Plastic bottles in the ocean? Well, that was but only the blunt observations of times past. Now there are microplastics, little bits of shredded plastics that have since had their time being whole in the environment, and they are everywhere. In the air, in the rain, in the soil of protected national parks, in the oceans, washing back onto land, washing down to deep sea vents. Wind currents readily blow them from one country to the next and take them all over the world. They’re in the arctic, probably from European blow-over. Yeah, it’s known that they are there, but most of the plastics are heavily degraded, no longer a recognizable manufactured synthetic form. The primary property of plastic, its hardiness, is exactly what makes it such a persistent pollutant. And alas, we don’t know quite what the environmental effect of these are, just that… there’s no putting the plastic back in the bottle.
20200616/https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/plastic-rain-is-the-new-acid-rain/