Plastics are man-made materials that have made living much easier for human beings. The ease with which things can be built out of plastic makes them very useful. Unfortunately the structure of the molecules is such that no plastic is easily degraded. In fact it can take millions of ears for a single plastic bag to be completely broken down into elements that can be reabsorbed by the earth.

This is why you can find plastics choking the planet as they lie landfills. It is the single biggest threat to the environment from human activities. The problem is worse because people are still using plastic indiscriminately all over the world. In a science research project by the University of Plymouth it was found that a  single plastic grocery bag could be shredded by marine organisms into 1.75 million microscopic fragments.

This does not mean that the amphipod Orchestia gammarellus, disintegrated the plastic. No. It means that microscopic bits of plastic that coat their feces are now floating in the sea. This is a way that marine wildlife actually is contributing to the spread of micro-plastics. The physical and chemical breakdown of plastics takes so long that by the time we actually understand what harm this layer of plastic in the sea is doing, we may not have any clue how to stop it.