You Eat a Credit Card’s Worth of Plastic Every Week
Martin Wagner was annoyed that his colleagues were always talking about microplastics in the ocean. It was 2010 and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch had been headline news. Here was this massive gyre, formed by circular ocean currents in the Pacific Ocean, reportedly brimming with plastic particles, killing sea turtles and seagulls. Wagner, a professor of biology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, whose lab focuses on the impact of plastics on human and ecosystem health, felt like scientists were pointing to marine systems as the main repository of these tiny plastic particles. But wouldn’t it make sense for them to exist in other systems as well? “It was like, wait a second, it must be in freshwater too,” Wagner says today. He set out to search for microplastics elsewhere.
As we know, plastic is omnipresent. Plastic is cheap and easy to make and mold. We use this miracle polymer to store and transport food, make our clothes and cosmetics, cars and boats, detergents and fertilizers, transfuse our blood and floss our teeth. But it also takes between 20 to 500 years to break down a single piece of plastic in a landfill. Those bagged salad containers will be with us for generations to come.
