The Pollution Detectives

Imagine an evening (pre-COVID-19) where you take your family out to dinner and all order a family-sized meal of seafood gumbo full of clams, shrimp, and other delights. Yous. You may get more than you bargained for. Turns out that when someone throws a plastic bottle into the ocean, it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces until it becomes invisible to humans – but it does not go away.^[1]

Most of the plastic made in the world winds up in water where it breaks down into invisible but long-lasting pieces which gets eaten by wildlife. The bodies of fish, clams, crabs, and other water critters consume these microplastics contain plastic they ate. Bigger fish eat the little fish, you eat the big fish and when you eat the seafood, you also get a dose of plastic.^[2]

No charge will appear on your bill – but you will pay for it in your healthcare bills.

If you ordered hot tea with dinner, things could get worse because a surprising number of brands of tea have plastic in the teabag dissolving astounding amounts of invisible microplastics into the hot tea water which wind up in your tummy.^[3],[4]

After almost 3 years of work, during which time we helped school leadership, teachers and students in around 40 schools “make invisible pollution visible” we are hitting the pause button because all schools are closed.

Instead, the 6,000 members of this mailing list will begin receiving emails from The Optimistic Futurist – same author, different mission, different focus. We will re-start The Pollution Detectives once schools have restarted, and school administration has enough bandwidth to engage with us on that topic again.

I am starting two new projects I’d like for you to know about.

All eyes are watching for the impact of one invisible threat to America.

There are actually two threats coming.

Some food will become hard to get.

America imports one-third of its fresh vegetables and more than half of its fresh fruit from countries that already have the coronavirus epidemic.
Importing food is not limited to acquiring food from other countries – the majority of America’s heavily populated east coast states import fruits and veggies from west coast states. [1] Continue Reading