Plastics
True or false: it takes 250 years for just one plastic bottle to fully break down into the earth.
False. It takes 450 years on average.
Soil used for planting crops in peri-urban China is saturated with ______, which have toxic effects on the bacteria which help plants survive, and creates other bacteria that further renders some medical treatments ineffective.
Antibiotics.
True or False: there is no remaining marine environment that is free of plastic.
True.
In Feral Atlas, the feral distribution of chemical presence is called _____.
Toxic Environment.
What food product, made by Hormel, could contain trace amounts of antibiotics that are fed to pigs in their early days to increase production?
SPAM.
What percentage of plastic waste has been accumulated in landfills or the natural environment?
~ 97%
True or false? Communities already dealing with issues such as poverty, urban decline, or ongoing struggles for control of ancestral lands, also face the greatest risk of environmental injustice.
True.
Plastic makes up __% of all marine debris.
80%
300 tons of radioactive _____ were illegally dumped along a river in Shiga, Japan.
What is the reason over 1/3 of Albatross chicks on Midway Island perish before reaching adulthood?
Plastic is being fed to them unknowingly by their parents.
In the United States, how many plastic bottles are thrown away every hour?
2.5 million. That's about 42,000 per minute, or 695 per second.
What crop is affected by the airborne fungal disease called black Sigatoka, or black leaf streak, causing tons of chemical cocktails to be sprayed on them on a semiweekly basis?
Bananas.
1.6 million square kilometers (for perspective, that is twice the size of Texas!)
While the rise of CC398 and other forms of antimicrobial resistance traced to food production have led to new regulatory measures, what is the loophole that the food industry has found?
They have shifted to antibiotics that have not (yet) been banned.
____ are a class of monomers that leach from plastic bags, and are present in nearly all humans. They have been found in amniotic fluid and breast milk, are present in soils, and can be absorbed by edible plants.
Phthalates.
The average plastic bag is made from a flexible and durable plastic film called ______?
Polyethylene.
What is the biggest problem with polystyrene foam, according to Evelyn Reilly?
Their longevity.
Which body of water has one of the largest marine dead zones and is one of the most polluted seas in the world?
The Baltic Sea.
Despite studies that correlate chronic exposure with increased levels of neurotoxic and thyroid-impairing metabolites in locals living near banana plantations, why are chemical cocktails allowed to be continually sprayed?
The use of mixed fungicidal cocktails makes it virtually impossible to draw any DIRECT links between exposure to a particular chemical and medical symptoms emerging in communities.
The average person eats __,____ microplastics each year
70,000.
Why are hydrophobic organic carbon molecules, or HOCs, in plastic so dangerous to humans and the environment?
They are long-lived highly carcinogenic pollutants that are not easily flushed by the body, and when they adhere to fat in an organism, they can bio-accumulate through the food chain due to predation, but also through the fatty milk mammals feed to their offspring.
What subspecies outcompetes others under polluted conditions, survives in saline or brackish water, and recovers after adverse events, like oil spills or hurricanes?
Phragmites australis ssp. australis, or the European Common Reed.
By what year does the UN Oceans Conference estimate that the oceans may contain more weight in plastics than fish?
2050.
A recent evaluation of 30 of the largest pharmaceutical companies found that eight companies set discharge _____ for antibiotics, but none disclose actual discharge _____.
Resistance to what antibiotic (used as a last resort treatment in certain forms of pneumonia) has increased as its usage in the weaning of piglets has doubled?
Colistin.