Ex Uno, Plures

When I stroll the sands at Bay View, I pick up bits of trash one at a time. When I'm home in the evening, cleaning & sorting & counting my finds, I tally them one at a time. And then I create my collection reports and my list, touting all the individual pieces of garbage I've found.

But all flotsam is not alike. Compare this...

1 piece of flotsam

...to this:

1 piece of flotsam

Of course that tiny piece of plastic didn't start off so tiny. Whatever it was, it was once much bigger. Maybe as big as the balloon above. And if I had found it intact, on the beach, I would have registered it as "1 piece of flotsam." The question is: How many pieces has it broken down into? Where did they go? The answer is: Who knows?

An analogy. Here's your basic styrofoam packing peanut.

1 piece of simulated flotsam

Here's what it looks like after being rolled around in my hand for a few seconds, to simulate being ground up by the surf.

Far more than 1 piece of simulated flotsam

Suddenly, it's gone from one piece of garbage to hundreds of little floatable flecks, like these I found at the beach one week. Ex uno, plures.

Here's another analogy. This is a lobster trap.

img "Catching lobster.jpg"
from Wikimedia Commons

These are bits of vinyl trap coatings washed ashore last week:

Lots of bits

Traps get scraped & dinged, the steel exposed. Many traps (maybe hundreds of thousands) are lost at sea. The exposed steel rusts slowly on the sea floor. Rust expands, bursting the vinyl coatings. In time, the steel will all rust away to dust. But the vinyl bits will live on. One lobster trap can generate thousands of them as it slowly disintegrates under the waves. Ex uno, plures.

So what? What's the point of this ramble? It's to make a distiction that's often missed, between big flotsam that disturbs our eyes, and tiny flotsam that disturbs entire ecosystems. And to connect the former to the latter.

An intact trap, or balloon -- we can see that, it's obvious. We can clean it up. 1 piece of flotsam.

The small stuff is far more insidious. Tiny flecks elude us. They get into the guts of small-bodied (read: small-brained) fish & filter feeders. Bigger creatures eat them -- and their plastic-laden friends. Now the bigger creatures have a bigger dose of plastic chemicals in them. And on and on, polluting every stage of the food web, eventually ending up on our plates. (Similar to how mercury from coal-burning now poisons so much of the tuna in our oceans.)

All large pieces of plastic are trying to break up into countless small pieces of plastic. Given time, they'll succeed. Every balloon, bottle, measuring cup, shovel, glove, recycling bin, buoy, chunk of foam, or broken boat hull (!) that ends up in the ocean... it isn't really just one piece of flotsam. It's 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 pieces of flotsam, just biding their time.

What were you?

Ex uno, plures. Out of one, many.