Plastic found in oceans enters human food chain

Microbeads are manufactured solid plastic particles of less than one millimeter in their largest dimension.They are most frequently made of polyethylene but can be of other petrochemical plastics such as polypropylene and polystyrene. They are used in exfoliating personal care products, toothpastes and in biomedical and health-science research.

You are what you eat

• Humans make pigs look clean. As a Conservative Environmentalist I have always been disgusted at how man will destroy his own home.

(Reuters) - Tiny bits of plastic are contaminating mussels from the European Arctic to China in a sign of the global spread of ocean pollution that can end up on people's dinner plates.

Mussels in apparently pristine Arctic waters had most plastic of any tested along the Norwegian coast, according to a study this month by the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA).

Plastics may be getting swept north by ocean currents and winds from Europe and America, ending up swirling around the Arctic Ocean, NIVA researcher Amy Lusher told Reuters.

"Microplastics have been found in mussels everywhere scientists have looked," she said.

Bottom Line - We treat the oceans like a giant toilet,
but if the oceans die we die.

Past surveys have found microplastics off nations including China, Chile, Canada, Britain and Belgium. Off Norway, the molluscs contained on average 1.8 bits of microplastic - defined as smaller than 5 mm long (0.2 inch) - with 4.3 in the Arctic.

Last year, Chinese researchers suggested that mussels could be a global "bioindicator of microplastic pollution" because the molluscs live on the seabed where many plastics end up and, unlike fish, stay in the same place.

The impact of microplastics' on marine life or humans when eaten is unclear. Scientists suspect you would have to eat vast amounts of shellfish to be at risk, straining even Belgian diets where moules et frites (mussels and French fries) are a favourite dish.

"It's a warning signal that we need to do something about reducing the input of plastic to the ocean," Richard Thompson, a professor at Plymouth University and an expert on microplastics, told Reuters of the worldwide finds.

"It's a cause for concern at the moment rather than an alarm story for human consumption," he said.

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George Carlin - Saving the Planet