[HN Gopher] Nurdle Patrol
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Nurdle Patrol
Author : amar-laksh
Score : 123 points
Date : 2024-10-11 06:00 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nurdlepatrol.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nurdlepatrol.org)
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Much nicer to run into a Nurdle patrol than a Nurgle patrol (I
| know this is not the kind of comment HN is for, but I couldn't
| help it).
| flir wrote:
| The nurdles mostly come from the manufacture of Nurgles.
| wyldfire wrote:
| What's worse, a patrol of Nurgles or a patrol of Nargles?
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Imagine a beach completely consisting of nurdles. Imagine an
| ecosystem of bacteria, microorganisms, fish and other seafood
| creatures adapted to living on it. I feel like as humanity we
| could totally reach a point where evolution to that kind of
| ecosystem becomes the only choice. Same for our immune, digestive
| and lymph system. We could end up at a point where most of life
| NEEDS microplastic to survive! Then we can finally stop caring
| about micro plastics and start loving them instead.
|
| I for one love nurdles!
| mnazzaro wrote:
| This is such a strange spot for a glass half full take lol. "At
| least it's warm in hell!"
| prepend wrote:
| I think the good news is that we can adapt to enjoy how warm
| it is in hell. So it's bad news that we're going to hell,
| good news is that we'll eventually like it.
| dTal wrote:
| "Evolve" here is a neat word for "countless trillions of
| creatures die preventable deaths or otherwise fail to reproduce
| over geological time". If your terminal goal is to "finally
| stop caring about micro plastics" rather than "protect Earth's
| existing ecosystem", why wait? Just nuke the planet to glass.
| Microplastic worry over.
|
| (A similarly nihilist viewpoint comes from the people who
| pontificate that "the planet will be fine, it's humans who will
| suffer". Sure, if by "the planet" you mean "a lump of mass
| orbiting the sun". Low bar for your ethical framework.)
| flir wrote:
| > Low bar for your ethical framework
|
| Or highest. Puts overall species diversity ahead of the
| future of a single species (us).
| dTal wrote:
| That would be a defensible (if unpopular) position - see
| VHEMT - but usually the people saying this are arguing
| against the ethical consequentiality of anthropogenic
| ecosystem damage ("the planet will be fine") which is very
| harmful to biodiversity. Nobody's really offered a sane
| ethical framework in which it's a _good_ thing for humans
| to wreck the planet, killing themselves and most everything
| else in the process.
| oasisbob wrote:
| There's a broad read on the definition of "social Darwinism"
| I like to remember.
|
| Natural selection is a scientific concept and process. When
| people hijack these concepts for social or political aims,
| it's no longer scientific, and it's something else entirely.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| The trouble with that notion is this: imagining that a plastic-
| based ecosystem arises (horrifying thought!) it means that
| there are life-forms capable of deriving energy from plastics,
| breaking them down. That makes plastics useless to us humans,
| because any time we try to use plastics for all the things we
| currently do with them, those life-forms are going to come
| along and attack, break down the stuff we deem "useful
| plastics"; the critters will make no distinction between
| nurdles lost on the beach and the plastics holding your
| car/house/clothes/aeroplane together. i.e. It's Game Over for
| plastics use.
| cglace wrote:
| That's not necessarily true. There is an ecosystem for
| breaking down wood, and my house is framed in wood.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Termites are a good example.
|
| They are a natural way to break down wood. And they can eat
| your house. Thus we have come up with ways to mitigate
| them. Now there is an entire industry around preventing
| termites, fixing termite damage, etc..
|
| So, the problem is, we find some microbe that eats
| plastics. Boom, now we have a new problem, we need an
| entire industry to prevent them from eating the plastics we
| don't want them to eat. Think of traveling with your
| laptop, 'oops, got a little bit of plastic eating microbe,
| guess i'm buying a new laptop'
| amelius wrote:
| Fast forward to that future, someone says: imagine a world
| where we don't have to live in our own waste ... how much more
| efficient would our biology be?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I mean sure, with issues like plastics, global warming, ozone
| layer hole, melted polar caps, extreme weather events, bug
| collapse, etc etc etc, life will find a way. It's not a "final"
| extinction event per se, nor one as catastrophic as the meteor
| strike from back when.
|
| But we are living in a mass extinction event. Billions of crabs
| died. Bug population has collapsed. Biodiversity has nosedived.
|
| Humanity hasn't suffered yet in terms of total population, but
| that's because we're able to adapt our environment accordingly.
| That said, we will see famines and scarcities in our lifetime.
| Hell, we already do, but it mainly presents itself in day to
| day life (in "the west") as some products going out of shelves
| (the UK having supply problems due to brexit / long border
| queues) or prices spiking (e.g. produce from Ukraine). But
| worldwide we will see more of that.
|
| As for (micro)plastics, IIRC we've yet to determine the full
| impact. But we know these nurdles break down into microplastics
| over time due to UV exposure and the like, but they don't
| disappear completely and find their way into everything. We'll
| only know the full impact looking back in a few hundred years.
| mrspuratic wrote:
| Harvest in England the second worst on record because of wet
| weather https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/10/h
| arvest-...
| jdietrich wrote:
| In 2023, 221 shipping containers were lost at sea, out of a total
| of 250 million shipped. That's a loss rate of 0.000088%.
|
| Plastic pellets are a visible pollutant on beaches. I have not
| seen any evidence that they're a particularly harmful pollutant.
| A single 20 tonne containerload of plastic pellets can leave a
| visible residue on hundreds or thousands of beaches, but the 15
| tonnes of CO2 emitted by the average American _every year_ is
| entirely invisible.
|
| https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ff6c5336c885a268148b...
| protonbob wrote:
| They are particularly harmful because they end up in your food
| and cause damage to your organs.
| jdietrich wrote:
| A plastic pellet is typically 3-5mm in diameter. I think I'd
| notice that in my food. Even if I did enjoy swallowing fish
| guts whole, a plastic pellet is just going to pass straight
| through my digestive system.
|
| Additives can leach out of plastics and enter the food chain,
| but pellets lost at sea are a completely insignificant factor
| because the total volume of waste produced by this route is
| so small. The majority of marine plastic is either post-
| consumer waste dumped in rivers in developing countries, or
| fishing gear that is lost at sea. If you're really worried
| about this, then you really need to take it up with the
| government of the Philippines and the global fishing
| industry.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| "I think I'd notice that in my food"
|
| That isn't how food processing works.
|
| There are many steps of grinding, pulverizing, mixing, re-
| forming, de-forming, extruding, heating, cooling.
|
| The 3mm plastic pellet becomes a thousand smaller bits.
|
| Also, you'd be surprised how many bugs are in your creamed
| corn, and you don't notice those either.
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| >> a plastic pellet is just going to pass straight through
| my digestive system
|
| Through the mechanical grinding action of weather and tides
| (the same mechanisms that make sand out of rock and coral),
| these chunks can become much much smaller, small enough to
| cross the intestine into the bloodstream and small enough
| to cross the blood brain barrier or pass up your nose,
| lodging in your brain.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10141840/
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticl
| e...
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| It's a pity the parent commenter led with that point.
| Their second point, that the overwhelming majority of
| ocean plastic pollution comes from those two sources,
| remains valid (albeit I'm not sure if it's actually true
| but it certainly seems feasible).
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| To their second point, blaming the Philippines for
| dumping our 'recycling' in the ocean is a little bit like
| blaming African countries for burning our e-waste. We
| can't pretend you can generate pounds of single-use
| plastic waste per person and have the problem disappear
| when you put it in a blue bin. Recycling is a lie
| invented by the packaging industry, and the reality is
| that we export the problem in bulk to the developing
| world, who inconveniently happen to share a planet,
| physics, and economy with us. We're the ones buying the
| plastic to begin with, and it's only right it washes
| onshore back here so we can't pretend it doesn't exist
| when it hits the bin.
| jdietrich wrote:
| The Philippines accounts for 0.16% of the world's waste
| plastic imports. Switzerland imports 10x more plastic
| waste and the Netherlands imports 100x more. Your
| explanation is very wrong.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-
| impor...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Well, probably not the nurdles themselves unless they're
| scooped from the oceans and used as a food additive, but
| they'll break down into microplastics and enter the food
| chain that way. The damage of said microplastics is still
| being researched, at the moment (I believe) it's still fairly
| vague, not unlike asbestos or smoking. IIRC they have been
| found to mimic hormones though.
| ptk wrote:
| What do you find vague about the studied effects of smoking
| or asbestos? Or did you mistype and mean "unlike" instead
| of "not unlike"?
| davidjhall wrote:
| I think they meant "not unlike" as - we didn't think
| asbestos was bad, then we thought it _could_ be bad, then
| yes, after studies, this is really awful. Similarly, we
| might find that ingested plastics cause more damage than
| we realize now.
| jdietrich wrote:
| There was never any doubt about asbestos, we just didn't
| care.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Kershaw
| zombot wrote:
| Wow, Texas seems to be one of the worst offenders here. How do
| you collect close to 1000 nurdles in 10 minutes? Do people wade
| through them on the beach?
| api wrote:
| That doesn't necessarily mean they are all coming from Texas
| though does it? It could mean ocean currents are carrying them
| there. I think the idea here is we have maps of ocean currents
| and can trace them to their likely source.
| whythre wrote:
| That's a good point. Texas beaches are the cul-de-sac of the
| Gulf Coast. Makes sense that trash would collect there.
| amatix wrote:
| There's a similar UK initiative which has spread to a number of
| other countries.
|
| Nurdles are everywhere... https://www.nurdlehunt.org.uk/nurdle-
| finds.html
| amar-laksh wrote:
| Oh thanks! I was looking for something similar when I posted.
| yashasolutions wrote:
| Here are the real nurds
| rc_kas wrote:
| In sprite of all the Trumps and Putins and Netanyahu's out there.
| This project is just that reminder : There really are good humans
| in the world.
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(page generated 2024-10-11 23:01 UTC)