A team of scientists in Massachusetts, USA studying plastics largely polluting our oceans have recently revealed an astonishing discovery: polystyrene, used to make many everyday single-use plastic items, can degrade a whole lot faster than the “thousands of years” previously believed.
The new study, by five scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that the plastic could in fact degrade in centuries or even decades, if exposed to sunlight.
Sunlight is commonly known to cause plastics to weather, but researchers say the new study is “the first direct evidence” of how of sunlight can break down polystyrene into its basic chemical building blocks, having it effectively disappear from the environment.
