Hand, Eric. “Trillions of Plastic Pieces May Be Trapped in Arctic Ice.” sciencemag.org. AAAS, 22 May 2014. Web. 23 May 2014. http://news.sciencemag.org/earth/2014/05/trillions-plastic-pieces-may-be-trapped-arctic-ice
This article reveals that small pieces of plastic have been found frozen in ice in the arctic. Rachel Obbard, a materials scientist from Dartmouth College, found that there’s been more plastic found frozen in the Arctic than some areas of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch located halfway between Hawaii and California. According to the industry association Plastics Europe, roughly “288 million tonnes” of industrial plastic has been produced within the last half-century, yet “ecologists have not been able to account for the final disposition of much of it” (Hand). The hazards of these plastics are still unknown. I think this article speaks to how grand and wide-reaching human’s impact on the environment has become. To me, there’s an overwhelming sense of diffusion of responsibility, or the sense that our environmental impact is confined to our local spaces, which is untrue. This article highlights just how far our environmental destruction is and how it impacts the environment on levels society isn’t fully aware of. The fact that humans don’t know where all of the plastic being produced ends up also shows the irresponsibility of a large, global consumer culture. The fact that these plastics haven’t been accounted for up until this point also raises the question of how long have they been there, and what kinds of animals have been exposed to them (and how much has been consumed by the surrounding ecosystem). There’s also the potential problem of the ice melting and the plastic being exposed to more species within the ocean, which would probably make its way down the ecological chain and into society’s economy (and only then will it become a problem, when humans are affected and not their environment).
