What Will Our Physical Legacy Be? Layers Of Plastic, Middens Of Chicken Bones And Aluminum Cans, Lots Of Concrete

[hatrack]

As an eternal testament of humanity, plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones are not a glorious legacy. But two scientists exploring which items from our technological civilisation are most likely to survive for many millions of years as fossils have reached an ironic but instructive conclusion: fast food and fast fashion will be our everlasting geological signature.

“Plastic will definitely be a signature ‘technofossil’, because it is incredibly durable, we are making massive amounts of it, and it gets around the entire globe,” says the palaeontologist Prof Sarah Gabbott, a University of Leicester expert on the way that fossils form. “So wherever those future civilisations dig, they are going to find plastic. There will be a plastic signal that will wrap around the globe.”

Fast food containers dominate ocean plastic, but aluminium drinks cans will also be part of our legacy. Pure metals are exceptionally rare in the geological record, as they readily react to form new minerals, but the cans will leave a distinct impression.

“They’re going to be around in the strata for a long time and eventually you would expect little gardens of clay minerals growing in the space where the can was. It’s going to be a distinctive, new kind of fossil,” says the geologist Prof Jan Zalasiewicz, a leading proponent of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch that reflects the impact of modern humanity on the planet, who with Gabbott has written a book on technofossils, Discarded. Another fast food staple, chicken, is also destined for immortality. Bones are well known as fossils, but while those of modern broiler chickens are fragile – they are bred to live fast, dying fat and young – the sheer volume will ensure many survive into the geological record.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/feb/22/technofossils-how-plastic-bags-and-chicken-bones-will-become-our-eternal-legacy

[DBoon]

1. Archaeologists identify past cultures by their pottery

You have the Funnel Beaker culture, the Bell Beaker Culture and so on

Our civilization will the the "Styrofoam Clamshell Culture"

[CrispyQ]

2. This photo gallery is beyond heartbreaking.

Chris Jordan
Midway, Message from the Gyre (2009-2013)

https://www.chrisjordan.com/Midway/1/thumbs-caption

I have no words.

[bucolic_frolic]

3. You could be a billionaire if you could harvest it and recycle

Aluminum. Plastic. Maybe not recycle it, but are they still working on plastic in paving material?

Chicken bones. Calcium. Fertilizer. Coral reefs.

We're doing a bit better at turning waste into raw materials, but still room to grow.

[2naSalit]

4. All of that...

Under pools of petroleum waste fluids.