The Biggest Problem Is Actually Quite Small #PlanetOrPlastic

The Biggest Problem is Actually Quite Small

"Oh man, Andy, take a look at these numbers!" – for some reason I felt the need to tell this to my German Shepherd Andy, who was laying beside me . "These predictions are way off the charts!"

I was up all night looking at new calculations I had been working on, and according to my numbers, Earth was headed for a sure-fire disaster within just a few decades.

While all the media was focused on the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch", I had spent the past few years working on a project dedicated exclusively to microplastics. I suspected that while gyres were churning around the seas on the surface, a whole other set of sub-surface environmental factors such as temperature, ocean floor topography, salinity, pressure and more were affecting particle movement along the bottom of the sea. It meant that one day in the near future someone would somehow come across a great underwater patch of microplastics – growing exponentially by the minute.

"Andy, check this out. While everybody in the world seems to be focused on this problem that is so big – it seems the problem is actually the opposite – it's really quite small. Microplastics!" There are now over 8 million metric tons of plastic being dumped into the ocean every year! Now, since all the plastic in the ocean that floats or sinks is steadily breaking down further and further due to UV light and mechanical actions of waves, these particles will all eventually become microplastics. Any given plastic water bottle could potentially be converted into hundreds, maybe thousands of individual particles over time. And, most of them would be increasing in density as they bonded to microalgae, or larger organic compounds – or even toxins such as heavy metals and other petroleum byproducts. Like balloons after a party, they would eventually all sink to the floor – and could end up anywhere. In this case, the "plastic party" was never-ending and the "floor" was the size of the entire ocean – which occupies over 70% of the Earth's surface area.

That means that for the billions to trillions of pieces of plastic trash in the ocean today, there will be many many multiples of that ending up spread throughout the ocean in a fairly short period of time. Not to mention, every time these particles break down, their surface area increases and they become more reactive.

"Andy, we have no choice but to tell someone about this right away!" I exclaimed. "Fortunately, I've been designing an autonomous underwater vehicle which can help with this very thing – a low cost system that can easily be replicated, scaled and used throughout the ocean to not only find microplastics, but spatially map where they are, and even predict where others might be located." I had planned to use this idea in a science fair, but I felt I had no choice but to give the technology to the authorities, for the benefit of the world at large.