Question: why is rubbish a problem for the environment?

Nicolas Biber answered on 21 Jun 2011:

Hey imaperson, thanks for taking so much interest in my topic!
You are right about your question. I also think it’s really important to know why some research is important. Rubbish – let’s call it plastic, because that’s what I am working on and it has very specific properties – is a problem because it does not behave like materials that occur naturally in the environment. It lasts a lot longer. Plant materials degrade over a short time when they are exposed to the environment. Microorganisms can break them down into small pieces and digest their molecules producing water and carbon dioxide. Animals that eat plant material manage to digest them over a longer or shorter period of time, and they eventually discard them. With plastic this is a very different story. Plastic is made of very large molecules (polymers), that’s why it is so sturdy. These molecules cannot be digested by organisms because of their size. This means that plastic lasts a lot longer in the environment than any other material. The problem with that is, that animals that ingest plastic are not able to break it down, and it may obstruct their stomach. Their stomach fills up without ever emptying, and they don’t feel hungry because of that. But there are no nutrients coming from plastic, so they starve with a full stomach (). The other problem is that we make structures that contain loops out of plastic (those rings that hold drink cans together, or fishing nets). Animals get trapped in these loops, and because the loop is a concept that does not occur naturally, they don’t know how to get out of it. Maybe this bit of plastic will just slow them down, but maybe it will strangle them to death or cut deep into their flesh while they try to escape.
For all these things we don’t exactly know how often they happen, lots of dead animals are never found. We do know that they do happen though, and therefore we have to assume that plastics cause trouble.
There are also new issues that were discovered recently. Chemicals are released by plastics and poison animals that eat the plastic. Animals settle on bits of plastic and travel a long distance to a place they don’t originally belong. There they cause a threat to native species. Plastics break down into tiny pieces and get eaten by small animals. We never know they are in the animals, because they are so small, and other animals that eat the smaller animals are likely to get those plastic bits into their bodies as well.
Let me know if you have more questions.