I’m not talking about plastic with specific issues (i.e. plastics bags look like jellyfish to sea turtles so sea turtles eat them and die).
But the sand on the beach is still going to be sand on the beach in 10,000 years, so what specific issues are going to happen from X amount of sand grains being plastic?
Edit: Based on the first few replies: I’m talking about plastics that are said to still be there, unchanged, millions of years later. Like they’d show up on the geological record. “Forever plastics”
IF they don’t decay what’s the issue? Or is them not decaying and “forever plastics” a misconception?
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Plastic is toxic and can cause serious health issues. Rocks and sand are just indigestible. Just because they both down break down easily doesn’t mean they have the same effect on your body.
Different kinds of plastics have different chemicals. One property of all plastics we have created is that they all leach chemicals when heated or scratched. As the plastic slowly breaks down/leaches, it leaves PFAS and EDC’s. This gets into the ocean where it enters our food chain, but it can also be from plastic food containers and such. While BPA has been marked as bad and there are other plastics to take it place, the newer “non-leaching” plastics still do leach. All of these built up chemicals (some of them lasting longer than human lifetimes) have an affect on the body, while rocks and sand are non-reactive with the human body.
To put it simply, sand has been around for as long as we know it. But plastic is a man made thing that isn’t benign to our bodies. We wouldn’t normally be exposed to these chemicals and our body has no natural way to prevent damage.
Plastic *does* break down, just not in the same way you’d expect. Usually when we say “break down” we mean something like decomposition. So another way to frame your question is “why is plastic that doesn’t decompose an issue, plenty of rocks don’t decompose either”
The key difference is that rocks usually stay as big rocks. If all plastic bottles stayed *as plastic bottles* forever, the problem would actually be smaller than it is now.
The problem is that plastic *does* break down. It just becomes smaller. And smaller. And smaller. Think like rocks becoming pebbles becoming sand. They’re still “rock”, but “smaller”.
Except that these plastics can break down so small they can get into your bloodstream, or your brain. We don’t know the consequences of this.
Also carcinogens and other toxic compounds bind to microplastics and make their way into the marine food chain (unlike rocks), and considering that roughly a third of the population depends on seafood as their primary source of protein this poses a problem to long term health of humans and to the marine food chain itself. They are very hard to detect and remove due to their small size, not to mention there are probably billions within our oceans now and have been detected in human blood and fetuses…
The issue your having is that ***everything*** breaks down over a long enough time period. The sand on the beach will still be sand in 10,000 years but that sand came from rocks and mountain faces. Plastic has this same problem but its happens much more frequently due to it being a weaker material. It will break down into particles that many times smaller than sand very quickly and proceed to leach into the environment.
As it leaches into the environment, it starts to get absorbed into anything that happens to be near it. Fish might get it stuck in their gills, worms will consume it from the dirt, birds swallow it mistaking it for food, etc. These plastics will enter them and subsequently the food system where they slowly build up.
https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/plastic-problem/plastic-affect-animals/plastic-food-chain/
First of all, plastic will, as everything, be eroded by wind and other elements, and will release particles with time, no matter what it’s made off. Glass is more long lasting than plastic and still gets eroded by nature.
If you eat stone you shit stone. If you don’t shit it it gets dissolved in your body, captured by blood, brought to kidneys, and you will pee it out later on.
If you eat plastic some will get in your blood and it goes around grinding on your heart valves or clogging veins in your brain. No way your body can filter it out.
Animals, humans included, have many ways to get rid of harmful thing that existed when the evolution happened. We have zero protection vs plastic.
Bioaccumulation. Plastic breaks down into microplastics. A little fish eats a microscopic piece of plastic. A larger fish eats 20 of those smaller fish and now has 20 little pieces of plastic. An even larger fish then eats 20 of those fish and now has 400 pieces of plastic. Then Bob eats one of those larger fish once a month. After a year Bob has eaten 4,800 pieces of plastic. This isn’t very good or Bob or any of the other organisms that are full of microplastics.
There is no evidence that micro plastics are harmful. Rocks also form micro particles of a similar size to micro plastics its called clay and there is billions of tons of it.
Plastic can be toxic, but so can rocks.
Everything that they say about micro plastic is also true of micro rock.
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