When different types of plastics are melted together they tend to phase-separate, like oil and water, and set in these layers. The phase boundaries cause structural weakness in the resulting material, meaning that polymer blends are only useful in limited applications.
Since December, the Reality Coalition, a group of environmental interests led by former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, has run television ads of its own and plastered billboards in the nation’s capital with the message: “In reality, there’s no such thing as clean coal.” The coalition also has Oscar-winning filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen directing ads spoofing ACCCE as a pitchman peddling room-blackening air spray that “harnesses the awesome power of the word clean.”
The latest ad from the Reality Coalition, an environmental group led by former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, was directed by the Academy Award-winning Coen brothers. David Hawkins, director of climate programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council, supports carbon capture research but says ACCCE’s approach won’t spur needed private investment. “They’re going to argue any climate program should be so slow-acting that essentially it doesn’t change business practices in the next 20 years or so, and that is simply incompatible with the needs of climate protection,” he says. “They have concluded it’s not politically viable to maintain a ‘just say no’ position, so now it’s ‘just say mañana.’”
Brian Hardwick, a spokesman for the Reality Coalition, won’t say how much his group is spending on advertising, but says it aims to continue to counter coal’s messaging. “They’ve made a business decision, that it’s cheaper to spend $40 million on lobbying and advertising than hundreds of billions needed to make coal clean,” he says. “They’ve made a calculation that if they can stall, delay progress and mislead, they can avoid that investment.”
Moore estimates plastic debris—most of it smaller than a fifth of an inch (five millimeters)—is "dispersed over millions of square miles of ocean and miles' deep in the water column.
Pollutants also become more concentrated as animals eat other contaminated animals—which could be bad news for us, the animals at the top of the food chain.
Plastic hits marine creatures with a double whammy, Moore said. Along with the toxic chemicals released from the breakdown of plastic, animals also take in other chemicals that the plastic has accumulated from outside sources in the water.
About 44 percent of all seabirds eat plastic, apparently by mistake, sometimes with fatal effects.
The team's new study is the first to show that degrading plastics are leaching potentially toxic chemicals such as bisphenol A into the seas, possibly threatening ocean animals, and us.
The researchers behind a new study, however, found that plastic breaks down at cooler temperatures than expected, and within a year of the trash hitting the water.
Bisphenol A (BPA) has been shown to interfere with the reproductive systems of animals, while styrene monomer is a suspected carcinogen.
