In many ways, plastic is the perfect material: we can make it strong and rigid enough to
build spaceships and replace bones, or thin and flexible enough to make shopping bags
that weigh as much as a nickel but carry up to 17 pounds.
And unlike other materials, plastic doesn't rust or rot — it can last for centuries,
even when we only need it to last a few seconds.
We make tons of plastic precisely because it's cheap, durable and yet expendable.
But the features of plastic that make it so useful to us have also transformed life in
the oceans, where as much as 10% of our discarded plastic -- millions of tons per year -- ends
up.
Big pieces of plastic are definitely bad news for marine animals like whales, albatross,
and sea turtles, which risk getting tangled in the debris or ingesting large pieces of
it.
Yet despite the publicity about huge garbage patches in the sea, most of the ocean's plastic
isn't big — our castaway shopping bags and soda bottles get weakened by sunlight and
torn apart in the wind and the waves into little bits of plastic confetti.
On the micro-scale, though, it's still super durable — the microorganisms that decompose
ripped-up bits of wood and seaweed down into simpler organic compounds can't easily digest
plastic.
So while the plastic confetti gets broken into smaller pieces, it doesn't go away - it
just spreads out over time.
Which is why we've found "microplastics" pretty much everywhere in the oceans, from the Arctic
to the Antarctic, and from the seafloor to the surface.
Unlike the easy-to-observe impacts of large plastic trash, the effects of microplastics
are as subtle and difficult to trace as the fragments themselves: the durable fragments
can serve as new real estate on which small ocean creatures can grow and multiply; or
choke slightly larger ocean creatures that think the plastics are food; or attract and
collect toxic chemicals which become introduced into the food chain if the particles are eaten;
and probably a million other problems we haven't noticed yet.
Because we've only recently started paying attention to all these microplastics in the
oceans.
But it's undeniable how much plastic trash we've introduced into marine ecosystems, and
the wonderful durability of plastic guarantees it'll be an issue for years to come - it's
possible we can decrease further impact by switching to biodegradable plastics, dumping
less plastic in the oceans, or cleaning up the patches of sea most strewn with plastic,
but until we do, the question is, will the oceans be plastic enough to deal with our
favorite material?