Excerpt from Ecofieldtrips:
Since the beginning of the year, students and staff have cleaned up the same patch of beach on Malaysia’s eastern seaboard, collecting on average about 150 kilograms of plastic waste and other such debris. It would not be amiss for groups to come back with 200 plastic bottles they’d found at the high-water mark, or with hundreds of meters of fishing nets cut away from nearby juvenile mangroves. A notable event from our last beach cleanup was the discovery of an oil spill that coated most of the coast and the rubbish upon it!
Whilst that scene was devastating for those who participated in that particular cleanup, one of the more poignant discoveries came at a much smaller scale. A group of younger students found some food packaging inscribed with a use-by date of 2006 – a year most of them had been born in.
The message was clear - plastics do not biodegrade. They break down into smaller microplastics that are ingested by all living organisms in the ocean – that is if they aren’t swallowed whole by sea birds, turtles, whales and other large sea creatures. However, these microplastics don’t just affect the oceans. Food webs ensure that within any environment there is constant predation, this means that through a process called biomagnification, the amount of microplastics found in organisms increases the farther you travel up the food chain – eventually reaching us.
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