Turtle thinspiration!

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Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

It's not plastic. At that range, 800 miles north of Hawaii, he's discovered Gilligan's Island!

And those meathooks? They're also plastic. It never ends.

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I love the fact that they are called nurdles.

The nurdles are coming to get us!

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Nurdles is what my brother and I used to call the lumps that appear in curdled milk, and also the lumps in badly-dissolved powdered milk. Any way you slice it, nurdles are gross!

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Jesus, this is depressing. Plastic is to modern society as lead was to Rome.

Too bad everything I like has plastic in it. :P

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Findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contributing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world
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It's kinda strange, this talk about ZOMFG GLOBAL plastic poisoning, that causes obesity only in developed countries.

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That thought struck me too. Plastic is rather ubiquitous in developing countries too, yet no obesity epidemic.

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obesity is on the rise in many parts of the world that are industrializing, although i agree that plasticizing chemicals alone are unlikely to be the sole cause. however, i don't think plastic is as ubiquitous in developing countries as in industrial nations -- countries like China and India may be producing more and more plastic products, but people in most of the world still don't consume at the rate we do in the US. and our version of consumption = disposable -- think about all the food packaging and shopping bags and cheap electronics Americans use (and often throw away) every day. americans still use and consume a disproportionate amount of the world's resources, including petroleum products.

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Maybe (coz it's impolite now to strongly assert your point of view in these matters) it's because people in developed countries eat too much?

There is quite an insightful post here: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/superstimuli_an.html, though I cannot adhere to the conclusions that author had obtained through pushing some of his ideas somewhat out of their original domain.

But here is the relevant quote:
"A candy bar is a superstimulus: it contains more concentrated sugar, salt, and fat than anything that exists in the ancestral environment. A candy bar matches taste buds that evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment, but it matches those taste buds much more strongly than anything that actually existed in the hunter-gatherer environment. The signal that once reliably correlated to healthy food has been hijacked"

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yay for lj.

and yes, calorie-rich sedentary lifestyles probably have something to do with obesity :). the more disturbing/intriguing stories are of people whose metabolisms are very very slow and have incredible difficulty losing weight, or keeping it off. interestingly, processed food ingredients like high fructose corn syrup and transfats seem to exacerbate weight gain, interfering with appetite regulation and how calories are stored/burned.

regardless of the direct effect of plasticizers on weight gain, i'm still not thrilled with the idea of being saturated with questionable organic compounds.

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interesting, highly-readable article on why those calorie-ich, nutrient-berift foods are so available, at least in the USA:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/magazine/22wwlnlede.t.html?ei=5090&en=e8328c69f0b3f4be&ex=1334894400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

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I find it dubious that plastic has anything to do with obesity.

Wealth and an abundance of food are the likely suspects.

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Dude...Unless I am mistaken, that is not a sea turtle. That appears to be a snapping turtle, the kind that live in fresh water. This one picture, if false, could undermine the whole point of a good article. If they are wrong and they know it, what else may they have falsified?

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I feel the same way when I see articles about air pollution showing nuclear cooling towers.

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Yep. The world would be a cleaner place with nuclear power.

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That is not, in fact, a sea turtle (note its claws), and it does look like a snapping turtle. But I don't think that undermines the point of the article, which is we that we have too much debris around, plastic and otherwise, and because of it various creatures are suffering and dying.

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I am simply less likely to trust the source of the article, and the article's general credibility. I do, however, believe we have way too much crap just floating around out there - and the ocean has been treated like a dumping ground.

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What *isn't* "contributing to the obesity epidemic"?

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Celery.

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pro_ana seems to be fighting the good fight.

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I heard there are some sunken nuclear subs with neurotoxins and warheads at the bottom of the ocean, that'll be fun for everyone when the rust finally eats through.

Have you heard of Morgellions? Conspiracy hippies love it, but it may be an expression of so much goddamn plastic and nano stuff everywhere!!

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Or when the bottom-net trawlers hit some uncharted dumping grounds: http://simonnorfolk.com/ [it's all flash, choose "The Hebrides..." and read the text associated with the 8th photo titled "Dump"]: "The Beaufort Dyke, a stretch of deep water between the coasts of Scotland and Northern Ireland was used for the dumping of munitions and radioactive waste int eh years after WW2 when the Ministry of Defence needed to dispose of a considerable stockpile of US, British and captured German weapons. Since then an estimated 1.17 million tonnes of weapons were jettsioned off boats, supposedly into the Dyke. [...] The Aquilon, a Breton-based trawler, had been fishing outside the 12-mile exclusion zone of the Beaufort Dyke in waters officially deemed safe. On July evening in 1969, [...] while emptying the nets her crew were contaminated with the mustard gas eporite. The two fishermen wors affected had skin and hair peeling away [...] In 1995 the Beaufort Dyke hit the headlines after 4000 phosphorus incendiary bombs were washed up on Mull, Oban, Arran and other parts of Scotland's west coast. [...] It seems a British Gas pipeline has been laid through the heart of the dump and the trenching machine used to bury the pipeline had dispersed thousands of shells. [...] The British Gas trench ran outside the official site of the weapons dump, but in a classic case of incompetence and laziness, a series of articles in The Independent and New Scientist, showed that bombs had been dumped well short of the intended site and a great number had lain not more than 3 miles offshore, in as little as 50m of water. [...] Retired seamen who sailed on dumping expeditions in the 1940s confirmed that in poor weather, the ships discharged their cargoes no more than a few hundred metres offshore. [...] Anecdotal evidence from mariners, including crews of the Stranraer/Larne ferries, says that deep, underwater explosions can often be heard when passing over the Beaufort Dyke." Hawaii, which is closest to the Gyre, also has munitions, toxic, and radioactive dumping grounds. Think of that next time you go snorkeling there... A picture is worth 2 million plastic bottles (US consumption every 5 minutes): http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7 [second image on page, also plastic bags further down]

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Gah, sorry about the lack of formatting.

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I lived in Hawaii, and although Kaholawe was used as a bombing site, it's water is still some of the cleanest in the ocean that I've swam in. Think about that a bit. But you know, my sis, snarkyshark2 sometimes takes ocean water samples to her teacher, so she could tell you a lot. Especially about marine plankton. ;)

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Nobody is claiming the water is polluted right now, it just seems like it has the potential to be catastrophically so. One area is called Ordnance Reef by the locals. The water's so clear you can see the munitions (with low-res photos):

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2007/2007-03-29-03.asp

"They are covered in coral and blended into the environment out
there, which is teeming with sea life," he said. "We didn't want
to disrupt the corals to see how many munitions were underneath."
The munitions were found in depths ranging from 24 feet to the
maximum depth of the study area, 300 feet.

Here's another article about the toxic and radioactive dumping:

http://starbulletin.com/2005/11/09/news/story04.html

"at least 16,000 mustard-filled 100-pound bombs were dumped as
close as five miles off the islands in 1944 under the Army's
secret ocean-dumping program. In 1976, a fisherman in Hawaii
was burned when he brought up an Army mortar filled with mustard
gas [...] 64 million pounds of liquid nerve and mustard agents
in one-ton steel canisters were secretly dumped into the ocean.
Some 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and
more than 500 tons of radioactive waste were either tossed
overboard or packed into holds of scuttled vessels, the paper
said."

It's not clear whether those last numbers are for the Hawaii dumps alone, or all the ones off US coasts. So I'm not sure if Hawaii has the radioactive waste dumps, though I've heard about depleted uranium on land-based bombing ranges.

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Some times ago the popular theme was "plastic never decay". Now it is "we surrounded by plastic".

I smell grant hungry scientists. They are product of education epidemic in developed world. They are in our schools, they are in our government, they advice our town council, they are in our bank, they are in our pockets...

:)

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scary stuff -- i posted about this article a couple of weeks ago. as far as i can tell, plastic really shouldn't be considered a "disposable" product, since it can't biodegrade easily, and gives off nasty plasticizing chemicals into the environment.

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A few years back, there were ads for the plastic industry on TV. They said, "look at all these great things that wouldn't have been possible without plastic." And each of those things they showed were things that were non-disposable. It was all artificial hearts and, uh, I can't think what else. They notably didn't show Bic pens, plastic grocery bags, and soda can yokes.

Plastic itself is not a problem. It's the notion that it's so cheap that it's easier to throw it away and make new plastic than bother trying to reuse it.

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personally, i think it's fascinating that a material which cannot break down is thought of as "disposable" in the first place -- exactly how are we going to dispose of it? i tend to agree that the problem is cheap plastic packaging and grocery bags and single-use "throwaway" items, and i'm trying to figure out how i can effectively cut down on the amount of disposable plastic i consume (since plastic recycling is mostly a non-starter).

as a more permanent material, i agree that plastic is often useful, though i still have doubts about it. partly because even multi-use items get disposed of eventually (cellphones, nalgene bottles, tuppperware, inkjet printers, cars, etc.), and partly because of the chemicals used to make plastics which can off-gas. like PVC or bisphenol-A -- really not compounds you want much exposure to.

mostly, i'd like to see manufacturers responsible for the life of their products, including a plan to reuse or recycle their components. right now, companies can make and sell as many nurdles and shopping bags and plastic packaging as they want without consequence to them -- municipalities have to deal with waste disposal and sanitation issues. so the extra profit made by selling cheaper products comes at the cost of taxpayers cum consumers.

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I just wonder what's going to happen when the oil starts to run out - it would be great if people started collecting all that plastic waste and recycling it, but there is one serious flaw in the idea - any sort of collecting machinery will need power to run . . . . . where's that going to come from if there's no cheap oil? This also reminds me of a book I once read called "Mutant 59" about a bacteria that mutated to eat plastic. Great idea or catastrophe? We are sooooo screwed.

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Good news, they found out where half that crap is coming from! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=460077&in_page_id=1811

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Plastic is ubiquitous.

I've been in Tokyo two weeks and the amount of plastic they throw away in this one city alone is absolutely amazing. However, to give them credit they are one of the few countries with an extensive and efficient waste management system (ie: incineration + recycling).

It's not just plastic products either -- ships that are moving pellets which are used be manufacturers are lost at sea all the time.

Maybe our purpose in existing is to produce plastic in order to spark the evolution of our new plastic overlords -- but either way, that turtle looks sad. He prolly got made fun of a lot in turtle school. Poor guy.

I'm a bit of a self-hating fan of plastics. They're so useful and cheap!

I think it's the pathetic lack of waste management technology that really gets me angry when I think about it. We know plastic is nigh-indestructible since we invented it... why haven't we thought of a way to manage the plastic life-cycle?

Just throwing it into the water isn't going to be the cheaper option in the bigger picture.

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