jdietrich
5 hours ago
In 2023, 221 shipping containers were lost at sea, out of a total of 250 million shipped. That's a loss rate of 0.000088%.
Plastic pellets are a visible pollutant on beaches. I have not seen any evidence that they're a particularly harmful pollutant. A single 20 tonne containerload of plastic pellets can leave a visible residue on hundreds or thousands of beaches, but the 15 tonnes of CO2 emitted by the average American every year is entirely invisible.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ff6c5336c885a268148b...
protonbob
4 hours ago
They are particularly harmful because they end up in your food and cause damage to your organs.
jdietrich
4 hours ago
A plastic pellet is typically 3-5mm in diameter. I think I'd notice that in my food. Even if I did enjoy swallowing fish guts whole, a plastic pellet is just going to pass straight through my digestive system.
Additives can leach out of plastics and enter the food chain, but pellets lost at sea are a completely insignificant factor because the total volume of waste produced by this route is so small. The majority of marine plastic is either post-consumer waste dumped in rivers in developing countries, or fishing gear that is lost at sea. If you're really worried about this, then you really need to take it up with the government of the Philippines and the global fishing industry.
doctorhandshake
2 hours ago
>> a plastic pellet is just going to pass straight through my digestive system
Through the mechanical grinding action of weather and tides (the same mechanisms that make sand out of rock and coral), these chunks can become much much smaller, small enough to cross the intestine into the bloodstream and small enough to cross the blood brain barrier or pass up your nose, lodging in your brain.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10141840/
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
quietbritishjim
16 minutes ago
It's a pity the parent commenter led with that point. Their second point, that the overwhelming majority of ocean plastic pollution comes from those two sources, remains valid (albeit I'm not sure if it's actually true but it certainly seems feasible).
FrustratedMonky
4 hours ago
"I think I'd notice that in my food"
That isn't how food processing works.
There are many steps of grinding, pulverizing, mixing, re-forming, de-forming, extruding, heating, cooling.
The 3mm plastic pellet becomes a thousand smaller bits.
Also, you'd be surprised how many bugs are in your creamed corn, and you don't notice those either.
Cthulhu_
4 hours ago
Well, probably not the nurdles themselves unless they're scooped from the oceans and used as a food additive, but they'll break down into microplastics and enter the food chain that way. The damage of said microplastics is still being researched, at the moment (I believe) it's still fairly vague, not unlike asbestos or smoking. IIRC they have been found to mimic hormones though.
ptk
3 hours ago
What do you find vague about the studied effects of smoking or asbestos? Or did you mistype and mean “unlike” instead of “not unlike”?
davidjhall
3 hours ago
I think they meant "not unlike" as - we didn't think asbestos was bad, then we thought it could be bad, then yes, after studies, this is really awful. Similarly, we might find that ingested plastics cause more damage than we realize now.
jdietrich
2 hours ago
There was never any doubt about asbestos, we just didn't care.