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We’ve been told for decades that a plastic bottle lasts 450 years, or even that plastic never goes away. But how would anyone know, given that plastic has only been widely used for about a century? Recent research tells a different story, and it’s both better and worse. Let’s take a look.
#sciencenews #microplastics #environment #plastic
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Want to restore the planet’s ecosystems and see your impact in monthly videos? The first 100 people to join Planet Wild with my code SABINE310 will get the first month paid for by me: https://planetwild.com/r/sabinehossenfelder/join/310
If you want to get to know them better first, check out their floating wetland mission: https://planetwild.com/r/sabinehossenfelder/m43/310
Cool, bring back plastic straws.
I used to use black and clear plastic sheets in the garden. When I would go to pull them out and get rid of them in the Fall, many of them would disintegrate. I might find little bits and pieces in the soil in the spring, but not much. I don't know what bad chemicals it was contributing to the garden..
Non stick pans' coatings manifest best invulnerability to degradation.
Petrochemical is the word to use. There's no such thing as fossil fuel.n If it was all dinosaurs that made up the oil pools underground, it would have been so many dinosaurs that they would have covered every inch of the Earth.
Hotter
I hate plastic. Its so fake, sure there are thing that make sense to be made of plastic. It just the underdeveloped countries take the easy way that is made everything out of plastic because it cheap and can be used to make almost anything, but they don't have the infra to collect and recycle the trash plastic so then people just throw their stuff into the nature and it look so horrible.
This video was also somehow about ai. And as carlin explored the idea, maybe nature needed us to create plastic. Or be a biological bootloader:)
I think plastics are one of the best inventions made by man out of natural petroleum derivitives. I see nothing wrong with it, encourage recycling and educate people on their positives and the importance of not littering and recycling.
I believed the claim that plastic would not break down for hundreds of years or more when burried in landfill conditions. The fact that so much plastic is produced that we can’t even contain it to landfills is much worse!
Yeah it's very similar to the crap about how toxic oil is. They act like it's radioactive waste. Remember Deepwater Horizon? They spazzed over that one and said the entire Gulf of Mexico would be contaminated for 1,000,000 years. I was like, COME ON, hydrocarbons they were bisshing about photooxidize in a a very short amount of time. Like 3. years after that disaster everything was as pristine as it was before.
We dont know the effects of microplastics because theres no control. We can only hypothesize based on health outcomes from before micro plastics. Thats not good enough either for a mutlitude of reasons, but the first of which is that we dont use arsenic in paint or as a sweetener anymore, for example.
Is the seasoning on my cast iron skillet plastic? It is a polymer.
ok.., but what globe???
🤔😈🤣
@Sabine it is 2026 ok and no one believes in the globe any more ok bhahaha it got 10 on the bullcaca scale…
DERP
Wow I’m feeling a bit more educated, thanks ❤ very positive input 🤗
problem media and politicians both jump on studies that have never reproduced as gospel and repeat and exaggerate. recently collage student found microplastic data contaminated by the chemical on lab gloves that keep lates and nitrile from sticking . since chemically similar triggers the sensers ,
Like the eating more than 2 eggs a day is bad for health myth.
the 450 years thing is literally what i was taught in school, word for word basically. meanwhile the plastic chair on my balcony crumbled after two summers of heat, so i never fully bought it lol
Our brains are right full of it.
Nothing really goes away it just disperse
Perhaps instead of encouraging people to recycle, which in turn doesn't happen, we should be using plastics for fuel.
If plastic didn't decay, I wouldn't have to replace things that are exposed to sunlight and water like components of my sprinkler system. I must buy in quantity and keep spare parts on hand because degradation is guaranteed.
Sorry to say but the rant about "artificial" sound kinda as bad as NdG Tysons mini-rand about leap-days: "We’re not leaping anywhere. The calendar is simply, and abruptly, catching up with Earth’s orbit" – yeah, a sudden/abrupt movement of the calendar… that is exactly what the word 'leap' describes. And "artificial" simply means man-made – in contrast to something that formed on its own naturally without human intervention.
What we would need for plastic would be far far FAR better and more visible labelling, stricter requirements on products to not make recycling intentionally unfeasible, a trash-collecting system that deals with the various types of plastic, and laws that make actual recycling mandatory and not the greenwashing that the "eco"-parties of the past decades have done. The worst i have seen is in austria: "Yeah we dont need separate trash containers for metal and plastic packaging – just toss everything into the same bin cause the automatic sorting will take care of that"…. yeah it really doesn't.
Heck, for plastic just burning it for power would be a better idea than sending it to other continents like happens with a lot of waste.
Anton said the beetle worms have a microbe in their guts that digest plastic. The microbe was cultured and evolved to do it better.
Mico plastics in my gonads, liver, brain… I am Nano Plastic Man.
You are a brave physicist, Sabine.
So plastic is not a problem, got it!
decay timescale long or short, we are still pumping out more than is decaying.
I don't know if you are "missing the point" here? Is it really the issue that it's ONLY a hundred years rather than a thousand?
It seems to me that lasting long enough to get into EVERYTHING is POTENTIALLY a serious problem.
If, as you say, there is no evidence that it causes damage to health, I guess we can hope. If it does, then the issue of length of time is really only a fool's argument.
Listen honey.
There’s plastic in every living thing.
And an every creature’s hormone and endocrine systems are affected.
That’s really all I need to know.
Cool is as cool does, and she cool. 😎
scam alert
We were sold the belief that “Fossil Fuel” is the remains of decomposed plants and animals from the past. What makes more sense to me is that it is the decomposed remains of all of the plastic that was produced by the “advance civilizations” that lived here before us. What goes around comes around, and we are following in the footsteps of those who walked before us.
anything said about the manufacturing process ?.
Compare it to mineralic microparticles nobody is talking of! Those are much more and we all gonna die!😂
5:30 What? Higer risk of heart attack (The New England Journal of Medicine 03.2025), higher dementia and alzheimer( Invisible Invaders, 2025), microplastic endocrine distuprion (2026) etc.
What more do you need?
This video was sponsored by the plastic industry 👌.
And remember, children: pollution is not an issue if some can raiae money out of it 💰💰
You just need to think what will you say to your childrrn 🤔🤣
This is pure propaganda. Pure bullshit. Brought to you by the plastic industry
I'm really worried about my LEGOs right now.
Kindly Release a New Pop Song. I Miss your Musical Personality. I'm Not Cassandra.
そういえば〜。
My dog likes to eat plastic toothpick. She used to take the toothpicks from my hand and chew it and guess what. It comes out with her poop alright?! 😱🙀
❤🧡💛thanks Sabine💚💙💜;)
Watch rivers in Africa, India, Bangladesh. Plastic should not be used by uncivilised nations, it is a horror show and it all finally drops in our oceans.
Great video. Turns out plastic isn’t persistent, it just breaks into a trillion nanoparticles that live in the Arctic, the Sahara and your lungs forever. Totally different thing. Problem solved.
Every number you cite is for tiny particles floating in water under UV light. Most plastic is in landfills and ocean sediment where the sun famously doesn’t shine. You even admit the data don’t cover buried plastic and then conclude it won’t take thousands of years anyway. Bold. Santa Barbara sediment cores have microplastic layers from the 1940s still sitting there, apparently unaware of your half life estimates.
Also 5.5 years vs half a year for a millimeter particle is a factor of eleven. “Roughly compatible” is doing a lot of work there. And garden furniture baking in full sun is the worst case not the average, that’s like timing a sugar cube in hot tea and announcing rocks dissolve.
Last thing. Watching you deliver this is like watching a ventriloquist who forgot to bring the dummy. Lips barely moving, words coming out anyway, and somehow the argument still doesn’t hold together.