Question

Small vessel vasculitis pattern of uptake in pet brain

Answer 1

A crucial manufacturing step turns petroleum into a material unrecognized by the organisms that normally break organic matter down.

Most plastics are derived from propylene, a simple chemical component of petroleum. When heated up in the presence of a catalyst, individual chemical units monomers of propylene link together by forming extremely strong carbon-carbon bonds with each other. This results in polymers long chains of monomers called polypropylene.

"Nature doesn't make things like that," said Kenneth Peters, an organic geochemist at Stanford University, "so organisms have never seen that before."