“Sunlight degrades polystyrene faster than expected” is the title of an October 10, 2019 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) news release https://www.whoi.edu/press-room/news-release/sunlight-degrades-polystyrene-faster-than-expected/ which reports that WHOI researchers have shown that “… polystyrene, one of the world’s most ubiquitous plastics, may degrade in decades or centuries when exposed to sunlight, rather than thousands of years … The WHOI study shows that sunlight doesn’t just cause the plastics to physically break down, however—it also causes them to degrade chemically into dissolved organic carbon and trace amounts of carbon dioxide, at levels far too low to impact climate change. Once the plastic undergoes this transformation, its original form disappears from the environment, and it becomes entirely new byproducts that cannot be seen by the naked eye … additives to polystyrene … play a major role in breakdown …Different additives seem to absorb different frequencies of sunlight, which influences how fast the plastic breaks down … - Summarized by Jack Cooper of the Animal Digestible Food Packaging Initiative www.adfpi.org - JLC@adfpi.org - Text to 301 384 8287 #SingleUsePlastics #FoodPackaging #PlasticWaste #PlasticPackaging #MicroPlastic #NanoPlastic