Peak Oil News and Message Boards

arkwriter wrote:Evening all,
Havn't been on for a while but noticed that the problem of the expanding plastic waste sloshing around in the Pacific has again been raised; my questions are:
Firstly, Is ANYONE trying to do anything about it?

Keith_McClary wrote:This is incredibly cool:
A new project posted online by a pair of Google computer scientists, called simply Wind Map

10 Facts on Pollution and Impact on Our World:

Around 40% of the lakes in America are too polluted for aquatic life, swimming or fishing.

Although children make up 10% of the world’s population, over 40% of the global burden of disease falls on them. Environmental factors contribute to more than 3 million children under age five dying every year.

Pollution kills over 1 million seabirds and 100 million mammals annually.

Recycling and composting alone have avoided 85 million tons of waste to be dumped in 2010.

Currently in the world there are over 500 million cars, by 2030 the number will rise to 1 billion, therefore doubling pollution levels.

High traffic roads possess more concentrated levels of air pollution therefore people living close to these areas have an increased risk of heart disease, cancer, asthma and bronchitis

Inhaling Air pollution takes away at least 1-2 years of a typical human life.
25% deaths in India and 65% of the deaths in Asia are resultant of air pollution.

Over 80 billion aluminium cans are used every year around the world. If you throw away aluminium cans, they can stay in that can form for up to 500 years or more.

People aren’t recycling as much as they should, as a result the rainforests are be cut down by approximately 100 acres per minute

Scientists have found that a caterpillar commercially bred for fishing bait has the ability to biodegrade polyethylene: one of the toughest and most used plastics, frequently found clogging up landfill sites in the form of plastic shopping bags.

The wax worm, the larvae of the common insect Galleria mellonella, or greater wax moth, is a scourge of beehives across Europe. In the wild, the worms live as parasites in bee colonies. Wax moths lay their eggs inside hives where the worms hatch and grow on beeswax - hence the name.

A chance discovery occurred when one of the scientific team, Federica Bertocchini, an amateur beekeeper, was removing the parasitic pests from the honeycombs in her hives. The worms were temporarily kept in a typical plastic shopping bag that became riddled with holes.

Around a hundred wax worms were exposed to a plastic bag from a UK supermarket. Holes started to appear after just 40 minutes, and after 12 hours there was a reduction in plastic mass of 92mg from the bag.

Scientists say that the degradation rate is extremely fast compared to other recent discoveries, such as bacteria reported last year to biodegrade some plastics at a rate of just 0.13mg a day.

"If a single enzyme is responsible for this chemical process, its reproduction on a large scale using biotechnological methods should be achievable," said Cambridge's Paolo Bombelli, first author of the study published today in the journal Current Biology.

Colleagues point out that the global plastics industry churns out about 140 million tons of polyethylene every year. Much of it goes into the bags, bottles and boxes that many of us use regularly—and then throw out. Scientists have been trying to figure out for years how to make this plastic trash go away.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2014-12-gut-bacte ... c.html#jCp

Environmental pollution — from filthy air to contaminated water — is killing more people every year than all war and violence in the world. More than smoking, hunger or natural disasters. More than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined.
Key points:

One out of every six premature deaths in 2015, about 9 million, was due to toxic exposure
The financial cost of pollution-related death, sickness and welfare is $5.9 trillion annually
The worst affected countries are in Asia and Africa, with India topping the list

One out of every six premature deaths in the world in 2015 — about 9 million — could be attributed to disease from toxic exposure, according to a major study released on Thursday in The Lancet medical journal.

The financial cost from pollution-related death, sickness and welfare is equally massive, the report said, costing some $5.9 trillion in annual losses, or about 6.2 per cent of the global economy.

“There’s been a lot of study of pollution, but it’s never received the resources or level of attention as, say, AIDS or climate change,” Dean of global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and the lead author on the report, Philip Landrigan said.

The report marks the first attempt to pull together data on disease and death caused by all forms of pollution combined.

“Pollution is a massive problem that people aren’t seeing because they’re looking at scattered bits of it,” Mr Landrigan said