Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

Therefore, even though polystyrene represents a small percentage of global plastic, its long life in nature was considered an environmental threat, one easily visualized as chunks of Styrofoam bobbing on waves and beaches. In a lab, the scientists exposed five samples of polystyrene in seawater to light from a special lamp matching the sun’s rays. What they discovered was that sunlight breaks down the polystyrene into organic carbon and carbon dioxide. The organic carbon dissolves in seawater, and the carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere. At the end of the process, the plastic is gone. “We used multiple methods, and they all pointed to the same outcome,” said one of the researchers. The same molecular property that made polystyrene molecules hard for microbes to eat was just the feature that made them vulnerable to having their bonds broken by sunlight. The scientists said their study was the first to provide direct proof of how, and how fast, sunlight breaks down polystyrene first into microplastics, then into individual molecules, and then into its elemental building blocks.46