Friday, March 18, 2011

Eating plastic

Have you ever eaten a yummy piece of plastic? Crunchy bottle chips, or perhaps a nice creamy bag puree?

Probably not, unless you're a fish. A new study found 1/3 of marine fish studied had plastic in their guts.

Nobody knows for sure if it's a problem, but it can't be good. Besides physical blockage of their guts, there is a risk of harm from toxic breakdown products released by digestion.

This is, of course, just one more in the long list of ways plastic affects ocean creatures. Turtles and seabirds are the poster vicitims of getting tangled, choking, and starving because of plastic pollution in the ocean.

But I'm tired of all this worrying. I say it's time for the strong to survive and we need to just get on with adapting to plastic. Life here on Planet Plastic is just going to have to cope with our human-produced plastic flood. In fact, I think we should stop worry and start loving plastic. Maybe someday soon we'll find ourselves talking about the lovely tang of BPA-spiced plastic bottles instead of worrying about the safety of this component of plastics that is after all already detectable in most people.

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