Transcript
RICHARD THOMPSON
Over a third of the plastic that we produce is used for single trip applications. And we’re sort of taught that those are throwaway items, and that the plastic at the end of its life sort of has no value. But it’s that behaviour that results in littering. It results in accumulation in landfills. It results in debris being left behind by beachgoers. And all of that material is accumulating in the environment.
LIZ BONNIN
This stretch of water is meant to be unpolluted, so Richard doesn’t expect to find much plastic. If we’ve caught anything, it’s bad news. Yeah, I can see plastic. There’s a lot of seaweed, but yeah. There’s definitely bits of plastic in there. Everything from – I don’t know what this is, but – but they’re small.
RICHARD THOMPSON
Yeah. The effects of small bits of debris are less well known and potentially quite different to those that we might think of in terms of larger debris causing strangulation or lacerations. We’ve got very small pieces that could become trapped and retained. And there’s also concern that some of these small pieces could act as a vector for the transport of chemicals to the creatures that ingest them.
LIZ BONNIN
Recent research suggests these tiny bits of plastic attract pollutants, making them even more toxic to wildlife. All of this is bad enough, but it turns out it’s not the open seas that are suffering the most.
RICHARD THOMPSON
So Liz, the reason I wanted to bring you here was because some of the plastic we were looking at in the sea, of course that all washes up on shorelines.
LIZ BONNIN
Yeah.
RICHARD THOMPSON
If I dig my hands down, there’s actually hundreds of small pieces of plastic. All of the shorelines that we’ve sampled worldwide, from the Southern Ocean up to the Arctic, we’ve found microscopic fragments of plastic on all of those shores.
LIZ BONNIN
Even if plastic breaks down into minuscule fragments, it’ll never disappear. And now there’s a danger it can get into our food chain, a food chain that starts with tiny creatures.
RICHARD THOMPSON
One of the ones we looked at was these sandhoppers will readily eat small fragments of plastic. In fact, they’ll even chew away at the corner of a plastic bag.
LIZ BONNIN
Oh my gosh. So these are the little critters that will be going through the really tiny plastic particles, is that right?
RICHARD THOMPSON
Yeah. I mean they’d normally be shredding natural organic material, seaweeds.
LIZ BONNIN
Yeah. So how much damage do we think this might be causing these little fellows?
RICHARD THOMPSON
Well, that’s really one of the great unknowns. And it’s something that we’re really trying to establish with some of the research that we’re doing at Plymouth, is what is the potential harm from these microscopic fragments of plastic in the environment.
LIZ BONNIN
Until we can prevent waste plastic from getting into our oceans, it seems unavoidable that it will end up in our food chain. What we need to find out next is how that might affect our wellbeing.