The world creates 57 million tons of plastic pollution every year and spreads it from the deepest oceans to the highest mountaintop to the inside of people’s bodies, according to a new study that also said more than two-thirds of it comes from the Global South.
It’s enough pollution each year — about 52 million metric tons — to fill New York City’s Central Park with plastic waste as high as the Empire State Building, according to researchers at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. They examined waste produced on the local level at more than 50,000 cities and towns across the world for a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature.
The study examined plastic that goes into the open environment, not plastic that goes into landfills or is properly burned. For 15% of the world’s population, government fails to collect and dispose of waste, the study’s authors said — a big reason Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa produce the most plastic waste. That includes 255 million people in India, the study said.
Plastics are becoming endemic at this point. There are bacteria evolving to live in and consume plastic already. I wonder how our bodies are beginning to change to cope with this.
They don’t, bacteria can evolve quickly because they multiply a lot. Humans take about 30 years to create offspring so evolution is pretty much nonexistent on the scale of a human life
Yup. Just like the wolves at Chernobyl are evolving to be immune to cancer, but their lifespans are far less than ours. Evolution in humans happens, but it takes a whole lot longer.
Wait what
I was wrong. It’s not that they’re immune, it’s that they survive/are resistant to cancer.
https://www.iflscience.com/chernobyls-mutant-wolves-have-evolved-anti-cancer-abilities-72831
https://www.earth.com/news/chernobyl-wolves-have-evolved-resistance-to-cancer/