More Plastic Than Fish by 2050

A good post by Gaius Publius, "Which Would Be Harder to Ban, Single-Use Plastic or Money-Bought Government?," appears this morning on Naked Capitalism:

In a related piece EcoWatch notes, “More than 8.3 billion metric tons of new plastics have been generated, distributed and discarded as of 2017. Much of that material ends up in our oceans. Every year humans send an estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic out to sea. If plastic consumption continues at this rate, we are on pace to fill oceans with more plastic than there are fish by 2050.”

More plastic than fish in the ocean is a lot of plastic. Most or all of this plastic is single-use. You touch it for five minutes — drink your slurpee, drain your sugery coke, carry your groceries to the kitchen — then throw it away. Five minutes on the finger tips, a thousand years on the hips of an already over-burdened planet.

There’s so much plastic in the ocean that mussels are now so riddled with it they should not be eaten:

Shellfish are the natural filter systems of our seas, mechanisms of purity. So, to discover in a report released on World Oceans Day that mussels bought from UK supermarkets were infested with microplastic seems like a final irony in the terrible story of the plasticisation of the sea. According to the study by the University of Hull and Brunel University London, 70 particles of microplastic were found in every 100 grams of mussels.

We feed plastic to the ocean, and it feeds plastic to us. Our modern life, “consumed with that which it was nourished by,” eaten by what we eat.  

We Need an Anti-Plastic Party

Britain has joined a growing list of countries to ban plastic microbeads from personal care products. The immediate problem is that microbeads, as Des Shoe explains in "The U.K. Has Banned Microbeads. Why?," are overwhelming waste water treatment facilities. The long-term problem is that plastic -- not just microplastics -- is destroying our oceans, which are already in rough shape because of climate change. What Shoe doesn't say is that all that non-microscopic plastic in the ocean eventually breaks down into microplastic and becomes bite-sized collection points for toxins before being consumed by sea life.

Last year I saw a documentary, A Plastic Ocean: We Need s Wave of Change (2016), that compellingly framed the issue of plastic pollution. Here is a review I wrote of the film for my public library:

This documentary will make you think twice the next time you go to the grocery store and you put your produce in a plastic bag. The oceans are choking with plastic. Most plastic is not recycled and it ends up in landfill. From there it finds its way into the ocean. Stories of a Texas-sized island of floating plastic in the north Pacific are not literally true. But the reality is worse. Plastic, because of sunlight, salt water and the action of waves, breaks down into little bits. The bits act as collection points for toxins. The bits are then consumed by sea life. The hardest scenes of the film to watch are when they cut open the bellies of birds and fish and inside is a hefty load of plastic debris. But sea creatures aren't the only ones getting zapped by plastic. We are too. Overwhelmingly plastic bottles and containers release chemicals that mirror the sex hormone estrogen. So we're all getting doused with estrogenic chemicals. I often wonder why it is that there seems to be more young men, who as far as I can tell don't appear to be transgender, walking around with large breasts. Now I have an idea.

To go along with our vegan party we need an anti-plastic party. The Anti-Masonic Party of the early 19th century was key to party formation in the United States. The Anti-Masonic Party held the first presidential nominating convention; it was the starting point for politicians such as Thurlow Weed, Thaddeus Stevens and William Seward; it was populist and anti-elitist, sort of an Occupy of its day, before being swallowed up by the Whigs. Too bad we don't live in a truly open society.