by: Ethan Huff
(Natural News) For several many years now, we’ve got been told that recycling plastic is a lot better for the environment than simply trashing it – but is that really true?
Recent research published within the Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances casts a shadow of doubt on the merits of plastic recycling, which seem like massively overblown and possibly even fraudulent.
To assert that recycling plastic helps to guard the environment is just not true, the study essentially found. And the rationale has to do with the generation of microplastics, which now pollute oceans, lakes, streams and rivers, and even farms where food is grown.
Researchers each from Scotland and Canada collected and tested water samples at a recycling plant. They found that the water, which is used to wash plastic before it gets recycled, is loaded with toxic microplastics.
Once a plastic bottle is washed, the subsequent step within the recycling process is to shred and melt it into pellets, that are then reformed to create recent plastics. The issue is that this process generates a lot of microplastics, which persists within the water and flows all the way down to the local wastewater treatment plant.
Since many wastewater treatment plants are ill-equipped to filter out microplastics, all that hidden, microscopic waste finally ends up flooding into the environment.
(Related: Some cities have even resorted to burning recyclables since no one seems to want to simply accept the raw material for processing anymore.)
Microplastics go straight through filtration systems, especially on the micron level
On the plants tested, water was used 4 times to wash the plastic before recycling. And researchers discovered the presence of micron-sized plastic particles in all 4 water samples used during each step of the cleansing process.
In some cases, the water used to wash plastic at recycling plants never even makes it to a wastewater treatment plant, and is as an alternative just dumped directly into the environment or repurposed as irrigation water.
All in all, the team estimated that 6.5 million kilos of microplastics are released into the environment each yr, all because of the recycling of plastics. Were all that plastic simply tossed right into a landfill, it could not have the chance to taint water supplies and cause every kind of health problems in humans and animals.
Moreover, the team evaluated a recycling plant that had installed a special filtration system to capture microplastics. That system captured about 50 percent of the particles, which is hardly enough to be satisfactory.
Not only that, however the team only tested for microplastics all the way down to a size of 1.6 microns. It seems that microplastics could be a whole lot smaller than even that, which implies the true concentration of microplastics in even filtered water remains to be disturbingly high.
Prior research has shown that some microplastics are so small that they’re able to entering individual cells in an animal’s body. We are able to only assume that the identical is true of individual cells in humans, that are greater than likely contaminated with microplastics as well.
“Thanks, greenies, for making things worse once more,” wrote one upset commenter, stating that the farce of recycling “was obvious from the very starting.”
One other took a less harsh approach, making the idea that those in favor of recycling mean well but are simply misinformed about its alleged advantages for planet and other people.
“Washing recycled plastic and never measuring the microplastic detritus is scandalous by itself, but to then let that water to flow out into the continuum and be surprised at the results” is ludicrous, this person added.
“Why not melt the plastic into useful products without washing the microplastics into the continuum?” this person further questioned.
More related news will be found at Pollution.news.
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