Pristine Lakes Are Filled With Toxins (bbc.com) 100
Much of the focus on plastic pollution centres on our oceans. Emerging evidence shows it's also a problem in freshwater, which may even be the source. From a report: "Freshwater systems are increasingly studied but still at a much smaller scale than oceans," says Filella. This may simple be due to the fact that initial studies focused on the ocean -- and so research proposals and grants followed suit. It didn't take long for the Geneva team to find what they were looking for. Filella and colleagues collected over 3,000 samples. They went on to analyse 670 of these, revealing some worrying results. Many of these samples contained hazardous and toxic elements including cadmium, mercury and lead -- in some cases in "very high concentrations", as outlined in a 2018 paper in the journal Frontiers of Environmental Science.
A large proportion of these toxic elements are now banned or restricted. This "reflected the age and residence time of the plastic stock in the lake," says Filella: the plastic waste has been building up over several decades. And as we know, plastic can take hundreds of years to degrade. [...] Lake Geneva is not an outlier. Other lakes show similar levels of pollution. Italy's Lake Garda, for example, also has high levels of plastic waste. A sample from the northern part of the lake contained 1,000 large plastic particles and 450 smaller particles (microplastics) per square metre. [...] It is now becoming clearer that much of the plastic that ends up in the ocean starts off in freshwater bodies in the first place -- estimates suggest it could be as much as 70-80%.
A large proportion of these toxic elements are now banned or restricted. This "reflected the age and residence time of the plastic stock in the lake," says Filella: the plastic waste has been building up over several decades. And as we know, plastic can take hundreds of years to degrade. [...] Lake Geneva is not an outlier. Other lakes show similar levels of pollution. Italy's Lake Garda, for example, also has high levels of plastic waste. A sample from the northern part of the lake contained 1,000 large plastic particles and 450 smaller particles (microplastics) per square metre. [...] It is now becoming clearer that much of the plastic that ends up in the ocean starts off in freshwater bodies in the first place -- estimates suggest it could be as much as 70-80%.
It's the cost of doing business (Score:2)
Pollution is the cost of doing business. So maybe business should pay to clean it up.
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To my knowledge, fish don't tend to shit much cadmium., so it might not be fair to make the fish pay for its cleanup.
Either or (Score:3, Insightful)
There's nothing that says that manufacturers can't make their stuff and do it clean as possible. It's a false dichotomy created by the business community that want to keep their bottom lines fat by passing the costs on the commons.
This is a prime example where government regulations do good.
And so what if things become more expensive. We don't need so much crap in our lives anyway and the health benefits and health savings costs to our society far outweigh any costs.
Re:It's the cost of doing business (Score:5, Insightful)
What have you done to clean up the part of the mess that you made by living in first world conditions?
I've written my representatives frequently to ask that we not shit where we eat. As is my right and responsibility in a democratic republic.
Pollution is also the cost of supplying first world living conditions.
I'm not sure if leaded gasoline was really all that necessary to have a high standard of living. I don't think overfishing is the necessary consequence to feed our populace. And I don't think fertilizer run-off into our freshwater ecosystem is the only way to operate a farm. I think frequent chemical spills [bridgemi.com] is a symptom of mismanagement, poor oversight, incompetence, and criminal negligence.
Obviously you partake, since you're using a computing device connected to the internet
Perhaps the purchase price of my computer did not include all of the necessary the costs. Paying to clean up our environment through tax dollars is a bit like padding the income of every business. As a consumer, in the end I will have to pay.
It is way cheaper for a business to avoid spills than for it to accumulate over decades. We're at a point that we can't force businesses to clean up some of the biggest sites as it would bankrupt them before they could finish the job. I propose that we not let things get to the point where we need the government to step in and clean it up.
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I see, so you expect others to fix the problems you make, rather than fix them through your own actions
Correct. I'll do my job. And other people must do theirs. If this were an anarchy then I would be expected to do everything myself. Grow my own food. Refine my own crude oil.
If some aspect of my behavior must be changed to avoid making further problems, I am fine doing that. But I am not going to convert to asceticism on some to gain a moral high-ground when in practice it will be less effective than acknowledging.
you apparently didn't decide to take into consideration the effects of your purchases on the environment.
Maybe I did, and my actions are not significant enough to matter. I still needed gasoline to g
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So it's OK for you to engage in activities that cause pollution, but your representatives should clamp down on other people who are going about their chosen activities?
Am I doing things that cause pollution? Certainly I exhale CO2 and I create water that must be treated and recycled back into the environment. But what I do is not equivalent to dumping polychlorinated biphenyl into the drain because it's cheaper than having it disposed of safely. If there are improvements I can make, I am certainly willing to try.
I have representatives to do the boring dirty work of organizing a great number of opinions and debatable priorities within the government. I am unable to force m
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Earlier in the thread I already rejected asceticism as a debatable point. Unless I can be convinced that my premise is flawed I won't discuss it further.
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And my point is that my house is already in order.
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Could you explain how you think I am proposing a tax? But that's clearly what I'm trying to avoid. Throwing money in the general fund and letting some bureaucrat manage it tends to be very inefficient (although better than doing nothing).
PS- I left the GOP in 2016. I tend to bounce between LP and independent and GOP. I'm supporting mostly independents in my local elections this time around.
Re: It's the cost of doing business (Score:2)
If you're looking for a pre-industrial baseline for plastics, no research is necessary. The baseline is zero.
Re:It's the cost of doing business (Score:5, Insightful)
Pollution is the cost of doing business...
It's not business that's the problem. The problems are deregulation, negligence, inadequate safety standards, cost cutting, mistakes, ignorance, carelessness, indifference and disregard.
... So maybe business should pay to clean it up
It's a start. If the executives at fault lose their own money and go to jail, that would make a world of difference.
Exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
Because many of these problems go hand in hand. A reduction of use of fossil fuels in our cars for example would reduce the pollution from them. Many of our plastics use cheap and freely available fossil fuels. If we cut back on fossil fuels, then cheap oil won't be available and folks will stop making as much plastic and fall back to using more naturally sourced organic materials (cellulose or fiber makes a good building material for example).
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What? I give up on Slashdot.
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"Oh no, everyone's cut back on fossil fuels now that alternative and renewable energy sources are available!"
"But what do we do now with our oil surplus and glut of production capacity?"
"People still need fossil fuels for some of the vehicles they use."
"But not enough! Prices will drop if people don't consume it!"
"I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics."
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Actually, a surprising (and outright concerning) amount of water pollution comes from cost-cutting with waste water treatment plants--ranging from just skipping steps in treating sewage to assuming that the roads are always always always clean so you can just have the storm drains dump straight into the nearest bodies of water without aaaaany bad consequences.
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While people are going on about "Climate Change" the REAL IMMEDIATE DANGER is local pollution! Where do you think your water comes from? You are worried about lower Manhattan getting flooded in 2050 while you drink your toxic water! Complete insanity.
Well, we kind of need to be working on both of those things at the same time, because the fixes for things like climate change will take decades, if not centuries. If we wait until we solve the toxic water problem before we tackle climate change, 2050 will be here already. Luckily, nations are capable of doing more than one thing at once, and many of the the solutions to one environmental problem help fix other environmental problems.
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Why not both? (Score:2)
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Actually, the water you drink isn't toxic because it's been treated and filtered and whatnot.
Anyway, I've been to Lago di Garda back in 2009, it was beautiful, and I genuinely believed its water to be very clean (it was clear and without a shred of garbage in sight).
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Great, another emotion based article (Score:1, Insightful)
Can we get rid of MsMash please? All they post is emotionally based stories, none of this MEANS anything.
I cannot utilize the knowledge that water is polluted to create anything at all, there has been no innovation here, nothing was created or constructed. No one programmed anything, there are no chips, electricity or engineering to ANY ARTICLE FROM MSMASH EVER.
Whoever they are, their just a muck raker "zomfg, did you hear about the water, LOLZ, its like totally like polluted *japanese giggle*" All they
Cd, Hg, Pb (Score:2)
Re:Cd, Hg, Pb (Score:5, Insightful)
Virgin plastic doesn't use Cd, Hg, or Pb for catalyzing or production of plastic.,
Yes it does. Hg is used as a catalyst in chlorine production, and ends up in PVC. Pb is used as a stabilizer, and Cd is used to create yellow and red pigments.
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RoHS was only introduced in 2006. It also only applies to electrical equipment.
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I sometimes wonder how many of these "scientists" have ANY understanding of what the earth is made of. Every one of these metals ARE IN THE GROUND ALREADY! They leach out into the ground water and will build up naturally in lakes.
Although, looking at the article they're measuring the metal content of the plastics they picked up along the beach. As the parent said, none of those metals are present in the plastic from manufacturing, they must have picked them up from the environment.
Lead is rarely found in it's pure form in nature, and is not found uniformly everywhere. If lead is found in water far from any source lead, then it most likely got there by pollution.
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...and a couple of their samples were so ridiculously high that it's pretty obvious that they really, REALLY screwed up their tests.
Unless someone is putting out plastic with more than two percent lead by mass. Or with almost eight percent chromium by mass - and nobody in the EU never noticed.
There's something really, really wrong with this study.
Re:Cd, Hg, Pb (Score:4, Informative)
I was confused by the summary too, so I looked at the study. These heavy metals used to be used in plastics as stabilizers and colour pigments, but are now typically banned. The study used this fact to demonstrate that the plastics they were finding predate regulations (i.e. are old) and have therefore been building up in these lakes for decades.
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and have therefore been building up in these lakes for decades.
If they pre-date regulations, then they have not been building up for decades. They accumulated decades ago and are not building up through any human activity now.
In other words, since there is already regulation prohibiting them, this is not a current problem that we can enact more legislation to deal with. This is like someone coming across a thalidomide baby that is grown up, hearing about what happened, and yelling that we need to enact legislation to ban thalidomide. Or hearing about someone killing
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Toxin? (Score:2)
A toxin is a poisonous substance created by organic mechanisms. What do micro-plastics and heavy metals have to do with toxins?
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Organic Vs. Toxin (Score:5, Interesting)
True, plastics are organic compounds. However, what defines a toxin is that it is a result of an organic *process* meaning it was produced in a living organism.
Also, I'm not being pedantic - these are scientific terms that have specific meanings. Exchanging the terms poison and toxin is just as dumb as calling toxic substances "chemicals."
Dear Editors, Sorry to be pedantic, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pristine Lakes Are Filled With Toxins
How about, "Lakes Thought To Be Pristine Are Filled With Toxins".
Re:Dear Editors, Sorry to be pedantic, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Really. Lake Geneva - in the middle of Switzerland. Which has been industrialized since industry was industry. Take a quick look at the area with your GIS of choice - it's hardly 'pristine'.
TL;DR - we have some issues with pollution.....
Not even thought to be pristine (Score:4, Insightful)
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True point, but as it turns out orthogonal to the study -- the summary is pretty misleading even for around here. The study [frontiersin.org] was about the presence of plastics in the lakes, and that some of the plastics contain high levels of heavy metals. They didn't find heavy metals in the water itself, and specifically punt on whether it's even possible for the heavy metals to leach from the plastics:
The migratability of hazardous elements from the polymeric matrix is likely to determine their environmental impacts and is recommended as a future area of research.
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On further investigation, the lakes are filled with DHMO.
This known toxin has lead to thousands of deaths, including small children who have accidentally entered the lakes.
All of our precious bodily fluids! (Score:2)
Anyone Remember Prophecy? (Score:2)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079758/
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Of course... (Score:3)
...a fair number of "pristine" lakes and waterways contain surprising amounts of heavy metals and other nasty things because they pick them up from natural sources. They casually mention it, but it's a bigger problem than you'd think - usually parts per billion, but that's enough to trigger EPA attention by itself, for example.
The other thing to watch out for is the complete lack of useful numbers in the article. The paper itself has them, and they are certainly high. In fact, they're so high it makes you wonder if they screwed up their tests. They claim 23,700 ppm of lead in some plastic samples. Almost 24 parts per thousand? More than TWO PERCENT lead in plastic as part of the manufacturing process? Or a sample with almost EIGHT PERCENT chromium? In plastic? Are they sure they weren't pointing the detector at their car instead?
Sorry, not buying it. Someone either screwed up the analysis, wrote "parts per million" instead of "parts per billion," or something even dumber.
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Who did what [Re:Of course...] (Score:1)
Is there a way to tell if toxins such as heavy metals come from man-made pollution, man-made environmental alteration (such as diverting streams), versus purely natural?
It's tricky to regulate and clean if we don't know what's causing it.
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Square metre?
pristine? (Score:2)
Calling Lake Geneva or Lake Garda "pristine" is ridiculous. There are major cities located on those lakes, and they have been used for waste dumping, agricultural runoff, and mining wastes since Roman times.
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No, what you should focus on is that the BBC and other media publish fake news, spread FUD, and lie to you. This is just one particularly egregious example out of many.
Simple Fix (Score:2)
Ban plastic food containers. I grew up with everything in a bottle. Milk bottles, coke bottles, ketchup, mayo, everything was in a glass container. We took the coke bottles back to the store for the deposit and the kids used that to buy candy and more cokes. Plastic is cheaper but not if it's going to poison us.
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This is common in Europe for things like drinks. You can also get milk in glass bottles, but normally you only get it in metal lined paper. Come to think of it, I think I have never seen plastic milk bottles here.
Banning plastic would not be that big of a deal here I think. Most people that I know get their meat from the butcher counter and that is wrapped in waxed paper.
Ice cream would be an issue.
At one point, I guess we will need to bite the bullet though.
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...and the amount of energy and other resources used to ship (heavier, so more-costly to make and distribute), return, and clean/disinfect was much, much higher than just selling it in lightweight plastic in the first place.
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Sure, plastic is cheaper in the short run. But the environment is getting saturated with it. What will another hundred years of this bring us?
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Did they look before? (Score:2)
I am not disputing that the water has pollutants in it. I am just wonder if the same samples were taken years back. Can we rule out the possibility that those lakes have always had such chemicals in them?
Speaking of pristine and toxins ... (Score:2)
I just saw this [google.com] on the Google news feed: Russia just launched a floating nuclear power plant, headed to the Arctic. I can't help but comment on this headline: Russia's 'Nuclear Titanic' Heads West, Raising Fears of 'Chernobyl on Ice' [newsweek.com] to say the "Chernobyl on Ice" sounds like the worst Ice Capades [wikipedia.org] theme ever.
(Apologies to those that take the potential destruction of the environment and Earth seriously.)
All these European countries... (Score:2)
All these European countries with pollution in their lakes, you might think they had a World-wide war with Bombs, and gas, and things detonated or masses of un-used ordinance buried everywhere.
"OMG There's POLLUTION EVERYWHERE"
Well, yea, wars do that. They destroy everything they touch for hundreds of years onward.
Boundary waters canoe area (Score:3)
You can't eat the fish.
Mercury contamination from coal power as far away as china has polluted the lakes to the point many of them aren't safe to eat the fish, or it's a small portion per month.
Please, someone help me think... (Score:2)
What is the opinion that I should form based on my 30 seconds worth of media spoonfeeding today?
A) Pollution is bad, so we should throw money at researchers looking into it, as proven by this unbiased paper in the journal Frontiers of Environmental Science
B) Pollution used to be worse, so efforts in the last 25-50 years to reduce heavy metal use in plastics manufacturing are paying off. We should fund future research to ensure this trend continues,
-or-
C) Lake Geneva, surrounded by active civilization but "p