A P R I L 2 0 1 3 • 25 ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS........................................................................
HEMLOCK NEWS
Plastic Showing Up in Lakes Presents risk to drinking water
“(Researchers) also know it intertwines with their intestines and affects how nutrients are absorbed into the bloodstream.” Eriksen said that microplastics can look like food, such as fish eggs, to the fish and could be eaten by organisms that are, in turn, eaten by other animals, causing the plastic to move up the food chain. There are ways to diminish plastic pollution. In addition to recycling and not dumping trash, Mason and Eriksen also encourage people who use facial scrubs to choose products that don’t use microplastic beads. “One jar of facial scrub has conservatively 5,000 beads of microplastic,” Eriksen said.
Source: www.TheNews-Messenger.com; Dec 12, 2012; by mkhorn@gannett.com
Contributed Photo
This sample, taken from one of the Great Lakes, shows some of the plastics found there.
Reference: www.thenewsmessenger.com /a r t icle/20121212/ NEWS01/312120034/Study-finds-highlevels-plastic-Lake-Erie?gcheck=1
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know it,” she said. One sample taken in that area showed 600,000 pieces per square kilometer. “That’s more than twice any sample that I’ve taken on the ocean,” said Marcus Eriksen, executive director of the 5 Gyres Institute. Because this is the first study done on plastic pollution alone in the lakes, scientists can’t say for sure how fish and other animals are affected, but Mason said that plastic pollution on the ocean provides some possibilities. She pointed to the stomachs of sea turtles and the albatross, a bird. “Any time you find one of these animals dead, its gut was literally filled with plastic,” she said.
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Kristina Smith Horn discusses the findings of a group of researchers who have discovered more plastic in water taken from Lake Erie than from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The garbage patch is a well-publicized location in the Pacific Ocean—the size of Texas—that is filled with degrading plastics: bags, pieces of bottle and tiny bits called microplastics. In the three Great Lakes the researchers sampled—Erie, Huron and Superior—there were plenty of microplastics, which measure less than 1 millimeter in diameter. According to Sherri Mason, associate professor of chemistry at the State University of New York Fredonia, they can come from facial scrubs that include exfoliating beads, some of which are made of plastic. Mason partnered with the 5 Gyres Institute to do the study, which is expected to be published next year. Microplastics don’t break down. Instead, they go down the drain after you wash, through the wastewater treatment process unchanged and out to the lake. According to Mason, these are worse than the larger pieces of plastic netted during the study. “They could be sitting in the glass of water you have in front of you, and you could drink them and not
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