There's a story in one of the New Scientists I've stolen off Nik about how the world is becoming more toxic to life. That's not what the headline says, that's something about plastic bags. To start off with it talks about how plastic bags are hated by everyone, everyone knows they're bad, but everyone still uses the fucken things. It goes over the bit everyone's heard about with that whale eating them because it hasn't evolved the instincts to distinguish between food and not-food. Yeah, smartest creatures on earth allright.
Then there's a few paragraphs at the end of it all that describe how plastic bags do actually 'break down'. 'Break down' usually has a specific meaning, to do with how bacteria and natural forces turn complex things like trees and human beings into simpler constituent parts. It's an established process that unfortunately doesn't work on plastic bags. Natural forces do 'break' the bags down, but really they're just smaller pieces of plastic. The plastic gets smaller and smaller until you can't see it anymore. The article talks about how this microscopic plastic is a growing part of our general environment. Does anyone else find that as incredibly fucking scary as I do? I didn't read further on from there because I'd finished crapping and wanted to get out of the toilet to get away from the smell, so for all I know it mighta said 'This doesn't actually have any effect on anything'. But I kinda doubt it.