The 3rd - 5th grade class went to Gustavus dock on January 21, 2011. The weather was cold, cloudy, and rainy. We where there for an hour. We got some plastic (not too much). There was yellow plastic, black plastic, white plastic, a piece of a shot gun shell, plastic rope, and four pieces of Styrofoam. There was also a soda can, 2 pieces of rubber, packing from ramen noodles, a paper Cabela’s tag, fishing lure. We saw a lot of living things such as; sculpins, cockles, isopods, arthropod, and 2 sea anemones.
We have a question that we haven’t found an answer to. Is rubber plastic?
No. Many modern rubbers are synthetic, which means they are made in a laboratory from inorganic chemicals; however, plastics are (by and large) the product of petrochemical distillates.
ReplyDeleteApologies if you already saw this, because I'm not sure it logged successfully the first time... All rubber used to come from rubber trees (the sap, actually), which mostly grow in tropical jungles. But nowadays a lot of rubber is synthetic, meaning it's human-made in a laboratory. As BJ says, these modern synthetic rubbers are made from petrochemical distillates - in other words, oil. This makes synthetic rubber a type of plastic. As you may know, it takes a LOOONG time for plastics to degrade in the environment. The seem to "go away", but what's really happening is they're just getting broken up into smaller and smaller pieces until you really don't notice them anymore. But they're mostly still there.
ReplyDeleteThank you, BJ and Lewis, for the answers. We learned a lot from you and now we know that we can count rubber with our plastic in our data. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteNice blog, and thanks for collecting trash from the beach!
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