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We are drowning in plastic.

From beauty products to grocery bags to water bottles to our daily cup of coffee, plastic is present in every aspect of our lives. Most of these items are designed to be used once and thrown away, usually heading to the landfill.

Some of the plastic that we think can be recycled, like drink lids, straws and utensils, end up in the landfill because they're either too difficult to recycle or there's no market for the end products. Even recyclable plastic such as water bottles are becoming harder to recycle.

The most effective approach to reducing our plastic waste is to REFUSE, REDUCE, and REUSE.

In January 2019, GreenWorks spearheaded the creation of the Plastics Reduction Task Force -- a group of motivated volunteers dedicated to reducing single-use plastic in our environment. 
​
Join the plastic-free movement and break free from the plastic ties that bind us.
Donate now for a plastic-free future
Mind Your Plastic May is meant to encourage and challenge us in our journey to live plastic free. These posts are created by GreenWorks staff, Plastic Reduction Task Force volunteers, and other plastic-free advocates in Buncombe County. If you've found these posts helpful and encouraging, please consider making a donation to support this work. If you have any questions, please email [email protected]
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Plastic Wave: The Effect of Microplastics on our Planet

5/22/2020

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By Mickey Snowdon, Communications Liaison for The Collider.

We are all living in plastic. Most of it is obvious—food packaging, takeout bags and containers, polyester clothing—but there’s an alarming amount that we can’t easily see. These tiny particles are called microplastics. 

According to NOAA, microplastics are less than five millimeters long, roughly the size of a sesame seed. Microplastics may be the most ubiquitous pollutant on Earth. According to Dr. David Hastings, a recently retired professor of marine science at Eckerd College and the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg, “Wherever we look, we find microplastics, whether it’s in the Arctic or the deepest ocean trench. They’re even in salt and beer.” These particles primarily stem from the production of plastics, lint from synthetic clothing, bath and body products, and from the degradation of larger pieces of plastic over time. 

Microplastics range in size from that of a grain of sand to something that can’t even be seen under a microscope (these are known as nanoparticles). One common form of microplastics are microbeads—tiny pieces of plastic less than a millimeter thick that are added to bath products such as face washes, soaps, and toothpaste as an exfoliant. According to an article published in the Environmental Science and Technology journal, microbeads are persistent, toxic, and they bioaccumulate, meaning they are passed through the food chain.

Microplastics are unwittingly flushed down toilets and washed down drains every day. Too small to be filtered by wastewater treatment plants, they enter streams and rivers which carry them into oceans. They also infiltrate open land and fields in the form of sludge when the organic byproducts of wastewater treatment plants are applied to crops as fertilizer. Former President Obama created the Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015 which outlawed microbeads, but Hastings speculates that many of these products still remain on store shelves throughout the world.

The impacts of microplastics on aquatic life begin with filter-feeding organisms, such as barnacles, clams, whales, mussels, sponges, and crabs, that filter water to feed. We’re not talking about just a little bit of water, either; one oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water per day to feed itself. Hastings explains that while 50 gallons of water would normally contain quite a bit of plankton for the oyster to eat, it will get a false sense of being full if it consumes a substantial amount of plastic from the water. 

Persistent organic pollutants (POPs)—chemicals that don’t easily break down, such as PCBs, DDT, and dioxins—stick to the surface of microplastics, a process known as adsorption. When a filter-feeder or a fish consumes one of these contaminated plastics, the chemicals can desorb from the plastic and become stored in the organism’s fatty tissue. As fish eat other fish, these POPs concentrate as they move through the food chain, a process called biomagnification. One Environmental Health Perspectives article posits that these chemicals may even make their way into humans when we eat contaminated seafood.

Hastings says that marine scientists are interested in how quickly microplastics are egested out of an aquatic organism after they’ve been ingested. “If it goes in and out quickly, there will be less of an impact,” he says. But if that piece of plastic can’t be removed from an organism,  Hastings says it can block its digestive tract. “It’s hard to tell what the impact of that is on the organism, but it can’t be good,” he explains. A Scientific American article posits that microplastics typically don’t just pass through the digestive systems of organisms, but rather rub up against internal organs, causing inflammation. In some cases, they can even pass into the bloodstream or other organs.

While Hastings says that there isn’t enough evidence to support the claim that microplastics could be contributing to warmer ocean temperatures, he cites a study conducted by Florida State University that examined the effects of microplastics on sea turtle hatchlings. When loggerhead sea turtles lay eggs, the temperature of the sand determines their sex. The study found that since plastics retain more heat than sand, an increase in microplastics in sea turtle beach nests could result in higher nest temperatures, thus influencing the turtles’ sex. Hastings points out that increased overall temperatures from climate change could exacerbate the heat retained by microplastics.

Plastic production has been on the rise since the 1950s and doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon. As Finn Digman points out in his inaugural Mind Your Plastic post, the Plastic Industry Association is actually pushing for an increase in single-use plastic bags to fight the spread of the Coronavirus, a point that Digman says is illogical. The US is responsible for discarding over 100 billion plastic bags a year—the equivalent of throwing away 12 million gallons of oil. Hastings points out that as our country begins to decrease our overall consumption of oil and other petroleum products, there’s a perceived need to find a new market for petroleum-based products. “Increasing our production of plastics will provide the excuse to continue to extract petroleum,” he says.

So what’s the one thing we should all do to reduce our plastic footprint? 

According to Hastings, we need to be better about how we deal with garbage as a society. Less than nine percent of plastics are recycled in the US, which means that nearly all plastics are sent to landfills. Plastics are incredibly durable and do not biodegrade, making it easy for them to travel throughout ecosystems. Plastic bags easily get blown around the world, ending up in the farthest-reaching corners of the planet. Hastings says that reducing the production and usage of single-use plastics needs to be our primary focus. I propose the well-established “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” model be modified to begin with “Refuse,” because the first step we can take to reduce plastic production is to refuse it at the consumer end.
















​Mickey Snowdon is Communications Liaison at The Collider and a recent graduate of the Master of Liberal Arts and Sciences program at UNC Asheville. He is passionate about reducing plastic waste so that future generations can inherit a cleaner and healthier planet.

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​Asheville GreenWorks is a 501(c)3 non-profit environmental organization, governed by a Board of Directors. Established in 1973, GreenWorks mission is to inspire, equip and mobilize individuals and communities to take care of the places we love to live.
  • Programs
    • Bee City USA Asheville >
      • Pollinator Garden Certification
      • Native Pollinator Plants and Nurseries
      • Pollination Celebration >
        • Pollinator Photo Contest
    • Rivers & Roads >
      • Adopt-a-Street
      • Cleanup Supply Stations
      • Clean Streams Day
      • Trash Trout
      • WNC Big Sweep
    • Education
    • Urban Forestry >
      • Cool Green Asheville
      • Adopt-a-Spot
      • Food Tree Project
      • Ravenscroft Reserve Initiative
      • Tree Nursery
      • Treasured Trees >
        • Treasured Trees Calendar
    • Waste Reduction >
      • Asheville Bag Monster
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