Confession #1: I love the outdoors. Mountains, beaches, rivers, oceans, whatever the adventure I can't get enough of it! Look anywhere and everywhere and you'll find me out there soaking up the sun. I’d say the adventure I particularly love the most is when I get brought along on camping trips to amazing national parks and then just get chucked out into the woods for a solo adventure. I am pro-leaving-a-trace. Anyway, the mountains are calling and I must go.
Confession #2: I have no boundaries. My therapist tells me that this is an issue I need to work on but I just can't help it, I have to be involved with everything around me! I think I may have gone a bit too far when traces of me were recently found in newborn babies' digestive systems (1). I also recently got caught out in Norway in some pearls harvested from local mussels (2). This intrusiveness may upset some people, but I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.
Confession #3: The world revolves around me...I think. Am I wrong? Would the world as we know it not collapse if the plastic that makes me up were to just disappear off the face of the Earth? I think many people don’t realize how important plastic is. For example, the material that makes me up (Polyethylene Terephthalate) can also be found in fiberglass, solar cells, and 3D printed objects (1).
Confession #4: I will always be there for you. Everyone these days is trying to move on from me with their new, shiny reusable water bottles. They always come crawling back when they realize I'm only $0.99 and their new 64 oz. Hydro Flask is $50. What makes things even better is that when you're thirsty and tired after a long day, I'll be there waiting for you on the shelf at your local gas station. Ol' reliable saves the day once again. I may also be a tiny bit manipulative, but a bottle's gotta do what a bottle's gotta do. Am I purposefully keeping prices low to encourage consumption? Maybe. Am I perhaps 20x more amazing than those annoying, loud metal canteens everyone loves to tote around? Definitely.
Thanks for hearing me out, I’ll see you soon in your nearest national park!
With love,
Your Favorite Single-Use Plastic
Hopefully, these confessions have helped illuminate just how ingrained plastics are into this age of human impacts known as the Anthropocene. Modern society is fundamentally reliant on plastics whether we want to admit it or not, and they have allowed civilization to evolve into what it is today. Though with more sustainable alternatives (such as those pesky Hydro Flasks), one would think we would be able to escape them a bit more these days. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Throughout this semester, I have witnessed first-hand just how deeply plastics have infiltrated every aspect of the natural world. My classmate Grace Kinder and I are currently working on a macroplastic detection project and we have seen the seemingly miraculous placed plastics end up in. We traveled to Hiwassee Lake a few weeks ago for a public trash cleanup sponsored by Mainspring Conservation Trust, which centered around the local campgrounds and boat docks. We thoroughly expected significant litter at these sites, but what we didn’t expect to find were discarded water bottles and other items buried among the log jams in the coves of the lake. At first glance, the coves seemed clean. Though the more and more we searched, the more trash we found. One would expect this amount of litter at a popular recreational lake surrounded by busy roads, but 95% of the forest surrounding Hiwassee Lake is protected Forest Service land. The fact that a 20 oz. plastic Mountain Dew bottle managed to infiltrate this beautiful lake where bald eagles were once seen soaring over the water is a testament to the impacts of the Anthropocene (or perhaps the Plasticene would be more appropriate).
Our IE class as a whole has witnessed further infiltration of plastics into the natural world during our Capstone microplastics project. For the past 9 weeks, we have been sampling sections of the Chattooga River for microplastics to determine concentrations, sources, and types of contamination. Just from the quick grab samples, we have collected straight from the river we are finding multiple microplastics per 330-milliliter sample. When you scale this up to the number of liters of water in the river, that is a significant amount of contamination. The Chattooga River is famous for its wild & scenic designation and amazing rapids. Despite our love and appreciation of this wild river, humans have managed to pollute this river with microplastics that may be invisible to our eye, but will not be invisible to history.
Written by Chloe Hall
References
1. Zhang, et al. Occurrence of Polyethylene Terephthalate and Polycarbonate Microplastics in Infant and Adult Feces Environmental Science & Technology Letters Article ASAP, 2021, DOI: 10.1021/acs.estlett.1c0055
2. Bråte, Inger, et al. Occurrence of Pearls in Mussels (Mytilus Spp.) from the Norwegian Coast. Norwegian Institute for Water Research, 2018, www.miljodirektoratet.no/globalassets/publikasjoner/M1173/M1173.pdf.
3. “Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET): A Comprehensive Review.” PET Plastic (Polyethylene Terephthalate): Uses, Properties & Structure, Omnexus, omnexus.specialchem.com/selection-guide/polyethylene-terephthalate-pet-plastic.