How Is It Raining Plastic?! [Video]

Yearly, greater than 1,000 tons of plastic rain down onto nationwide parks and wilderness areas within the western U.S. On this week’s episode, we discuss the place that plastic comes from, and we search for it in rain that falls on Washington, D.C.

Video Transcript:

Right now, I awakened, it was raining, and so I made a decision, hey, let’s go accumulate some rainwater and see if there’s plastic in it.

Alrighty, the world produces round 350 million tons of plastic yearly, and round 90% of that plastic isn’t or can’t be recycled.

It must go someplace, and that someplace is definitely in all places.

You get one thing manufactured from plastic and while you’re accomplished with it there’s an excellent probability it’ll find yourself in a landfill or some other place the place it’s not being recycled or repurposed.

Over time it breaks aside. And by breaks aside, I don’t imply breaks down and turns into one with the earth. I imply it fragments. It simply retains getting smaller and smaller however by no means absolutely disappears.

This breaking up might be attributable to bodily abrasion, like put on and tear from being outside, but in addition issues like ultraviolet gentle from the solar, which you’ll be able to assist generate free radicals that trigger breaks within the bonds between polymers within the plastic.

These little fragmented items are microplastics, they usually’ve been present in nearly each ecosystem on our planet, from the underside of the ocean, to the Arctic, to mountain ranges in Europe.

Microplastics vary from lower than a nanometer, which is smaller than the diameter of a strand of (function(d, s, id) var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.6"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); (document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));