Virgin Plastic Pellets The Biggest Pollution Disaster

Discussion in 'Science & Nature' started by Frank Sanoica, Aug 19, 2019.

  1. Frank Sanoica

    Frank Sanoica Supreme Member
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    "Some 30 miles north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a township adjacent to a state forest, oil and gas giant Royal Dutch Shell is building a sprawling new plant to support what it sees as the future of its business: making millions of tons of new, virgin plastic.
    When completed, the new facility will pump out 1.8 million tons (1.6 million metric tons) of plastic each year. In a world where buying virgin plastic is often cheaper than using the recycled stuff, the new product will likely find an eager manufacturing market. The vast majority of that plastic, like the vast majority of all plastic made up to now, will likely not be recycled. And it will exist virtually forever, crumbling into microplastics that show up most everywhere scientists look for them."

    "But first, that new plastic will take a ubiquitous, often overlooked form: It will be born into the world as tiny plastic pellets. Those small spheres, sometimes known as “nurdles,” are a massive source of plastic pollution, escaping into the environment before they have a chance to be molded into a useful shape. With roughly 22,000 nurdles per pound of plastic, the Shell plant intends to produce the rough equivalent of 80 trillion nurdles per year."

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    Nurdles show up everywhere. In this photo, volunteers are cleaning nurdles on the coast of Hong Kong’s Lamma island in 2012. Hundreds of millions of the plastic pellets were dumped when containers were knocked off a vessel during a typhoon.

    The stuff's harmless, basically. Until sea dwellers eat so many, trapping them in their systems, they starve to death. Frank

    See: https://qz.com/1689529/nurdles-are-...uve-never-heard-of/?utm_source=YPL&yptr=yahoo
     
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