Environmental Question #3 [Microplastics]

 Courtesy of Reddit user u/makingitgreen

Q: Do micro plastics themselves ever break down into their elemental constituents and become harmless?

I always see talk of micro plastics getting smaller and smaller over hundreds of years etc but I've always wondered what's the actual end game and how long it's taken for say, a polythene bag to actually fully go away in soil.

A: Good question! I'm tempted to make some reference to ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but I'm sure I'd butcher the quote. Over the course of millenia the microplastics will gradually break down until the small molecules combine with oxygen to become CO2, and the larger molecules slowly degrade via geologic processes back into being crude oil. I sometimes muse about how if we keep piling trash onto landfills, then cover them over with dirt, the former landfills will become the crude oil deposits of the future in a few thousand years. (Don't quote me on the exact time frame for degradation back to crude oil, that's more in the geology world than the chemistry world. I just know it will take a very long time) This process gets me thinking lots of sci-fi thoughts about an imagined cycle of civilizations rising and falling, leaving oil reserves for those that come after unintentionally.

Donations

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Environmental Question #1 [Biodegradability]

 Courtesy of Reddit user u/Kischter Q: Aren't biodegradable and compostable different? Compostable breaks down into natural materials and biodegradable means that the environment can break it down but it isn't fully broken into naturally found materials?
Read more

Environmental Question #2 [Predictions]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/Trensocialist Q: What are your hopes in the next decade or two on overcoming our reliance on plastics? A: That is a very good and very complicated question. The short answer is that I have total confidence that our reliance on plastics can be overcome, but it comes down mostly to a matter of how fast and how much of a shock to people's current habits they're willing to tolerate. I'll give one simple example to illustrate my point. Nontoxic biodegradable bioplastics have come a long way toward safely and reliably replacing conventional plastics, but one property that will be difficult if not impossible to replicate is transparency. Some good advancements have been made in this sphere, but given the current state of polymer science it appears unlikely that we can make something that is biodegradable, transparent, durable, and impermeable to air and water. You pretty much have to pick two of those four properties. This is a problem, because over the p...
Read more

The Spectrum of Toxicity: A Brief History of Humanity Poisoning Ourselves

In the midst of the current attention on pollution and how it affects the environment, it can be easy to think that we live in the most toxic time in world history, but that isn’t true. Over the past several hundred years humanity has grown progressively better at avoiding environmental toxins and man-made pollutants, but our awareness of the dangers of these materials has grown faster than our ability to avoid them. This makes it look like the world is growing ever more dangerous, when in fact the world is growing gradually safer, but the average person is becoming ever more aware of the dangers that have existed for a long time already. This awareness is a good thing, because the more noise people make about environmental pollution, the faster solutions will be prioritized and implemented, but this increased awareness shouldn’t force people to live in constant fear. The Industrial Age As recently at the 1800s fatal outbreaks of dysentery and other digestive infections were commonplac...
Read more