Ocean plastics break down faster than expected

First of a couple of posts stimulated by reading FuturePundit.

One Katsuhiko Saido of Nihon University seems to have said, in a presentation to the American Chemical Society: “We found that plastic in the ocean actually decomposes as it is exposed to the rain and sun and other environmental conditions, giving rise to yet another source of global contamination that will continue into the future.”

Apologies to Saido-san if he's been misrepresented somewhere along the way, but that's so typical of the mind-set of the present day clod-botherers^TM: damned if you do, and damned if you don't. First the plastic refuse collecting in the ocean is bad because it would never degrade; then it's bad because it does degrade. I seem to remember that once upon a time, oxygen was the nasty new chemical that was destroying 99% of all life in the ocean. Turned out well eventually though, didn't it?

There seems to be a strain in modern-day environmentalism that just wants to bring about a stasis that is the antithesis of the real world (I was going to say "wants to wrap the world in clingfilm", but there's a limit to the amount of irony that I can take).