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Plastic does deteriorat or disintegrat, but it only does so into smaller and smaller pieces of its self.
Things like a plastic bottle will break into smaller parts of the bottle and linger around for hundreds or thousands of years but the bottle “shape” will not be recognised in this sense.
Unfortunately plastics like organic materials don’t breakdown and get absorbed the same way back into nature. Our streets would look a lot cleaner IMO if all our litter broke down quicker. Ie less plastic rappers flying around and chip bags.
Fun fact, when we freeze a bottle of water it too slowly deteriorates and disintegrates. That plastic is then transferred into the water contained in the bottle. Doing this multiple times can show the wear and tear overtime.
Even at microscopic levels things like toothbrushes brissle do show signs of wear and tear, as all products do.
My example of toothbrushes is more on how interwoven our plastic dependency is in our day to day lives. We may be ingesting plastics without even realistically knowing where from.
For example in our foods. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/22/health/plastics-food-wellness-scn/index.html#:~:text=Apples and carrots were the,also the least contaminated vegetable.
“People don’t think of plastics as shedding but they do,”
“In almost the same way we’re constantly shedding skin cells, plastics are constantly shedding little bits that break off, such as when you open that plastic container for your store-bought salad or a cheese that’s wrapped in plastic.”
Soon we will all be plastic. Its already in our food and water.
What i really think about is these are only the effects so far from the plastics that have started to break down from when plastics were created (smaller quantities). What happens when the plastics of today start to break down (larger quantities).
Kind of like the effects of oil (air pollution) being felt 30-50 years down the line.