Vocal Voices

The International Union for Conservation of Nature has issued a report saying that microplastics from tyres and textiles are worse than all the bottles, bags and other plastic waste. These simply get washed out to sea under normal drainage conditions and then into marine life and back into us.

The report follows earlier ones about microbeads found in cosmetics and Sky's campaign to clean up the seas.

Various sky reports have shown massive rafts, kilometres in size, of every imaginable plastic floating about the oceans. One report showed a former pristine beach a few kilometres long and hundreds of metres wide knee deep in the crap we throw away. The reporter said that locals try to clean it up but that every new tide brings in more.

It is criminal what we are doing to the planet's environment and one day it will bite back.

Interesting news about microplastic pollution from washing synthetic clothes and from vehicle tyres today.

None of it good news.

Here on the Isle of Man we too have the same problem of plastic waste on the beaches.

A local Guy set up a team of volunteers who go mob handed to a particular beach at a time and fill black bags with plastic waste and other items washed ashore with every tide, I believe at present he has about 4,000 volunteers on the island who turn up when they can even if only once a year and they take tons literally tons to the incinerator or local recycle centers who in turn send it for incineration.

Ideally rather than burn it we would be better recycling all these plastics..............http://www.hahnplastics.com/hanit-slabs/ . here is one recycler there are many others throughout the world one guy in south america is building houses from recycled plastic blocks even the roof panals are recycled waste plastic.

As an angler I was on different committees with the IOM government going back to the 70s when we were telling them they needed to create artificial reefs and start looking after our local seas...........mostly in vain as it cost money. same old excuses.

Now it is Karma time..........we have hardly any fish left in the Irish sea all round us has been decimated and the food chain destroyed compared to how it used to be.

Suddenly people are waking up to the reality of what they have done or allowed to be done to our seas and I only hope it is not too late.

These microbeads in makeup facial scrubs and may other products etc are the worst offender to date as the fish and the food chain digest these and many die before even reaching maturity to reproduce..........SO THE CHAIN IS BROKEN

We all need to wake up to the situation and do something about it before it is too late.

We need new regulations on the use of damaging contents we use and also a determined effort to stop the dumping at sea of all waste'

Soapbox put away again for now

Manxie xx

Interesting point about the volunteers and the collections, Manxie, as this is what the locals were also trying to do on the beach mentioned. There is, after all, money to be made from such waste. It is money that could help the locals. The problem is that they are simply overwhelmed.

Another report earlier on found toxic levels of PCBs and PBDEs, banned in the 1970s, in creatures from the depths of the Mariana and Kermadec trenches in the Pacific. These places are 7,000km apart, so it is not a local problem.

A ticking time bomb?

Hi Manxie,

[correction]
In the article I read, clothes washing and tyres were ~31% of the problem, car tyres were around 15%in the western developed world. Cosmetics were around 2%.

All very well to point at cosmetics when we are doing absolutely nothing about the majority of the problem.

However this is an opportunity… Now we all need Air Cars, no tyres, no problem…

Yep I now it’s a serious problem but if we don’t have a bit of levity, we’ll explode.

Killing the Oceans - Global warming - etc. etc.

It is amazing what humans have done to Planet Earth in the last 100 years or so.
If this trend continues unabated for another 100 years, the planet will not be worth living on.

The problem is that hardly anyone seems to care. I don't know what the answer is.

Perhaps we should start with making school children aware of the future prospects
for humanity if humans do not change their ways. That might help.