How many people today grab a takeaway coffee cup from the local cafe to drink on the go? We don’t know, but the number must be enormous.. Most every one of the above have a plastic top that will last 100s of years. Some cafes still use plastic cups that last a similar time. Is 10 minutes of coffee worth 100s of years of trash?
These items can be seen littering our gutters and on our streets all over the place. If they were all cardboard, they would still be littered, but they would, at least, be gone in a short time.
They do not need to be made of plastic.
On the way home from the gym last week, a distance of about 1 km (1/2 mile), I counted the items of plastic litter on the curb as I walked. In that short distance I counted 63 pieces of plastic litter. Plastic drink bottles, bottle tops, candy wrappers, plastic film, polystyrene fragments etc. That seemed to be a lot to me. I guess it is a generational thing. Our parents would have been horrified to see that amount, whereas it seems to go unnoticed by our youth of today. In another 20 years how many pieces will there be on this stretch, -- 200? What will today’s youth think of that new amount then when they are older? Will their children be so readily accepting of a higher amount of litter? Satellites Can Spy on Microplastics, Researchers Show
Posted on July 14, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsSource: Satellites Can Spy on Microplastics, Researchers Show
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We’d been taking these radar measurements of surface roughness and using them to measure wind speed, and we knew that the presence of stuff in the water alters its responsiveness to the environment,” said Ruf, who reported his findings in a paper titled “Toward the Detection and Imaging of Ocean Microplastics With a Spaceborne Radar,” published in June by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). “So I got the idea of doing the whole thing backward, using changes in responsiveness to predict the presence of stuff in the water.”
Surface roughness isn’t caused by microplastics themselves, however. Rather, it’s caused by surfactants, which are oily or soapy compounds that lower the tension on a liquid’s surface and often accompany microplastics in the ocean.
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