activities are now having a pernicious impact on our world.

The research, published in the journal Anthropocene, shows that no part of the planet is free of the scourge of plastic waste. Everywhere is polluted with the remains of water containers, supermarket bags, polystyrene lumps, compact discs, cigarette filter tips, nylons and other plastics. Some are in the form of microscopic grains, others in lumps. The impact is often highly damaging.

“The results came as a real surprise,” said the study’s lead author, Professor Jan Zalasiewicz, of Leicester University. “We were aware that humans have been making increasing amounts of different kinds of plastic – from Bakelite to polyethylene bags to PVC – over the last 70 years, but we had no idea how far it had travelled round the planet. It turns out not just to have floated across the oceans, but has sunk to the deepest parts of the sea floor. This is not a sign that our planet is in a healthy condition either.”

The crucial point about the study’s findings is that the appearance of plastic should now be considered as a marker for a new epoch. Zalasiewicz is the chairman of a group of geologists assessing whether or not humanity’s activities have tipped the planet into a new geological epoch, called the Anthropocene, which ended the Holocene that began around 12,000 years ago.

Link: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/24/plastic-new-epoch-human-damage

[NorthCarolina]

1. Would it really be such a huge deal to go back to returnable glass bottles?

Might be a bit of an inconvenience, but it would help to greatly reduce one of the worst offenders in plastic pollution, plastic drink bottles.