#plasticosis = #plastic #disease ! 🤣

"...the fibrotic disease caused by plastic-induced scarring they observed in the stomachs of seabirds."

#waste #pollution + #animal scarring (gut intestine etc)
#environment #oceans #seas

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2311253120

The Plastic Problem
Since the 1950s, industry has pumped out plastic products at an increasingly rapid clip (5). Production now reaches about 400 million metric tons per year (5). Half of these plastics are intended for a single use, such as polystyrene plates and polypropylene grocery bags, of which the vast majority are not recycled.

When pieces measure less than 5 millimeters, researchers call these fragments microplastics. Industry also produces microplastics directly for consumer use, such as beads in exfoliating face washes and fibers in synthetic textiles.

Microplastics have been found in sea ice in the Arctic Ocean (6), air in the Antarctic (7), and dust in homes (8)... guts of seals and dolphins (9) and in seafood (10) and bottled water (11). They’ve even been found in human blood (12), stools (13), lungs (14), and placenta (15).

“We’re swimming in a mess of our own making,” says marine ecologist Randi Rotjan of Boston University.

And macroplastics are going to break down to microplastics for millennia. - Randi Rotjan #Quote

It’s not as though the water had been thick with plastic. Imagine piling nylon filaments onto a quarter and then sprinkling them into a 6-liter tank... That amount of microplastic was all it took for the dramatic increase in mortality.

- Meredith Seeley, who conducted the research as a PhD student at VIMS. Mmarine scientist and environmental chemist.