Plastic pollution is no joke — large pieces of plastic litter aren’t limited to populated urban areas, but can find their way into the depths of oceans or forests, suggesting that their influence is broader than it may appear.
On TikTok, wildlife biologist and outdoors personality Forrest Galante (@forrestgalante) shared an unfortunate discovery he made while venturing deep into a forest, discussing what findings like these may mean for natural habitats everywhere.
On camera, Galante uncovered a half-buried, deflated Mylar balloon, no doubt left over from a birthday party several miles away, given his distance from any open or populated area.
He captioned the video, “The Last Thing You Want To Find In The Woods,” reflecting that mylar plastic takes a considerable period of time to decompose at all and never decomposes entirely, instead polluting parts of nature that we might have previously believed to be untouchable.
Even though the balloon must have originated from a more urban setting, its unregulated overhead path brought it into the middle of the woods.
“Out here, all kinds of things can have problems from [this kind of plastic littering],” Galante explained. “It can affect salamanders, waterways, give you microplastics, obviously kill patches of mushroom.”
In other words, not only can plastic trash trap or poison wildlife that encounters it, but it also contributes to overall biodiversity loss, disrupting the stability of all sorts of ecosystems, from marine to forested.
More than that, plastics that have incompletely broken down into microplastics can permeate even the most unexpected places unnoticed, eventually making their way through our water and soil into the things we ingest and leading to a range of health complications, from reproductive problems to cognitive impairment.
Commenters under the original TikTok post empathized with the situation, several sharing their own unfortunate plastic encounters.
“They are terrible,” one user wrote. “I find them in the ocean all the time. Don’t buy them!”
“Most of them end up in the back country of Death Valley as it’s a dumping ground from the air currents!” added another.
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