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? Scientists test out new method for IDing small microplastics
Posted on November 23, 2023 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsScientists have struggled to identify which small microplastics persist longest in the environment, given their ubiquity in waterways.
Source: Scientists test out new method for IDing small microplastics – Inside Water
Similarly, a scientific struggle has been to measure their abundance, especially at the smaller end of the size range. That’s where they’re most likely to be consumed by foundational species near the bottom of the food web, like zooplankton.
Researchers from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and the University of Minnesota-Duluth have now developed an innovative analytical method. It combines different specialized techniques, including flow cytometry, to characterize and count these small varieties of microplastics.
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