Scientists are finding the Hudson River has an alarmingly high number of tiny plastic baubles floating around and they’re making their way not just to the ocean, but also up the food chain. WNYC spoke with Sherri Mason, a scientist at SUNY whose research finds the river has 62,000 particles of plastic per square kilometer which is significantly more than the notoriously filthy Lake Erie which caught fire in 1969 (yes, I recently confirmed this actually happened and wasn’t another one of my Dad’s acid befuddled “memories”).
But for real, we all might be tripping pretty soon due to all those gnarly chemicals emitted by plastics that are most likely hanging out in our bodies. Mason told WNYC that her study looked at 18 species of fish and found bitty plastic particles inside every single one of them. As for humans? Mason told WNYC you would “probably” find the same plastic pieces inside us as well. Yeesh.
The plastics come from a variety of sources mostly introduced into the river’s ecosystem byway of people acting like assholes and polluting by throwing their—Styrofoam, cigarette buts, and candy bar wrappers are all obvious examples. But oddly enough some of the plastic bits are thanks to microbeads found in cosmetic products like that apricot scrub whatever-whatever people use in a desperate attempt to cover up the fact they’re actually assholes who don’t understand that pores can’t be made smaller. Assholes.
