Plastiglomerate

In news– a Plastic-rock hybrid has been discovered in Andaman’s Aves island recently.

About the rock-

Known as Plastiglomerate, the rock is composed of sand, rock fragments, shells and other materials held together by plastic, resulting in a plastic-rock hybrid.
It is a new form of plastic pollution described by scientists in 2014.
The rock which was discovered on a beach on Aves Island is the first such find from India.
Laboratory analysis showed that it has two very commonly used plastic polymers– polyethene and polyvinyl chloride– which was holding the smaller rock and sand particles to form a rock, approximately the size of ones found along railway tracks.
Scientists say that even though plastic pollution in the marine environment is being studied for the past five decades, new types of previously undiscovered plastic debris keep emerging globally. Plastiglomerate rock is one such form.
These man-made aggregates were initially discovered at Kamilo Beach, Hawaii, and have since been reported in Indonesia, the United States, Portugal, Canada, Peru, and now in India.
Other newly discovered forms of marine plastic pollution include plastic crust (a layer of plastic encrusted onto ocean rocks and Pyroclastic– burnt plastic that looks like pebbles). These forms of plastic pollution have the potential to survive millions of years and may even enter the geological record.
It has been considered a potential marker of the Anthropocene, an informal epoch of the Quaternary proposed by some social scientists, environmentalists, and geologists.