The Holidays are my favorite time of year to think about....plastic????

The other day my son invited me to lunch. This is a strange occurrence since he is even more broke than I am. "Mom, did you know your toothpaste has polymers?" Pretty random way to start the conversation, but like I said, the lunch itself was an oddity. "No, I was unaware of that. Are you trying to tell me you won't be around for the family holiday extravaganza." He had to be going somewhere with this. "No, it's that book you gave me."
One of the great unintended side-effects of a Goddard education is it can attack the whole family like a virus in winter. True, I had given my son Pete a copy of The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman. I'd been hoping to read it some day...like maybe after graduation. In the mean time it was sitting on my desk when he dropped in one day looking for something to read. That was months ago.
He was referring to the chapter entitled "Polymers Are Forever." The title may sound fairly James Bond, but the plot is a whole lot less entertaining. It seems scientists have been studying more than the obvious trash in the ocean. Beyond all the lovely things we know are there that are plastic and last longer than anybody can yet predict, there are microscopic polymers now ubiquitous in the biosystem, i.e. like the stuff we spit out after we brush our teeth that ends up in the sewers that end up in the waste water that ends up in the rivers that end up in the ocean. All of this ends up getting swallowed by little mircroscopic animals that are eaten by bigger ones and so on. Nobody konws exactly what the outcome is going to be. But imagine this. If that giant trash pile that is floating free in the Pacific (i.e. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch) has only taken fifty years to be created and may last as long as 100,000 years., what is the impact of continued and cumulative amount of hydrocarbon effluent? And it is in everything. Weisman also points out that plastic in water takes a whole lot longer to degrade (even from big to little peices) when in water so nobody really knows if it ever does. Further, he points out that a lot of the plastic bags we think are biodegradeable actually have some polymer content. He says biodegradable bags left in the ocean have been fished out months later and still are as strong as the day they first held groceries.
By the time my son finished giving me the upshot of just one single chapter in this book, I was too depressed to eat. "But mom, I'm buying you lunch," he protested. I hope this wasn't part of his plan.
In the mean time I've been procrastinating on my homework sewing reusable gift bags. It beats writing anotations, at least until this weekend when I plan to make up for lost time. And I swear, I'm using all natural fiber. Nothing to put in them yet, but I'm thinking more copies of Weisman's book might not be a bad idea.