Legos may take hundreds of years to break down in the ocean
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of stepping on a Lego, you know the plastic building blocks have absolutely no give. Now, scientists have discovered another unpleasant consequence of the toys’ indestructibility: A single Lego could take hundreds of years to break down in the ocean. Earth’s oceans are littered with plastic of all kinds (SN: 11/13/19). But estimating how long that trash takes to disintegrate in seawater is often a challenge, because it’s difficult to date fragments of debris with unknown origin. But it’s fairly easy to identify a piece of Lego by its distinct shape, says Andrew Turner, an environmental scientist at the University of Plymouth in England. And because the chemical additives used to make Legos have changed over time, the composition of each brick contains clues about when it was made. Turner and colleagues used an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer to measure the chemical compositions of washed-up Lego blocks, which had been collected by beach cleanup volunteers in Cornwall, England, since 2010....