Are there any like X-ray/etc. images of microplastics actually accumulating in peoples' bodies? I know that plastics are a huge problem, and there's been a lot of talk about microplastics in the past couple years, but I haven't seen any definitive proof of it being a problem in our bodies.
> but I haven't seen any definitive proof of it being a problem in our bodies.
Plastic can be toxic...see BPA a building block for certain plastics.
BPA is a known endocrine disruptor, and numerous studies have found that laboratory animals exposed to low levels of it have elevated rates of diabetes, mammary and prostate cancers, decreased sperm count, reproductive problems, early puberty, obesity, and neurological problems.
> BPA is a known endocrine disruptor, and numerous studies have found that laboratory animals...
the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has said that BPA is safe at the very low levels that occur in some foods. This assessment is based on review of hundreds of studies...
BPA is, indeed, a building block for plastics. The media loves to misquote it as a plasticizer, but its not, it's one of the ingredients that produces the plastic. The BPA found in plastics that use it (not all do, or can) is actually unreacted BPA, BPA that did not polymerize into plastic.
BPA is a xenoestrogen, not the only one to be found in plastic manufacturing, not the worst one (many BPA alternatives have higher estrogenic activity), and is also not the only type of chemical to look out for; phthalates, for example, fuck with testosterone metabolism, and are often found in plastics, too.
So, yeah, there is definitive proof of it being a problem, and studies have been published in depth for quite some time. You kinda missed the boat on this by about a decade.
Are you a vegan that eats an exceedingly safe and clean diet?
Like, I'm pretty strictly Paleo, which means heavy on the whole foods, heavy on the real ingredients from organic and safe sources, local if possible, the only major difference between us should be just that I eat meat and you don't.
Reason I say this is, I know vegans out there who eat fake food because its vegan... but its still fake food. If you are one of the vegans that eats like me, people like us should be avoiding most of the plastic in the diet just by our choices in where the food comes from.
You can't escape it due to the whole "biodegradable/recyclable plastic will save the world" bullshit movement (which is where most of the microplastic is coming from, sadly), but we should be avoiding most of it.
I guess by fake foods you refer to processed foods etc. but I'm not sure you are right.
As far as I understand organic fruits and vegetables growing exposed to air and rain would end up polluted a lot more than indoor farming products for example.
Eating local also depends on where you live. Apparently most of the microplastic that is around stems from car tires so that produce farmed near highways or cities will be more polluted with microplastic than the one they transport by plane from New Zealand.
> should be avoiding most of the plastic in the diet just by our choices in where the food comes from.
We used to put microplastics into cosmetic products. Microbeads are caught in sewage treatment plants, and the sludge is used as fertilizer which is how these microbeads end up in food.
> ECHA’s assessment found that intentionally added microplastics are most likely to accumulate in terrestrial environments, as the particles concentrate in sewage sludge that is frequently applied as fertiliser. A much smaller proportion of these microplastics is released directly to the aquatic environment.
Some microplastic (mostly fibres from clothing) is so fine it's blown into the sky by wind, and brought down by rain.
I wish I had more options to consume less plastic.
I'm pretty sure most of the plastic I use doesn't get recycled for various reasons, although I can estimate 90% of it by weight I do put in the proper recycling can.
I also care enough to avoid plastic if given a reasonable alternative.
However for a bunch of consumer goods there is no reasonably priced alternative.
I wish I could vote with my wallet and spend a significant (but not prohibitive) percentage more for detergent or shampoo or whatever in another container.
I can't help but feel like policy could help here.
There is a plastic cap and a plastic bag inside this cardboard bottle, of course. If I purchase these I make sure to separate the cardboard so it can be recycled but I believe many places the cap/bag will not be recycled.
I could not find positive confirmstion that Berkeley, CA recycles the cardboard, but a the city's related buyback center does buy cardboard by the pound indicating that it is possible.
I don't know how common this is, but the Boston area has https://www.cleenland.com/, a store that offers most household items in bulk, so you can go fill up a mason jar or something with detergent or shampoo.
Maybe something like this exists in other cities? If not it should, and really it should just be an aisle in the grocery store.
For shampoo, I'd recommend going with a solid bar. They're hard to find outside of health food stores and the like, but oftentimes you can find them being sold with only a simple paper wrapping for packaging, and a $5-10 bar will easily last many times longer than bottled shampoo as long as you're keeping it somewhere where it can get a chance to dry out between showers. Conditioner is trickier; I've yet to find a solid conditioner that I like.
For detergents, we've recently switched to Dropps for both laundry and dish detergent, and I've been quite happy. It's mail order, so not zero packaging, but about as low as you can get, and they put some thought into designing a box that's easy to re-use.
For dry foods, if there's a grocery store that sells in bulk in your area, that can make a big difference. We made some cheap muslin bags that we take to the store when we're stocking up; most food co-ops and Whole Foods will let you provide a tare weight so you don't have to pay an extra $0.10 for the weight of the bag. People like to malign Whole Foods for being expensive, but their bulk section tends to be priced comparably to packaged options at traditional grocery stores.
For razors, double-edge safety razors are an option, but a bit tricky to learn to shave with. I've found I can also keep a standard Gillette Mach3 cartridge going for a good 3 months by drying it after each use (and keeping it dry - no storing in the shower), and "stropping" it on a tea towel before shaves. My hypothesis is that it's corrosion, not use, that is the main limiter of a blade's life span.
Thank you for the useful tips, I'll certainly try the last one and I hadn't thought about looking for bar shampoo.
However my main issue is that there are so many hoops to jump through, and most consumers won't even get to the point of considering things like this unless these are presented as equally valid alternatives to the plastic packaged goods on their local convenience store.
Agreed. But I don't think we'll get there without some people being willing to do the extra work to get the trail blazed.
My city cut down on plastic bag usage considerably by introducing a $0.07 excise tax on every disposable grocery bag, but I don't think that would have been politically tenable if there weren't already a lot of people using reusable bags.
Plastic packaged goods, I don't know. . . I almost wish that some organization would launch a big campaign against Trader Joe's to get them to reduce their packaging use. It's going to be really hard to convince a bodega to stop selling packaged goods, for all sorts of reasons. But Trader Joes has enough control over their supply chain to do it. Their clientele is bobo enough to maybe be a bit easier to get on a bandwagon. They individually shrink wrap the broccoli, so they're a pretty easy target. And they're popular enough that a successful campaign could have a big cultural impact.
Over here there was an EU mandated (I believe) tax imposed on plastic bags, initially just 4 cents and now up to 7, and it dramatically reduced plastic bag usage.
So economic incentives do work, policy does work.
As far as hoping that chain stores are pressured into doing the right thing goes, I don't know if we can afford to wait for this to happen organically.
I wonder if the system used for plastic bottles could also work for other types of packaging. Add a cost to the packaging that the consumer can get back when they bring the packaging to some recycling or similar place.
Considering that, even if you ignore that 90% of what goes to the recycling center doesn't actually get recycled, plastic recycling's value is still fairly equivocal, I think it'd be better to just make it a straight up excise tax.
Save the deposit method for the things where returning them leads to a clear win: aluminum cans and reusable bottles. That way you're encouraging reduce and reuse first.
"Recycle" was never supposed to be the first resort in waste reduction, and, at this point, it's arguably not much of a waste reduction technique at all, and instead the centerpiese of an elaborate ecological shell game.
>For razors, double-edge safety razors are an option, but a bit tricky to learn to shave with.
Beyond reducing your plastic footprint, this method of shaving is substantially cheaper - albeit with some upfront costs. I switched years ago, and paid about $150 for a nice weighted blade handle, brush, and soap dish and now I spend maybe $60 a year on new razors and soap. The one draw back I can think of, aside from the fact that you have to learn how to shave like your grandfather (which isn't really a drawback, if you ask me) is that you can't bring these razors through airport security in your carry-on.
>> now I spend maybe $60 a year on new razors and soap
I've heard that it's much cheaper to go this route, but people who use Barbasol and disposable razors from Dorco (particularly with coupons that show up regularly every quarter on Slickdeals) spend less than this every year as well.
You could go cheaper with double edge razors, too. I have one of the more basic models from Merkur, and spent $20 on it. You can get a 1-2 year supply (assuming you don't require a fresh blade on every shave and/or don't shave daily) of basic Astra blades for about $10. The soap might end up being the most expensive part.
The price goes up quickly if you go for the luxury brands. I've never tried them, because I'm cheap, so I couldn't really speak to whether they're worth the extra cost. But I assume that anyone who's in the Barbasol-and-disposables is also cheap, so they wouldn't be likely to consider the higher-end kit, either.
I've switched to a shaving knife/razor a couple of years ago and don't regret it. The knife maybe needs sharpening once a year or even less if you take care to use the razor strop before every use. It was a one time investment and now the costs are $0 (except for soap/gel).
Yeah, I plan to go full old-school soon. My fiancée's dad does it and while it takes longer to shave it's quite clearly a) a better, closer shave and b) less likely to irritate the skin, which I'm prone to.
"For shampoo, I'd recommend going with a solid bar. They're hard to find outside of health food stores and the like . . ."
They're not hard to find at all. They're called "soap". It's as easy to find as Dove Unscented soap or any boutique brand; just look for a soap with the fewest ingredients. Or better yet: if you have time, just make your own. We've been conditioned by shampoo manufacturers to believe that cleaning our hair is different than cleaning our skin and I just don't buy it.
Aside from the convenience and the low cost, the fact that soap isn't an oil-attacking detergent like shampoo means that conditioner is probably unnecessary as well. Also, don't wash your hair every day. It may take time for your hair and scalp to adjust to not having to produce as much oil as it's used to, but my long hair has been absolutely fine for years using just soap.
It does seem like a radical option but is surprisingly doable. Beyond Soap was a book recommended here, which was a great read and discourages daily use of soap and shampoo (and conditioner if need be): https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Soap-Truth-Beautiful-Healthy/d...
Around the time when the marketing industry exploded in the 20th century, it became a hygienic necessity to strip the oils out of your hair and replace them with a synthetic alternative (conditioner). I haven't used shampoo for about 10 years now. For some reason many people are shocked by the notion of not using shampoo, but my hair looks good and I see no benefit to removing its natural oils.
He's right though. You should try it. Depending on your haircut you can probably go much longer than a day without shampooing. That doesn't stop you from rinsing it, after all.
Length is big. I cut my hair on about a 6 month cycle. At the beginning I can go a week or more without shampoo, towards the end I look overly grimy after just a day or two without shampoo.
This is actually something I thought about recently, and I've slowly began to experiment with not using deodorant. But I'm way more wary of doing so because BO is way more off-putting than greasy hair.
At first, my pits did stink pretty bad. But they did seem to get less so after 3 days. The problem is that I can't tell if my olfactory sense has just adjusted to the stink. Then I recently had a party to go to, and I chickened out and put on deodorant.
By the way, I work from home so I wasn't driving any co-workers crazy with my BO. lol
I've been using deodorant every other day for the last week and that seems to work just fine.
I live in a hot climate. I've never used deodorant. A/C+I shower and swim a fair amount and that seems to be enough. I personally find the odor of perfumes 1000X more offensive than BO. I once had to leave the gym because of an older woman that was radiating her perfume in ~25M radius. And that shit was on her skin. My eyes were watering at the edge of her halo so I don't know how she could even breathe. If I didn't smell lilac in there I would have thought it was a chem attack.
Someone tried this at my place of work and smelled horrible for a month straight. I would guess that most people are just not telling their co-workers they smell bad.
I did the "no-poo" (terrible marketing) thing some time back and swear by it, even if there is an icky adjustment period. I don't know how well this will work for deodorant. If this is something you want to undertake, I can suggest a couple of things:
First, shave off your underarm hair. I have a rather keen sense of smell, to the point where I can find my own scent off-putting by evening. Without long strands of fur to cling to, the bacteria will not do as well.
Second, experiment. You could try a left-right method, using one side of your body as control. You might also try putting some T-shirts in a plastic bag and getting someone else (someone you trust and would humor you with this endeavor) to try a whiff test to see what another vantage point has to offer.
When I had hair, I just rinsed it under water. Water is already a pretty good sovent, but isn't nearly as aggressive as detergents in shampoo.
Nobody I knew realized that I didn't use shampoo. I told lots of people that I didn't use it and they were shocked that it was even possible. My hair was fine. They weren't just being nice. I also discovered that a few other people in my social circle also didn't use shampoo, including some women with longer hair. I'd have never guessed.
I normally rinse my hair and scalp thoroughly with just water, working my hands around the scalp once or twice. I have a friend who uses baking soda as a shampoo substitute, but I've never felt the need to try it.
The type and form factor of plastic is significant. Types 1 and 2 are more often recycled than any other type (note that "recycled" is different from and rarer than "collected by municipal waste service"). However even those are not recyclable when too thin, such as with Keurig cups. Detergent and shampoo bottles tend to be highly recyclable.
It's true there aren't many alternatives at the moment for certain things like berries. I've never seen a bulk barrel at the grocery store for raspberries (for obvious reasons), and the clear, thin plastic they come in is not usually recycled. At farmers markets you can find them in biodegradable paper cups, but farmers market berries aren't available to most people most of the year.
As you note, the only way to fix this is legislation. Plastic is near free because it's a byproduct of something else we already use too much of (crude oil). If its production were taxed in alignment with its environmental cost (e.g. at the same rate it costs to collect it out of the oceans) we'd see far more alternatives.
At farmers' markets, most berry vendors sell raspberries and blackberries in egg carton-like paper baskets to absorb any juice. Strawberries are in plastic baskets.
My current goal is to go plastic free in the kitchen, or as close as possible. Right now, the only plastic in my kitchen is the appliances, and a few eatables which are impossible to buy without plastic packaging. All my utensits/cutlery/storage containers are ceramic, glass or metal. Its more expensive, but not so much.
The only major thing I can't avoid plastic for right now is meat. Always comes in packaging. I am hoping to find a butcher where I can show up with my own glass containers in which they dump the meat.
Yeah and you can be pretty sure that kind of quantity does not stay in the human body over 50 years+. So there is a factor of how much is in, and how much gets out. This, and not all plastics are equal, and some (most?) of hydrocarbons are fundamentally inert and unreactive and whether or not they cause harm is a big question mark.
And, given the language "people could be ingesting...", "suggests people are consuming...", I'm a bit suspicious of the numbers given. The study itself is said to be under review for publication and has been for over six months now. Anyone know if that's a long time, normal or short?
Not sure if this matters, but the naive math doesn't really work... they say "about 2000 pieces a week" and that they were "fibers", and "about 5 grams". The pieces are stated to be < 1mm in size. Assuming an average of 1mm x 0.1mm x 0.1mm "fibers" (rather large IMO), that's 20 cu mm or 0.02cc. Given plastic's density that's 0.03g, not 5g. I wonder if someone misplaced a decimal point or confused mg with g.
Not long ago I watched a tv show from Spain that wanted to make some awareness about this topic. They bought some fish and prawns and more seafood that should contain "lots of microplastics".
They took all of it to a laboratory and the laboratory found nothing at all. The presenter told the audience that it was surprising for him, and that they thought that the results were a letdown for the purpose of the documentary but that it was "good news" that we can still enjoy food without microplastics...
I would say that the results will vary vastly depending on the place you obtain the samples, but anyway, we should change our relationship with plastic...
So we eat tons of the stuff every year. Now what? Try searching for "what happens to ingested microplastic". To kill the suspense, most everyone looking to scare you with huge numbers also seem to avoid answering that more interesting question. But from the small amount of information that I could gather, I suspect that the answer is too big of a let down (figuratively and literally) to make interesting news. Happy trails to all looking for answers.
The fact that we don't yet know the ramifications, if any, doesn't mean that it isn't a potential problem. This is true for the complex chemical soup that is our bloodstream these days, making any sort of inferences to specific isolates exceedingly difficult and even off the mark.
Don't read anything into the six month review time: it's perfectly normal.
In fact, we've waited longer than that for a single set of reviews (ugh) and it's rare for anything to be accepted straightaway. Most papers go through the review-revise cycle at least once, even at the journal where they're ultimately accepted. This also doesn't indicate much about the quality of the research. Reviewers can flag serious problems, but they may also just want improvements to the writing (more details/discussion) or complementary experiments.
It's hard to check the numbers from the press release stuff. I swear I saw at <5mm somewhere too. I would bet the underlying studies are a morass of different definitions and methods, and I'd expect that a major contribution of the paper is to find some clever way to combine them.
Or, to put it another way: A study which has not passed peer review made an outlandish claim, one which anyone can verify is false just by boiling their tap water and inspecting the sediment. Flagged, and also I no longer trust Reuters to do simple factual reporting.
If the study just studied YOUR tap water, then yes, a counter-experiment of the sort will refute it.
Else you could be the unscientific outlier, thinking you've shot a study down with a sample of one -- whereas you could e.g. be on one fortunate district with really clean water supply.
Further, they claim that the majority of plastic is from drinking water. Call that at least 2.6 grams per week. Say that someone drinks 3 liters of water a day. There should be more than 120 mg in each liter of water. Cover a tall glass of tap water with a cloth and let it evaporate, and there should be a highly visible layer of plastic left at the bottom. Boil a pot of water to dryness, and there should be atrocious smoke from scorching the residual plastic.
Run a faucet with a filter system attached, and in minutes there should be multiple grams of plastic trapped in the filter. You'd expect clogging by plastic to be the lifetime-limiting factor of a faucet filter and of circulating filtered water fountains for pets.
In reality, I have never seen visible plastic residue in evaporation residue or trapped in household water filters.
Where has this been shown? I have never seen this. Are you saying that there's plastic particulates that leach into the water, or some kind of residue?
That's easy to test too. Run the boiling-to-dryness test once with tap water and once with bottled water. Try the same with a Brita filter pitcher. I don't think that you will observe any more plastic in the bottled water than in the tap water.
From the article: "but the scientific community is still only scratching the surface of understanding just how much plastic we consume and how harmful it could be."
Zero harm, so far. That's phrased like they're racking up lists of harm it causes. But so far, zero. So 'scratching the surface' means 'haven't found anything'?
At the very least, we know it's order of magnitude less harm than, say, lead poisoning. Look at how bad and obvious the issues in Flint, Michigan were. There just isn't that from humans and microplastics.
Hopefully scientists are feeding mice diets with 1% plastic content to see if anything interesting pops up.
Lead poisoning makes you slightly dumber, it's not a big obvious poisoning, that's why it took centuries before humans noticed that they were poisoning themselves with lead. Hopefully it doesn't take that long to figure out how much damage plastic does to us.
I'd guess that that is actually also why it is taking us so long to fix the problems caused by lead existing in the environment where it can affect humans. We know now that tetraethyllead in gasoline caused a great deal of harm and we've quantified it pretty well, for example, but people knew how dangerous that chemical was much longer.
People who demand a big obvious poisoning, as you said, before accepting the reduction of obviously dangerous substances in the environment is needed are the worst.
Yet we kept putting it in our paint and our gasoline until not very long ago. Probably because of people minimizing the problem, kind of like many of the commenters here.
> Zero harm, so far. That's phrased like they're racking up lists of harm it causes. But so far, zero. So 'scratching the surface' means 'haven't found anything'?
They've found an awful lot. They've determined that plastics containing endocrine-disrupting chemicals for which there's no determined safe dosage are floating around in our water and food in concentrations that were previously unsuspected. Determining how much harm that is causing is, necessarily, the last and most difficult step.
That's a true but especially obtuse way of looking at things, yes. It would be more intellectually honest to say that we're still measuring how much damage these substances are doing to human health.
Again, that's speculation. With not a lot of evidence behind it.
Folks have been using plastics for what? 100 years now? Where's the epidemiological evidence from that period? Where's the public health crisis?
The harm doesn't start when the proof of harm is found.
Every new thing that has never been seen before has no proof that it does harm until we catch it in the act. Once in a while someone invents nerve agents and kills themselves in the process giving us instant feedback, , but we had whole generations licking radium paint and putting lead in their wine to sweeten it. Cigarettes? No proof of harm even though the harm was obvious.
How many times are we gonna go around this merry go round before we put our foot out?
Plastics also seem to be sponges for toxic materials like PCBs. Even if the plastic turned out to be harmless, it could still be the gun for some pretty nasty bullets.
Combine this with city areas which contain up to 78% of molecular nitrogen poisoning, as a recent study showed. It’s transparent, also has no scent, like these microplastics. Who know how they react together?
I'm more concerned about dissolved plastic residues than the bigger plastic particles. The particles have more of a chance of passing through your body untouched. The unstudied plastic residues dissolved in your hot coffee are much more likely going to be absorbed into your body.
It's unlikely that I wouldn't notice eating a piece of plastic the size of a sesame seed. Maybe occasionally, sure, but I sure notice tiny fish bones or the slightest bit of grit in clam chowder, or egg shell in a cookie. If I'm eating a bottle cap worth of plastic a week I would notice on a daily basis.
Microplastics are generally smaller than sesame seed. Think of getting a drink from fast food in a styrofoam cup. The acidity of tea or, particularly, soda will eat away the styrofoam into microparticles which you then drink. Tasty drink, yes?
Maybe in a single oddball city in the USA like Portland (though I would still be surprised). Unfortunately, styrofoam is alive and well ubiquitously in the USA outside of whatever bubble you're writing in from.
From the cups stacked at the free coffee booth in the lobby of a bank branch to the vessel that a pho restaurant will use when you ask to take home the rest of your soup to the McCafe I just bought this morning.
We also consume a great deal of sand, dirt and indigestible organic matter.
The microplastic has been in the environment for a long time - reacting with the ecosystem and potentially passing through quite a lot of digestive systems before it gets to us.
The question is whether environmental micro plastic is any more harmful than the micro quartz crystals we've been digesting and expelling since the dawn of time.
Trying to trigger the yuck factor with visualisations isn't science. What's the actual risk here?
Microplastics tend to attract other persistent pollutants [1] to their surface and are linked to endocrine disruptors like BPA which have an undeniably negative effect on human health. And the fact that microplastics (which generally used to be macroplastics) have indeed passed through lots of other digestive systems doesn't make them safer. It means the same microplastic particles can kill over and over and over [2].
The first article is full of 'could'. Where's the 'undeniable' bit at the quantities we're talking about? The second article is large pieces of plastic, not small pieces?
We could have a really long exchange about this but instead I'll just ask you what you think happens to big pieces of plastic over time. The answer is that they just keep getting ground down, killing over and over as they work their way down the foodchain, killing smaller and smaller organisms, until they eventually end up nanometer-sized. Nothing digests them. Who knows what those do to individual cells. You should be worried.
We need to have a long exchange over this. My null-hypothesis - supported by the evidence you have provided - is that the large plastic is doing the killing and when it gets small it passes through with little effect - like grains of sand. Because clearly grains of sand are bigger than nanometer and they don't block up digestive tracts. The albatross didn't die from endocrine disruption did it.
That's how science works. From your evidence my null hypothesis is proven.
We should know what it does to individual cells - particularly if we are creating scare stories around it.
> The question is whether environmental micro plastic is any more harmful than the micro quartz crystals we've been digesting and expelling since the dawn of time.
That's nonsense, it's understood that microplastics contain and secrete endocrine-disrupting chemicals that are damaging to human health. It's a question of quantifying the problem and how much damage it's doing.
To be clear, if you eat something containing a bit of quartz you'll poop it out shortly, barring some specific digestive problem like diverticulitis that traps it. Your body won't do anything with it. This is not true of the chemicals in plastics.
Where is it understood that, at what quantities and for how long after they have been exposed to the environment? Is it a catalyst or is it 'used up' (ie extracted) by other organisms interacting with the microplastic.
If you read my note again, you'll find what you reactively typed out is the question I'm asking.
This is why Hacker News is degrading. You can no longer question anything.
> This is why Hacker News is degrading. You can no longer question anything.
It's flattering that you think I'm responsible for "degrading" Hacker News, but when you say things as deeply silly as "The question is whether environmental micro plastic is any more harmful than the micro quartz crystals we've been digesting and expelling since the dawn of time" you should expect a negative reaction.
The hey I'm going to reason from first principles and show that the so-called experts aren't so smart! attitude you've exhibited is perhaps a little more emblematic of message board silliness, although I would not go nearly so far as to call it "degrading." If you honestly want to know about why microplastics in the environment are increasingly alarming to scientists, use google, PLOS, Nature, arxiv, etc. (and if you find a mainstream scientific paper that actually supports the idea that the risk of microplastics is being highly overblown, or that organisms and microorganisms in the environment are mitigating all that risk for us, please do share the article)
How do you know somebody who calls themselves an expert are 'smart'. Isn't that a religious belief, when you accept what somebody says without question?
I don't accept your experts. I reject them. I will not treat them as though they are priests emitting the gospel. Just as I did with the 'experts' who pushed the lipid hypothesis using precisely the same 'peer review' and 'scientific journals'. Over time that turned out to be a fallacy. Why is this any different?
You have to be very sceptical of anything that is not subject to double blind testing. Belief and bias affects everybody.
> Just as I did with the 'experts' who pushed the lipid hypothesis using precisely the same 'peer review' and 'scientific journals'. Over time that turned out to be a fallacy.
The lipid hypothesis is still accepted, mainstream medicine.
Just another in what seems like a never ending stream of lies and exaggerations designed to make the population fearful, anxious and depressed.
It's been more than a decade now, of this fear mongering on a global scale. First it has to completely stop, and then we have to seek out those responsible. The damage they've done is immeasurable.
It would be interesting to see how micro-plastics differ from silica/ sand. Something most of us have been exposed to, especially if you live near a beach or other sandy environment.
One thing I do know is that not all sand is alike. There's the normal sand that has been ground & rounded over millennia and 'sharp sand' used in construction. Getting normal sand on your skin is a minor annoyance, and I'm not aware of any real damage if some are inhaled. Sharp-sand is much more irritating to the skin/ eyes, it feels more like fibreglass than the beach variety, and I believe the sharp particles are the reason for silicosis as they are not easily removed by mucus.
It would be interesting to know which category microplastics fall into. You would think (hope) micro-plastic would be more like the natural 'soft' sand variety than the more troublesome sharp sand.
Is eating plastic really a problem? Plastic is inert, that's actually the reason why there is so much of it in the oceans. But it also means that it should go straight through our body, untouched.
The problem about microplastics seem to be more about its effects on marine microorganisms than the fact that we are eating them.
The plastic is inert, but the stuff stuck to the plastic might not be safe. Microplastic is a lot of tiny pieces, which means it has a high surface area. That can attract pollutants that stick to it.
Also, some of it is pretty small. It can be small enough to enter the bloodstream when eaten, and we don't know what that will do.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadPlastic can be toxic...see BPA a building block for certain plastics.
BPA is a known endocrine disruptor, and numerous studies have found that laboratory animals exposed to low levels of it have elevated rates of diabetes, mammary and prostate cancers, decreased sperm count, reproductive problems, early puberty, obesity, and neurological problems.
the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has said that BPA is safe at the very low levels that occur in some foods. This assessment is based on review of hundreds of studies...
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
BPA is a xenoestrogen, not the only one to be found in plastic manufacturing, not the worst one (many BPA alternatives have higher estrogenic activity), and is also not the only type of chemical to look out for; phthalates, for example, fuck with testosterone metabolism, and are often found in plastics, too.
So, yeah, there is definitive proof of it being a problem, and studies have been published in depth for quite some time. You kinda missed the boat on this by about a decade.
Which types of diet contain more plastic than others?
I'm a vegan for example. Does this mean more or less plastic than average?
Which materials do not end up as microplastic? I assume natural fibres don't but besides them?
Like, I'm pretty strictly Paleo, which means heavy on the whole foods, heavy on the real ingredients from organic and safe sources, local if possible, the only major difference between us should be just that I eat meat and you don't.
Reason I say this is, I know vegans out there who eat fake food because its vegan... but its still fake food. If you are one of the vegans that eats like me, people like us should be avoiding most of the plastic in the diet just by our choices in where the food comes from.
You can't escape it due to the whole "biodegradable/recyclable plastic will save the world" bullshit movement (which is where most of the microplastic is coming from, sadly), but we should be avoiding most of it.
As far as I understand organic fruits and vegetables growing exposed to air and rain would end up polluted a lot more than indoor farming products for example.
Eating local also depends on where you live. Apparently most of the microplastic that is around stems from car tires so that produce farmed near highways or cities will be more polluted with microplastic than the one they transport by plane from New Zealand.
We used to put microplastics into cosmetic products. Microbeads are caught in sewage treatment plants, and the sludge is used as fertilizer which is how these microbeads end up in food.
https://echa.europa.eu/-/echa-proposes-to-restrict-intention...
> ECHA’s assessment found that intentionally added microplastics are most likely to accumulate in terrestrial environments, as the particles concentrate in sewage sludge that is frequently applied as fertiliser. A much smaller proportion of these microplastics is released directly to the aquatic environment.
Some microplastic (mostly fibres from clothing) is so fine it's blown into the sky by wind, and brought down by rain.
I was imagining things like plastic molecules wearing off the inside of an overused water bottle and consumed with the water
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito
I'm pretty sure most of the plastic I use doesn't get recycled for various reasons, although I can estimate 90% of it by weight I do put in the proper recycling can.
I also care enough to avoid plastic if given a reasonable alternative.
However for a bunch of consumer goods there is no reasonably priced alternative.
I wish I could vote with my wallet and spend a significant (but not prohibitive) percentage more for detergent or shampoo or whatever in another container.
I can't help but feel like policy could help here.
We only started using plastic in large quantities 50 years ago.
We have a Tragedy of the Commons with plastic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Maybe something like this exists in other cities? If not it should, and really it should just be an aisle in the grocery store.
For detergents, we've recently switched to Dropps for both laundry and dish detergent, and I've been quite happy. It's mail order, so not zero packaging, but about as low as you can get, and they put some thought into designing a box that's easy to re-use.
For dry foods, if there's a grocery store that sells in bulk in your area, that can make a big difference. We made some cheap muslin bags that we take to the store when we're stocking up; most food co-ops and Whole Foods will let you provide a tare weight so you don't have to pay an extra $0.10 for the weight of the bag. People like to malign Whole Foods for being expensive, but their bulk section tends to be priced comparably to packaged options at traditional grocery stores.
For razors, double-edge safety razors are an option, but a bit tricky to learn to shave with. I've found I can also keep a standard Gillette Mach3 cartridge going for a good 3 months by drying it after each use (and keeping it dry - no storing in the shower), and "stropping" it on a tea towel before shaves. My hypothesis is that it's corrosion, not use, that is the main limiter of a blade's life span.
However my main issue is that there are so many hoops to jump through, and most consumers won't even get to the point of considering things like this unless these are presented as equally valid alternatives to the plastic packaged goods on their local convenience store.
My city cut down on plastic bag usage considerably by introducing a $0.07 excise tax on every disposable grocery bag, but I don't think that would have been politically tenable if there weren't already a lot of people using reusable bags.
Plastic packaged goods, I don't know. . . I almost wish that some organization would launch a big campaign against Trader Joe's to get them to reduce their packaging use. It's going to be really hard to convince a bodega to stop selling packaged goods, for all sorts of reasons. But Trader Joes has enough control over their supply chain to do it. Their clientele is bobo enough to maybe be a bit easier to get on a bandwagon. They individually shrink wrap the broccoli, so they're a pretty easy target. And they're popular enough that a successful campaign could have a big cultural impact.
So economic incentives do work, policy does work.
As far as hoping that chain stores are pressured into doing the right thing goes, I don't know if we can afford to wait for this to happen organically.
Save the deposit method for the things where returning them leads to a clear win: aluminum cans and reusable bottles. That way you're encouraging reduce and reuse first.
"Recycle" was never supposed to be the first resort in waste reduction, and, at this point, it's arguably not much of a waste reduction technique at all, and instead the centerpiese of an elaborate ecological shell game.
Beyond reducing your plastic footprint, this method of shaving is substantially cheaper - albeit with some upfront costs. I switched years ago, and paid about $150 for a nice weighted blade handle, brush, and soap dish and now I spend maybe $60 a year on new razors and soap. The one draw back I can think of, aside from the fact that you have to learn how to shave like your grandfather (which isn't really a drawback, if you ask me) is that you can't bring these razors through airport security in your carry-on.
I've heard that it's much cheaper to go this route, but people who use Barbasol and disposable razors from Dorco (particularly with coupons that show up regularly every quarter on Slickdeals) spend less than this every year as well.
The price goes up quickly if you go for the luxury brands. I've never tried them, because I'm cheap, so I couldn't really speak to whether they're worth the extra cost. But I assume that anyone who's in the Barbasol-and-disposables is also cheap, so they wouldn't be likely to consider the higher-end kit, either.
They're not hard to find at all. They're called "soap". It's as easy to find as Dove Unscented soap or any boutique brand; just look for a soap with the fewest ingredients. Or better yet: if you have time, just make your own. We've been conditioned by shampoo manufacturers to believe that cleaning our hair is different than cleaning our skin and I just don't buy it.
Aside from the convenience and the low cost, the fact that soap isn't an oil-attacking detergent like shampoo means that conditioner is probably unnecessary as well. Also, don't wash your hair every day. It may take time for your hair and scalp to adjust to not having to produce as much oil as it's used to, but my long hair has been absolutely fine for years using just soap.
However, we don't need to use most of the products we use anyway, but we do, so we should try to make things have as little impact as possible.
gotta love taking advice from ancient humans when determining how to be hygienic.
At first, my pits did stink pretty bad. But they did seem to get less so after 3 days. The problem is that I can't tell if my olfactory sense has just adjusted to the stink. Then I recently had a party to go to, and I chickened out and put on deodorant.
By the way, I work from home so I wasn't driving any co-workers crazy with my BO. lol
I've been using deodorant every other day for the last week and that seems to work just fine.
I suppose now you know how people feel around you.
It's very awkward to be around people who smell bad. Most people will just avoid the confrontation of pulling you aside and telling you that you reek.
I speak for a lot of people when I say that I prefer nauseating lilac over the smells that can swelter and fester in someone's pits.
First, shave off your underarm hair. I have a rather keen sense of smell, to the point where I can find my own scent off-putting by evening. Without long strands of fur to cling to, the bacteria will not do as well.
Second, experiment. You could try a left-right method, using one side of your body as control. You might also try putting some T-shirts in a plastic bag and getting someone else (someone you trust and would humor you with this endeavor) to try a whiff test to see what another vantage point has to offer.
However, shave away. Helps quite a lot.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/magazine/my-no-soap-no-sh...
Nobody I knew realized that I didn't use shampoo. I told lots of people that I didn't use it and they were shocked that it was even possible. My hair was fine. They weren't just being nice. I also discovered that a few other people in my social circle also didn't use shampoo, including some women with longer hair. I'd have never guessed.
Remove all oils and don't replace them.
Use a bar of surfactant bar soap everywhere.
Everything squeaks and is bone dry until nature's chaos reasserts itself.
Flesh is gross.
Robotic bodies when
It's true there aren't many alternatives at the moment for certain things like berries. I've never seen a bulk barrel at the grocery store for raspberries (for obvious reasons), and the clear, thin plastic they come in is not usually recycled. At farmers markets you can find them in biodegradable paper cups, but farmers market berries aren't available to most people most of the year.
As you note, the only way to fix this is legislation. Plastic is near free because it's a byproduct of something else we already use too much of (crude oil). If its production were taxed in alignment with its environmental cost (e.g. at the same rate it costs to collect it out of the oceans) we'd see far more alternatives.
At farmers' markets, most berry vendors sell raspberries and blackberries in egg carton-like paper baskets to absorb any juice. Strawberries are in plastic baskets.
I wouldn't go that far. For things like ethylene, if there were no other demand for it, it would just get burnt in power plants like natural gas.
The only major thing I can't avoid plastic for right now is meat. Always comes in packaging. I am hoping to find a butcher where I can show up with my own glass containers in which they dump the meat.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butcher_paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft_paper
¹ https://loopstore.com/
Yeah and you can be pretty sure that kind of quantity does not stay in the human body over 50 years+. So there is a factor of how much is in, and how much gets out. This, and not all plastics are equal, and some (most?) of hydrocarbons are fundamentally inert and unreactive and whether or not they cause harm is a big question mark.
And, given the language "people could be ingesting...", "suggests people are consuming...", I'm a bit suspicious of the numbers given. The study itself is said to be under review for publication and has been for over six months now. Anyone know if that's a long time, normal or short?
Not sure if this matters, but the naive math doesn't really work... they say "about 2000 pieces a week" and that they were "fibers", and "about 5 grams". The pieces are stated to be < 1mm in size. Assuming an average of 1mm x 0.1mm x 0.1mm "fibers" (rather large IMO), that's 20 cu mm or 0.02cc. Given plastic's density that's 0.03g, not 5g. I wonder if someone misplaced a decimal point or confused mg with g.
They took all of it to a laboratory and the laboratory found nothing at all. The presenter told the audience that it was surprising for him, and that they thought that the results were a letdown for the purpose of the documentary but that it was "good news" that we can still enjoy food without microplastics...
I would say that the results will vary vastly depending on the place you obtain the samples, but anyway, we should change our relationship with plastic...
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/06/can-plastics-cause-i...
https://environmentjournal.online/articles/microplastic-poll...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/24/toxic-americ...
None of this is conclusive, but there's more and more evidence that microplastics might be causing serious reproductive issues in humans.
In fact, we've waited longer than that for a single set of reviews (ugh) and it's rare for anything to be accepted straightaway. Most papers go through the review-revise cycle at least once, even at the journal where they're ultimately accepted. This also doesn't indicate much about the quality of the research. Reviewers can flag serious problems, but they may also just want improvements to the writing (more details/discussion) or complementary experiments.
It's hard to check the numbers from the press release stuff. I swear I saw at <5mm somewhere too. I would bet the underlying studies are a morass of different definitions and methods, and I'd expect that a major contribution of the paper is to find some clever way to combine them.
Else you could be the unscientific outlier, thinking you've shot a study down with a sample of one -- whereas you could e.g. be on one fortunate district with really clean water supply.
Run a faucet with a filter system attached, and in minutes there should be multiple grams of plastic trapped in the filter. You'd expect clogging by plastic to be the lifetime-limiting factor of a faucet filter and of circulating filtered water fountains for pets.
In reality, I have never seen visible plastic residue in evaporation residue or trapped in household water filters.
https://clark.com/deals-money-saving-advice/pepsi-aquafina-t...
scientificamerican.com/article/plastic-not-fantastic-with-bisphenol-a/
Obviously, my grandma isn't 40% plastic.
Zero harm, so far. That's phrased like they're racking up lists of harm it causes. But so far, zero. So 'scratching the surface' means 'haven't found anything'?
Hopefully scientists are feeding mice diets with 1% plastic content to see if anything interesting pops up.
People who demand a big obvious poisoning, as you said, before accepting the reduction of obviously dangerous substances in the environment is needed are the worst.
The Romans knew it, and they still used it in their pipes and even in their drinks.
They've found an awful lot. They've determined that plastics containing endocrine-disrupting chemicals for which there's no determined safe dosage are floating around in our water and food in concentrations that were previously unsuspected. Determining how much harm that is causing is, necessarily, the last and most difficult step.
No, I think this is overblown.
Every new thing that has never been seen before has no proof that it does harm until we catch it in the act. Once in a while someone invents nerve agents and kills themselves in the process giving us instant feedback, , but we had whole generations licking radium paint and putting lead in their wine to sweeten it. Cigarettes? No proof of harm even though the harm was obvious.
How many times are we gonna go around this merry go round before we put our foot out?
That said, while I'm glad that they're doing these studies, I'd like to here something more conclusive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film) [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...
This is effectively not a thing in the United States. The war on styrofoam is nearly complete here.
Maybe in your part of the United States. Not in all of it and certainly not in mine.
From the cups stacked at the free coffee booth in the lobby of a bank branch to the vessel that a pho restaurant will use when you ask to take home the rest of your soup to the McCafe I just bought this morning.
The microplastic has been in the environment for a long time - reacting with the ecosystem and potentially passing through quite a lot of digestive systems before it gets to us.
The question is whether environmental micro plastic is any more harmful than the micro quartz crystals we've been digesting and expelling since the dawn of time.
Trying to trigger the yuck factor with visualisations isn't science. What's the actual risk here?
[1] https://cen.acs.org/articles/90/web/2012/08/Ocean-Plastics-S...
[2] https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/seabirds/laysan-albatrosses-...
That's how science works. From your evidence my null hypothesis is proven.
We should know what it does to individual cells - particularly if we are creating scare stories around it.
That's nonsense, it's understood that microplastics contain and secrete endocrine-disrupting chemicals that are damaging to human health. It's a question of quantifying the problem and how much damage it's doing.
To be clear, if you eat something containing a bit of quartz you'll poop it out shortly, barring some specific digestive problem like diverticulitis that traps it. Your body won't do anything with it. This is not true of the chemicals in plastics.
If you read my note again, you'll find what you reactively typed out is the question I'm asking.
This is why Hacker News is degrading. You can no longer question anything.
It's flattering that you think I'm responsible for "degrading" Hacker News, but when you say things as deeply silly as "The question is whether environmental micro plastic is any more harmful than the micro quartz crystals we've been digesting and expelling since the dawn of time" you should expect a negative reaction.
The hey I'm going to reason from first principles and show that the so-called experts aren't so smart! attitude you've exhibited is perhaps a little more emblematic of message board silliness, although I would not go nearly so far as to call it "degrading." If you honestly want to know about why microplastics in the environment are increasingly alarming to scientists, use google, PLOS, Nature, arxiv, etc. (and if you find a mainstream scientific paper that actually supports the idea that the risk of microplastics is being highly overblown, or that organisms and microorganisms in the environment are mitigating all that risk for us, please do share the article)
I don't accept your experts. I reject them. I will not treat them as though they are priests emitting the gospel. Just as I did with the 'experts' who pushed the lipid hypothesis using precisely the same 'peer review' and 'scientific journals'. Over time that turned out to be a fallacy. Why is this any different?
You have to be very sceptical of anything that is not subject to double blind testing. Belief and bias affects everybody.
The lipid hypothesis is still accepted, mainstream medicine.
It's been more than a decade now, of this fear mongering on a global scale. First it has to completely stop, and then we have to seek out those responsible. The damage they've done is immeasurable.
One thing I do know is that not all sand is alike. There's the normal sand that has been ground & rounded over millennia and 'sharp sand' used in construction. Getting normal sand on your skin is a minor annoyance, and I'm not aware of any real damage if some are inhaled. Sharp-sand is much more irritating to the skin/ eyes, it feels more like fibreglass than the beach variety, and I believe the sharp particles are the reason for silicosis as they are not easily removed by mucus.
It would be interesting to know which category microplastics fall into. You would think (hope) micro-plastic would be more like the natural 'soft' sand variety than the more troublesome sharp sand.
The problem about microplastics seem to be more about its effects on marine microorganisms than the fact that we are eating them.
Also, some of it is pretty small. It can be small enough to enter the bloodstream when eaten, and we don't know what that will do.
So far we don't know if it's a problem or not.