You can't escape plastic,
just one word:
plastics.
It's in most, everything we use, from the chair, you're sitting on,
to the pen you're using the box with your leftovers.
In a 70 years we've been manufacturing it,
researchers have found plastic in every crany of the planet,
from the highest peaks to the deepest ocean trenches.
The ocean especially has become a plastic repository,
with 18 million pounds added to the pile every year.
And beyond just being a massive eyesore on the planet,
plastics look and sometimes taste like food to marine animals.
Leading to things like whales,
washing up on beaches around the world with hundreds of pounds of plastic in
their guts.
Animals eating plastic isn't a great thing for obvious reasons.
It gums up their digestive tracks and creates a false sense of fullness,
overall weakening animals, robbing them of the energy to breed, migrate,
and hunt. But what's less obvious is the chemical impact.
Most plastics carry chemical additives with them to the ocean and scientists are
starting to think that those chemicals are what's attractive to animals.
PhD student. Zoe.
Diana is trying to find out why by feeding anemones plastic pellets.
Sorry anemones.
All the anemones we fed plastic pellets, ate the plastic pellets,
so we're curious on why do they even eat this in the first place.
Why does it taste like food to them?
We're thinking that plastic has flavors that makes it tasty.
Most manufactured plastics are a byproduct of fossil fuels.
The carbon in fossil fuels are the building blocks in a long chain of molecules
called polymers that can be molded into any shape,
kind of like spaghetti, but way more durable.
But carbon isn't the only thing present in plastics.
They often contain chemical additives that imbue the plastic with specific
characteristics like a resistance to UV degradation or inflammability.
The polymer itself is totally benign.
It's everything else that's in the plastic that's not so benign.
It's what you put in so you can make it into something like a Lego or whatever
else.
Those additives might have bizarre side effects including being tasty to Marine
animals. Scientists working at the Duke Marine lab in Beaufort,
North Carolina found that chemical additives and plastics were actually
encouraging corals to eat plastic.
They were eating it and sucking on clean plastic longer than weathered plastic.
You don't need bacteria and things like that on the surface to be,
have plastic be eaten.Taste your iPhone cover. Think about that.
Stick your tongue on something. If you taste the water in your water bottle,
is that a good idea? Tasting is one sense,
but it tells you a whole lot about the activity of molecules and they're huge
mixtures of molecules in plastics.
Some of them are steroids that can change your physiology and some of them are
toxic. They're heavy metals. There are all sorts of strange things in plastic
building on the work with corals.
Zoe is looking at what happens to anemones when they feed them plastic.
So we looked at different metrics like their, uh,
their growth in their crown area.
So anemones have all these tentacles up that's kind of called their crown.
And we looked at the area of that over time. And,
anemones that were fed the plastic,
their crown area did not grow compared to anemones not fed the plastic.
Their crown area did grow over 12 days.
We also looked at metal concentrations or element concentrations, um,
and we found increased lead concentrations in anemones that consumed plastic
pellets for 12 days.
Zoe's work is just beginning to penetrate the mysteries of plastic chemistry and
its impact on Marine animals.
But there's already some takeaways for the plastic industry.
So since we're seeing an increased concentration of lead in anemones that
consumed plastic as compared to the controls,
I think that if there's some substitute that can be used instead of lead,
metals are often in plastic to prevent photo degradation or the breakdown of
plastic and light.
So perhaps there's something else that we could use to prevent this photo
degradation.
And of course if there's plastic being produced and we want to use it,
maybe just don't make it tasty to Marine organisms.
One of the routine things for our culture is we develop products,
put them out in the market,
and then we don't realize we have issues until they gain market share.
So plastic is much more dynamic than something like a glass bead,
glass beads. We know what the surface chemistry is. Plastics,
we have no idea. And so when you see plastic on the ground,
you realize that it's something that's much more dynamic than a broken bottle.