More evolution. Biomes of life in the oceans plastic garbage patches

[Michael Weber]

I’m a subscriber to, big fan of and small donor to the YouTube channel of Anton Petrov. His channel is normally about astronomy and physics. Subjects I understand little about but he explains them well.:p He deviates from those subjects to discuss the so called ocean garbage patches, how they are formed and dispels common misconceptions about their appearance. Mostly though the video is about life surviving and evolving in what is considered an environmental disaster. Thought some would find this interesting.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qEuL925ovZ8

[Maurice Mcmurry]

Will generations of the future be known as Garbage Patch kids?

[Michael Weber]

Will generations of the future be known as Garbage Patch kids?
Where’s the like button when you need it.

[Edwin Santos]

That was indeed very interesting. I have a new appreciation for how complicated a problem it is. The sheer amount of plastic that humans produce is really staggering.

[George Yetka]

These types of things open too many questions. Should we clean and kill this new life? Will this new life cure cancer or whatever new thing happens? Im a recycling nut, im constantly digging into the garbage to grab the plastic bottles and paper everyone else tosses in there. But it doesnt make a difference from what everyone else says. The recycling plants only take so much then the rest gets dumped in a landfill anyway. If oil from a pizza box makes it into the paper recycling and is discovered supposedly they will dump the whole load in landfill. Its really pretty crazy. There are some decent solutions going on. Some of the cleanup solutions have been pretty successful. My uncle just retired from a company that burns garbage for power. Its a great business model as they get paid to take the garbage and paid to burn it. The furnace they use has scrubbers that remove 99% or more of everything that comes off of the burn. 1 filter the size of a tractor trailer will hit a landfill for every few hundred tons of garbage incinerated.

My town takes plastics 1 and 2/ cans/glass and paper. All the other plastics they insist I dump in the trash. Which is half. I take the film plastics to grocery store. But even still I dump a ton of plastic.

[Maurice Mcmurry]

I should not joke, it is serious. Our Kids just spent 3 months around the Bahama Bank and were very disturbed by all of the plastic trash. Most of what they saw was off-fall from commercial fishing. It brings to mind this video from the 70s

https://youtu.be/cCxPOqwCr1I

[Edwin Santos]

Having lived in a couple of different countries outside the US (Japan and Canada), I will say the recycling rules are far more stringent than where I live in the US.
Especially in Japan, sorting involves 5 different categories, and it is the responsibility of the homeowner. As an example, it was required that you remove the label from plastic bottles so that what was being deposited was just the plastic. And the cap had to be removed and go into one category while the bottle itself went in another and the paper label went in yet a third. No plastic went into what you might call regular trash. If the trash is not sorted properly it is not picked up, and all your neighbors know about it because of how compact and dense Tokyo neighborhoods are, so there is some peer pressure that keeps everyone in line. Of course part of this is that rules are taken seriously in Japanese culture, and non-compliance for whatever reason is frowned upon. But once you got the hang of the garbage sorting, it wasn't really that hard to comply honestly.
Here in the US, at least in my city, recycling is one broad category and I always wonder how it is processed downstream.

I thought it was brilliant when someone came up with the idea of grinding up and adding old tires to asphalt to keep them out of the landfills. I wonder if plastic could be added to concrete or asphalt or other building materials?
It's easy to get overwhelmed by the damage our waste is wreaking on the planet, but I try to stay optimistic that innovative minds are constantly coming up with good ideas and solutions.