There seems to be belief by many people that once you dump something into the environment, it will disappear and the environment will be clean again. For those of you who have seen Trailer Park Boys, you know about Ricky's belief in how the environment recycles. His wisdom, which many people seem to agree with is that when you dump something into a lake one day and come back the next day, that item is now gone. So, the lake must some how recycle it and return it back into nature.

While Trailer Park Boys is a comedy, there is nothing funny about what is dumped into our environment and it by no means just disappears. Plastic continues to break down into smaller and smaller pieces for centuries, tin cans last 1,000 years and archeologists will be astonished at the garbage dump of waste we have left after us in the 20th and 21s century.

As well, things do not just disappear when they get into the food chain. They stay there for decades, and a recent study has found proven this. Decades ago, manufacturers would dump DDT and PCB into the ocean through the Los Angeles County sewer system. These two chemicals are highly dangerous and were used as pesticides for decades. California State Long Beach University found that those toxins are still present in high concentrations in marine mammals including seals and sea lions.

It has been estimated that between the 1940s and 1970s, 110 tons of DDT and 11 tons of PCB were dumped out through the sewer system, hitting the ocean and polluting an area over 25 square miles from its source. By studying 145 seals and sea lions that died at a facility that helps sick and injured marine mammals, they were able to find those chemicals were still present in animals born over 30 years since the last bit of DDT and PCB was dumped there.

Male seal lions had the highest concentrations of the chemicals because they have a much higher fat content. Most of the chemicals are believed to have made their way into the animals through feeding on mother's milk that had the chemicals in them. Levels of contamination in this location was 10 times higher than in Northern California.

The problem is that sea lions and seals are part of the food chain in the ocean, and some of the animals that eat those mammals are eaten by us. That means that their chemicals make their way back into us and contaminate our own bodies.

Unlike what Ricky said, nature does not just recycle pollution and trash. It absorbs it and it comes full circle back to us. You don't poop where you eat, but we seem to have forgotten that.