Remember when they started talking about biodegradable plastics being the greatest thing? So suddenly instead of a milk jug floating around the ocean for a thousand years that milk jug is going to break down into tiny tiny pieces. Well it turned out that microplastics were a whole lot worse than having The milk jug floating around for a thousand years. You could easily grab the milk jug and put it in the landfill or do something else with it but those tiny microplastic particles are getting into fish and you're eating them and they're getting into everything in the ecosystem and they're leaching their chemical and often hormone mimicking properties into life everywhere.

We have to be careful about biodegrading things that are not of a natural origin. Making it smaller doesn't mean it's going away. In many cases it's better to have it in a big thing that doesn't deteriorate that you can compress and put in a relatively small space underground. Like a garbage dump.