BBC’s David Attenborough Misleads Viewers About ‘Toxic’ Plastic

Written by John O'Sullivan on . Posted in Current News

Everyone loves that great icon of British environmentalism, Sir David Attenborough. This avuncular mainstay of BBC nature television is today calling for the banning of plastics, because they are “killing our oceans.” But is he giving us a fair and full picture on plastic pollution?

Attenborough’s new BBC TV series, Blue Planet II, wondrously photographed and brimming with genuinely astonishing new insights, is nonetheless, pushing eco propaganda. This new series has seven episodes and predicted to be another global hit for the BBC. The programme has already been sold to more than 30 countries.

Lately, Attenborough has given countless promotional interviews where he focuses on one scene from the series – a mother albatross feeding its chick plastic waste, which kills the chick.

Energized by their stalwart champion, The Guardian newspaper, as verdant green as David, has gone on the offensive on the plastics issue (October 15, 2017). It tells readers:

“A Guardian investigation established that consumers around the world buy a million plastic bottles a minute. Plastic production is set to double in the next 20 years and quadruple by 2050. Around the world, more than 8m tonnes of plastic leaks into the oceans, and a recent study found that billions of people globally are drinking water contaminated by plastic.”

The article goes on, “Attenborough, 91, did not specify what could be done, but cutting back on plastic packaging and plastic bags in supermarkets would be a major step.”

The inference is that nothing can be done. So, just ban plastics, right?

Sounds ominous. But are these champions of the environment being truly scientific? The less biased among us understand that species learn what is safe to eat over time. Sometimes they eat a poisonous thing, and regret it. Here’s a famous picture of a blue jay that ate a poisonous monarch butterfly, and puked.

Our planet is replete with danger and toxicity is all around us. Natural selection ensures adaptable species learn and survive.  The Attenboroughs of this world, who should know better, don’t show viewers that side of the story.

And in the real world there are applied scientists (not those who preach climatism) that tell a more hopeful story. Not all plastics are toxic. Medical doctors and surgeons use plastics for breast implants, limb replacements, etc. The new technology of 3-D printing promises no limits to what plastics can do (see image below).

An increasing number of studies are proving that far from being deadly to the environment, plastics are actually food to many organisms. So much so, it is becoming increasingly possible to recruit those creatures into our technologies and bio-engineer ourselves away from our first generation plastic missteps.

Of course, bioplastics per se (the environmentally degradable kind) have been around for decades — Henry Ford  used corn and soybean oils to make automotive parts for the Model T.  Today, there are two promising new varieties of bioplastic, both made of fermented corn sugar. One type — dubbed polylactic acid, or PLA — is clear in color and costs manufacturers about 20{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} more to use than petroleum-based plastic. The other — called polyhydroxyalkanoate, or PHA — biodegrades more easily but, as it is not widely used, is twice the price of regular plastic. Both bioplastics break down well in the environment and won’t stick around floating in oceans for years.

Don’t Ban It, Eat It

Of course, Attenborough correctly tells viewers that higher life forms are not adapted to eating and digesting our plastic waste. And why should they be when modern plastics have only been around for a century?

Scientists are now exploiting the amazing discovery that there appears to be untold lifeforms on our planet that positively thrive on digesting plastics as food!

A recent big scientific breakthrough some eco-warriors don’t want to address is the arrival of the new, second generation in plastic technology. We are not just talking biodegradability here – plastics are proven to be nutritional to some life forms.

As the respected science publisher, phys.org/news [1] attests:

“A team of Japanese scientists has found a species of bacteria that eats the type of plastic found in most disposable water bottles.”

The discovery, featured in the journal Science, signals a breakthrough for turning more than 50 million tons of plastic produced globally each year, into food for microbes. The kind of plastic we all use so often, found in water bottles, is known as polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. It is also used in polyester clothing, frozen-dinner trays and blister packaging. Japanese researchers from Kyoto’s Institute of Technology and Keio University collected 250 PET-contaminated samples including sediment, soil and wastewater from a plastic bottle recycling site.

After tests the Japanese team showed that a bacteria species, Ideonella sakainesis happily digested PET plastic. The bacteria secretes an enzyme onto the PET to generate an intermediate chemical enabling better digestion.

“That chemical is then taken up by the cell, where another enzyme breaks it down even further, providing the bacteria with carbon and energy to grow,” says Tracy Mincer, who studies plastics in the ocean at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Mincer adds, “This process could be quite common,” he said. “Now that we know what we are looking for, we may see these microbes in many areas around the world.”

Elsewhere, in ‘10 Plastic Eating Organisms’ Erica Teller writes:

“Fortunately, a few organisms that can actually digest plastic have been discovered. Certain worms, fungi, and microbes can transform it into biodegradable matter. These organisms tend to have much slower rates of consumption than, say, a sea-faring albatross that collects plastic in its stomach. Still, scientists hope that by researching the enzymes found within these organisms, they can discover ways to speed up plastic decomposition.”

One key species of plastic muncher is an oyster mushroom. Not only can it safely eat plastic, but we can also safely eat mushrooms fed on plastic. Teller reports:

“Austrian designer Katharina Unger has created a prototype for an in home growth chamber known as a “Fungi Mutarium” for feeding plastic to edible mushrooms…The plastic must first undergo UV treatment to start the process of decay, but after that, a small piece of plastic can be fully consumed by the fungus in a couple of months. The caveat about this design is that so far, it is only suitable for biodegradable plastic. However, researchers hope to adjust growth conditions to enable the fungus to consume non-biodegradable plastic in the future.”

Reporting on an amazing discovery in the Amazon, Teller notes:

“Students discovered a mushroom that can live exclusively on polyurethane hiding in the thick foliage of the Amazonian rainforest. Led by their professor Scott Strobel, the students of Yale University’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry took an annual research trip in 2011 that enabled them to identify this unique trait of the fungus, Pestalotiopsis microspora [pictured below]. Though the fungus had been previously spotted in Buenos Aires and Japan, no one had realized its capabilities. Not only can the fungus survive solely by eating plastic, it does not require oxygen to do so, meaning it can potentially thrive underneath the waste accumulating in landfills.”

The fungus breaks down plastic’s molecular bonds and researchers believe we are fast approaching a new age where we may globally address the plastic waste problem with bioremediation. It has also inspired many scientists to search for similar species.

While in China scientists from the Department of Environmental Science and Technology at the Jun Yangfrom Beihang University have discovered that mealworms, the larvae of the darkling beetle, happily eat polystyrene, used to manufacture Styrofoam (picture below).

The Chinese found little larvae had converted the material to carbon dioxide, worm biomass and biodegradable waste. Nothing the larvae excrete is toxic or harmful and the mealworms were not harmed from the plastic-intense diet.

Then there is the common wax worm, known to ravage the beeswax of honeycombs throughout Eurasia. Yet they also eat and digest plastic shopping bags! This discovery was recently made by a scientist and amateur beekeeper who tried to capture the pests in a plastic bag.

Plastics are manufactured mostly from petrochemicals, refined from the hydrocarbons in crude oil. The infant science of geomicrobiology is showing us that hydrocarbons such as petroleum are long established in nature as a food source. Scientists have carefully studied the bacteria found in the La Brea Tar Pits. Life not only survives, it thrives in this rich hydrocarbon environment. In fact, the Helaeomyia petrolei, the petroleum fly, spends its larval stage within tar pits. In fact, science may have to embrace a paradigm shift that ‘fossil fuels’ are recyclable, renewable and good for our planet.

This intriguing insight was given a huge boost, as revealed in ‘Science Daily,’ (March 14, 2013) with ‘Life Deep Within Oceanic Crust Sustained by Energy from Interior of Earth’ detailing important new findings. We may soon regard those ‘dirty’ hydrocarbons and the plastics they spawn as much more eco-friendly than Attenborough and his ilk would have us believe.

The Future is Bioplastics

Since plastics are made from oil and natural gas, which in turn can be shown to originate from biological organisms, scientists are waking up to the idea plastics from oil and natural gas can be bioplastics. While some scientists resist this classification,  new research points to hydrocarbons having a rightful place in the food chain.

Some anti-oil crusaders will not admit it, but it is proven by making comparison between a molecule derived from natural gas/oil/coal and the same molecule derived from a “bio” source. It was wrongly assumed these two molecules must have different properties and behave differently in the environment. But, in reality, identical chemical structures behave the same. Period.

For instance, a primary feedstock for plastics is ethylene, manufactured in North America using natural gas. (Ethylene derived plastics go into everyday products, such as milk jugs, carpeting and fleece jackets.)

So, does the “bio” ethylene have different properties than the ethylene derived from natural gas? No. Ethylene is ethylene, regardless of the source. Ethylene’s structure (C2H4) is always exactly the same… just as water’s structure (H20) is always the same.

Human Ingenuity to the Rescue

Bioplastics that can more easily be digested by organisms are the future solution to some of the reasonable concerns Attenborough and others highlight. Scientists and industrial manufacturers can ethically pursue bioplastics as a viable solution for  mass disposable items, such as packaging, crockery, cutlery, pots, bowls, bags, trays, fruit and vegetable containers and blister foils, egg cartons, meat packaging, bottling, etc.

In addition, medical science has taken a lead. We now see surgical implants made of PLA (polylactic acid), which dissolve in the body and can save patients a second operation. Compostable mulch films can also be produced from starch polymers and used in agriculture. Looking to the future, next generation bioplastics manufacturing technologies will likely employ the “plant factory” model, using genetically modified crops or genetically modified bacteria to optimise efficiency.

If Attenborough wasn’t so anti-technology, anti-progress he would embrace the fact that homosapiens are proving to be an ingenious and innovative species – and very much a positive part of nature, not separate from it.

Those of us who are pro-science, pro-technology also love our natural world and are just as eager to preserve endangered species and habitats. But we recognise humans have a role, as the most intelligent lifeform, to act as caretakers of our beautiful planet. Science and technology is responding to the call to make eco-friendly plastics. That Sir David studiously avoids this good news and encourages banning a most amazing and versatile material like plastic tends to betray his deep-seated hatred of our species. Unless or until he acknowledges there are solutions less draconian than banning plastics, he will be remembered as yet another old school Malthusian eco-propagandist.

John O’Sullivan is CEO of PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL CIC* legally registered in the UK as a company incorporated for charitable purposes (Company no: 10824140). Please DONATE TODAY to help our mission, defending the traditional scientific method.

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References:

[1] More information: U. T. Bornscheuer. Feeding on plastic, Science (2016). DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf2853 S. Yoshida et al. A bacterium that degrades and assimilates poly(ethylene terephthalate), Science (2016). DOI: 10.1126/science.aad6359  Journal reference: Science

Sources:

 

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