John Flesher, writing for the AP:
Star Tribune
“Scientists who have reported that the Great Lakes are awash in tiny bits of plastic are raising new alarms about a little-noticed form of the debris turning up in sampling nets: synthetic fibers from garments, cleaning cloths and other consumer products.
They are known as “microfibers” — exceedingly fine filaments made of petroleum-based materials such as polyester and nylon that are woven together into fabrics.
”When we launder our clothes, some of the little microfibers will break off and go down the drain to the wastewater treatment facility and end up in our bodies of water,” Sherri “Sam” Mason, a chemist with the State University of New York at Fredonia, said Friday.
The fibers are so minuscule that people typically don’t realize their favorite pullover fleece can shed thousands of them with every washing, as the journal Environmental Science & Technology reported in 2011...
Ominously, the fibers seem to be getting stuck inside fish in ways that other microplastics aren’t. Microbeads and fragments that fish eat typically pass through their bodies and are excreted. But fibers are becoming enmeshed in gastrointestinal tracts of some fish Mason and her students have examined. They also found fibers inside a double-crested cormorant, a fish-eating bird.
”The longer the plastic remains inside an organism, the greater the likelihood that it will impact the organism in some way,” Mason said, noting that many plastics are made with toxic chemicals or absorb them from polluted water. She is preparing a paper on how microplastics are affecting Great Lakes food chains, including fish that people eat.
There’s also a chance that fibers are in drinking water piped from the lakes, she said. Scientists reported last fall that two dozen varieties of German beer contained microplastics.”
Looking? Found something you have, eh? Our stuff keeps moving with negative consequences. Happens to everything we create sometimes this does.
