#toxic plastic

[alunah-lalunah]

Just A Slogan

If calling life a dream reduces tension for some people, does that indicate insight about reality or simply a coping mechanism of the mind?

If life were truly a dream in the same sense as night dreams, you should be able to wake up from it into another state. But that does not happen because the comparison is inaccurate. Night dreams are internally generated simulations with weak external constraints. Waking life is a biological system interacting with an environment governed by physical laws. The organism cannot simply exit that system because the brain generating the experience is itself part of the system. There is no higher layer waiting above it in the way the metaphor suggests.

In other words, the slogan collapses two different ideas into one. Yes, experience is constructed. No, that does not mean it is optional or easily replaced with a better version. The brain is not a viewer inside a dream that can press an exit button; it is the mechanism producing the model while being embedded in the world it models.

When people say “life is a dream,” what they usually mean is that the mind exaggerates importance, builds narratives, and reacts as if everything were ultimate. Understanding this can reduce unnecessary mental noise. But it does not mean reality becomes flexible or that suffering disappears on command.

So the reason you cannot wake into a better dream is simple and unsentimental, the organism is not inside a detachable illusion. It is a biological process running a model because that is the only way it can operate.The slogan sounds profound, but most of the time it is just philosophy compressed until it loses its structure. Clarity tends to appear when metaphors are dismantled.

[letsreducereuserecyclething-blog]

We as humans are at the top of the food chain. To ensure out health, we need to ensure that our food sources remain healthy as well. In an article titled New Link in the Food Chain? Marine Plastic Pollution and Seafood Safety Nate Seltenrich writes, in the article linked below, that microplastic in our ocean are thought to be food by microorganisms. When these organisms eat the plastic, it can enter the food chain at a low level, in move up to our own diner plates. Enforcing recycling laws can help keep that plastic out of the ocean and in turn, out of our own bodies.

https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/123-a34/

[gardenup]

Hong Kong’s Plastic-Pellet Problem: Its Beaches Are Littered with Millions of Them

NOTE: I know the bio plastic industry well. People are always asking about biodegradability of plastic products, and arguing that even biodegradable plastic is toxic at some point along the production line. Well, look here: you have millions of plastic pellets which will NEVER biodegrade. These are the small salt-like granules of raw plastic resin that are shipped all over the world to plants that expand them into beads or melt them into objects. This stuff is impossible to keep contained in a factory or lab setting, let alone on a beach. Terrible. 

Now, if this plastic was biodegradable you'd already begin to see degradation in the sun and water. 

Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets have peppered the beaches of Hong Kong following a powerful typhoon, and now a major cleanup effort focuses on the minutiae.

Typhoon Vicente — the worst to hit the city in 13 years — rocked boats last month, tipping six cargo containers into the sea south of Hong Kong. Inside those containers were millions upon millions of nurdles, tiny plastic pellets used in factories to create other plastic products. And now the raindrop-size plastic bits have started to wash ashore. Despite what it looks like, no, it isn’t snow.

While an obvious eyesore and trash hazard for the beaches, there’s a bigger concern over having millions of the tiny, translucent pellets bobbing around: the threat to marine life. Environmentalists now worry that the roughly 150 tons of pellets spilled will prove toxic by absorbing pollutants in the water, which could infect marine life, especially as fish start to ingest them. And if dangerous to fish, they could also be dangerous to the humans eating such fish. As the Associated Press reported, there are also concerns that the Chinese white dolphin, already a rare species, could be further threatened by the nurdles.

Hundreds of volunteers have jumped on the cleanup effort, working through the weekend in residential communities on Lamma Island, just south of the city center, and Discovery Bay, on Lantau Island, after finding their waterfront areas inundated with the pellets. But cleaning them up proved a daunting, tedious task as volunteers used brushes and dustpans to slowly pick up the debris, making only slight headway into the mess. “It’s a bit overwhelming. It seems like we can’t get rid of them even though there are hundreds of people here,” Mathis Antony, a volunteer on Lamma Island, told the Associated Press. “It looks like it’s going to take a lot more to clean it up.”

The Hong Kong government plans to send in paid reinforcements, hiring workers to spend what could be months cleaning up the mess on 10 different beaches across the territory. Estimates say that about 150 tons of the pellets spilled, and 50 tons were picked up still in the bags marked with the manufacturer. With about 21 tons washed ashore, it’s little surprise that such tiny particles are causing a massive headache for cleanup crews.