Environmental Effects Of Plastic On The Environment Essay

The accumulation of plastics within ecosystem causes various adverse effects on wildlife, animals, plants etc. Plastic wastes are categorized into micro-plastics, meso-plastics and macro-plastics depending upon their internal structure, density, size etc. The increase in usage of plastics is correlated with its price and durability which lends to high level of debris in ecosystem. Plastics pose a threat to terrestrial as well as marine ecosystem no matter how often they are disposed. They are persistent and it is known that the parts of them that degrade threaten ecosystem with chemical residue and consumable fragments. As plastics are disposed of they are ultimately deposited in terrestrial and marine environments, while not being completely degraded. Damage is done by their leftover fragments, as they interfere with and jeopardize marine life. The chemicals released by plastics

The control group was not exposed to LDPE, and the two experimental groups were exposed to either untreated, pre-production “virgin” plastic, or plastic previously deposited in the urban bay area. The urban bay plastic is the group having absorbed the marine pollutants present before the plastics were introduced, and expected to be the most hazardous in the experiment. This group of plastics was also considered the most realistic imitation of how marine wildlife populations would encounter plastic in the wild.
The groups were tested in these conditions for two months, with the fish exposed to the marine polluted plastics accumulating the most PTBs. Chemicals such as PAH, PCBs, and PBDEs were recorded in averages between test groups, in which “fish from the marine-plastic treatment were 2.4 ×, 1.2 × and 1.8 × greater respectively than in fish from the negative control treatment,” (Rochman et al.,