Synthetic and natural rubber are polymers that break down into smaller polymer particles (usually—whether synthetic or natural—this would strictly be micro-rubbers rather than micro-plastics, but other than the former being elastic, they have pretty similar properties and issues, and micro-plastics seems frequently to be used in a way which includes rather than being distinguished from micro-rubbers.)
Sand is a bunch of tiny bits of a variety of things - we usually don't say micro-silica, micro-quartz, micro-etc and just bundle it together and describe the group as sand (unless explicitly trying to talk about an individual piece).
I’m having a hard time conceptualizing how the plastic is shed. Do the fragments not reintegrate back into the gum bolus at the next pass/chew of the gum?
Plastic is not metal, it's a tangle of polymer subunits that get scraped off relatively easily.
Whenever you scrape a plastic container with an utensil or finger, or even just from water being poured out of a bottle, a small amount of microplastics is released, and I think we can agree that chewing is a WAY more abrasive of a process.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 17.9 ms ] threadThis article is making the rounds on news media at the moment without any attention to this, seems a bit suspicious.
I mean, shouldn't different plastics (PE, PP, etc) have different effects?
I mean, it seems like saying copper/iron/titanium/lead are all "metal"
Whenever you scrape a plastic container with an utensil or finger, or even just from water being poured out of a bottle, a small amount of microplastics is released, and I think we can agree that chewing is a WAY more abrasive of a process.