Microplastics found in supermarket fish, shellfish | Hacker News Reader

Microplastics found in supermarket fish, shellfish

cbc.ca

183 pointsrhschan61 comments

I know this article is about more than just microbeads, but the thing that always angers me the most about this issue is that the people who decided to use them in shampoos and body washes must have known exactly what the long-term consequence was going to be, but went ahead and did it anyway.

What kind of soulless, dead-eyed scumbag do you have to be to wilfully introduce something so utterly pointless and utterly destructive just to sell more shampoo? Microbeads didn't even contribute to the efficacy of the the product, they were literally just there to help with marketing. It's absolutely sickening and I wish the world had cottoned on sooner.

> Microbeads didn't even contribute to the efficacy of the the product,

Increasing the coarseness of soaps absolutely helps their efficacy, especially for heavier oil and grime. There may be more environmentally friendly ways to do it, but microbeads were certainly useful in many cases.

In my experience, ground apricot pits work just as well.

Yup or sand :)

Or pumice ;)

I was thinking of acne cleanser.

Using abrasives in acne products probably does more harm than good by irritating the sling and disrupting the acid mantle.

Please amplify. I've never seen those terms, and I suspect that I'm not alone in that :)

*skin for sling. Oops.

Or fucking clay god damnit.

> must have known exactly what the long-term consequence was going to be

why must? It seems possible they just assumed plastic would deteriorate quickly, or that they didn't think it would get into tissue, or that they just underestimated the consequences.

Hanlon's razor might apply here.

If there's one thing plastic doesn't do it's "deteriorate quickly". Anyone who works with plastic knows this.

I've seen plastic bags stick around in trees for decades despite being exposed to wind, rain, and UV light for for twelve hours a day in the summer. There's a reason cities try and ban those things. A paper bag turns to mush within hours if it's wet. It's basically gone within weeks.

Plastic beads. In stuff that goes down the drain.

Brilliant.

From a user point of view, I doubt most people thought about it before the reports of ecological damage started rolling in. I know I didn't, I'd occasionally used products with microbeads in the past, it never crossed my mind to think about the damage those beads could cause, and even if it did I'd have assumed that it would've been easy enough to filter them out at a water treatment plant (I'm still not sure why this is a problem to be honest).

Now that I know about the ecological damage they cause I won't be using them again, but I suspect plenty of people are still unaware of their impact. Hopefully they can continue to be banned.

On a similar note, there are plenty of hazardous chemicals used in personal hygiene products, which is something that requires greater public awareness. There are some examples here (and even though the article suggests the EU has higher standards, hazardous chemicals can be found in products sold in the EU too):

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/04/2...

Microscopic plastic presumably does not work like plastic bags?

TFA actually states that most microscopic plastic is not from microbeads but from larger things which have deteriorated.

A lot of "biodegradable" plastic is actually plastic that just breaks down into tiny bits. It only appears to degrade, it doesn't actually go away.

This is probably another massive problem lurking in the deep.

Good point about cities trying to ban them. When California passed the ban I thought it was great until I saw they simply replaced the lighter bags with bags that are way more plastic. Since you can't surbside recycle them they're still going to end up in the dump and everywhere else and just take even longer to decompose. Should have gone paper or none at all...

>Hanlon's razor might apply here.

When there's profit involved, Hanlon's razor gets rusty quickly.

Try Sinclair instead: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

They had actual chemists and material scientists working for them. Tons of them. It's not like some executive had to guess whether it will deteriorate or not.

Besides, it's not like 1000 years have passed. Those are likely last's or 2-3 years ago plastics. They could have tested their product on this front for for a couple of years before releasing the product.

Using anything besides plain soaps is a little bit suspect.

It's always somebody else who pollutes.

Try this: for one week, don't have any food that requires any packaging. Don't just think about it. Do it. Then look back at how much packaging you needlessly go through.

Or try not flying for one year. You won't die. In fact, you'll figure out ways to enjoy life without causing all that jet fuel to go into the atmosphere. Then look back at how much pollution you needlessly cause.

People lived for tens of thousands of years without food packaging or flying while still making themselves happy.

If you're going to call someone soulless and a dead-eyed scumbag, are you ready to look at your own behavior? Or is your pollution better than theirs? Do your excuses apply to you but theirs don't apply to theirs?

I'll probably get downvoted because people don't like facing their pollution, only everyone else's. Theirs is always okay, or can't be avoided.

Bottom line: if you want them to reduce their plastic, you can reduce yours.

Well, and that’s why the German railway runs in many areas all trains with electricity from renewables, and why stores like http://original-unverpackt.de/ are a thing (it’s a franchise-chain of stores that sell products without any packaging, getting quite popular in Germany nowadays).

>Try this: for one week, don't have any food that requires any packaging. Don't just think about it. Do it. Then look back at how much packaging you needlessly go through.

Coincidentally, I did try this a few years ago when I was testing how easily I could go "zero waste". I found I could buy very few foods without packaging.

I could buy produce with minimal packaging - just rubber bands, twist ties, and stickers - but produce is increasingly sold in plastic bubbles and bags, so the selection was limited. There was some room for choice here: many types of produce, like carrots, were available both loose and in plastic bags. I could buy the loose ones. Also, most people use the plastic produce bags, but I could just bring my produce up to the checkout counter without them . I have done that since.

I thought I could buy meat and fish at the counter, and bring my own containers instead of using the plastic and paper wrapping they use, but I was informed that it would be against health codes for them to use anything I provided. Also, some stores do not have a meat counter- they sell all meat shrink-wrapped on plastic trays.

At the very least, I thought I could use my own containers in the self-serve bulk dry goods section of some local stores, where you can get beans, oatmeal, rice, cereal, dried fruit, etc. Nope - also against the health codes. You can only use the flimsy plastic containers they provide. It occurred to me that I could bring back one of their containers, and they would never know it was used. However, the containers are not at all durable, so they would break during washing, and it was difficult to clean the channel of the lids. I heard that at one far-away health food store they allow you to use your own containers despite the health codes, but I have yet to go there. Worryingly, these sections of the store seem much less popular, and people tend to buy the pre-packaged versions because it's easier to just grab something off of the shelf. I would not be surprised if these sections are phased out in the near future.

Basically, the way we sell food here makes it hard to avoid packaging. Although I live in an area with many people who (claim to) care about the environment, it seems like there is no way to stem the tide of our general preference for lots of packaging around food. In other areas people seem better about this. When I was in California I went to Berkeley Bowl, and, true to stereotype, I saw lots of packaging-free food, people bringing their own containers, and more locally-sourced food.

Supply side is historically, systemically more enfranchised to effect reality than any given individual. You cannot stand up the individual against contemporary profit-motivated industry as equals in any argument.

Consumers are not the source of the problem. Nobody asked for microbeads - you can sell anything.

Packaging is useful, and can be properly disposed off. Microbeads - not really.

> I'll probably get downvoted because people don't like facing their pollution

Oh shut up. You are violently misconstruing the comment you're replying to. It's not about using plastic. It's about putting in a special, harmful kind of plastic that does not improve the product in any way. It's extremely different from packaging, which is important for almost all products.

NO, according to the article, you are wrong:

""The biggest source is likely larger plastic items that we can see during beach cleanups that enter the water and over time break down with the sunlight into smaller and smaller pieces of microplastic."

Think plastic bags, styrofoam takeout containers and plastic cutlery, says Rochman."

That is irrelevant to this discussion of neotek's comment.

"I know this article is about more than just microbeads" is at the start of that comment. The frustration is not all plastic. The frustration is the microbeads.

Packaging does serve a purpose; making food last longer.

I'm not saying that packaging is good, but the stunning amount of food waste today would be even greater without it, causing other types of environmental contaminations.

Waaay oversimplified.

It almost sounds like you're suggesting that if we use any plastics for convenience then we have no right to ask corporations to not wreck the environment wholesale.

I use plastics, but I dispose of them in the trash or recycling, and I sure hope they don't end up in the ocean. If they do, then I'd be happy to work on a government solution to not have all our trash end up in our food. So comparing using packing to creating pieces of plastic in shampoos that nobody asked for that go into waste water is not reasonable.

Also packing materials is a terrible choice because I can't choose my packaging materials. I'd be fine if all my things were packed with paper, it just saves amazon 20 cents to use styrofoam peanuts. I'd gladly pay 20 cents more for paper-only-packaging.

The other point is, you're making the whole thing unreasonably black-and-white. If you think that consumers are the problem, why not come up with some kind of research that explains why most of this plastic in this fish comes from things uniquely under a consumer's control.

>What kind of soulless, dead-eyed scumbag do you have to be to wilfully introduce something so utterly pointless and utterly destructive just to sell more shampoo?

A company executive that will get a million dollar or several as bonus.

It's the same in the food industry (let's add crap to it so it's more colorful, more sugary, more addictive, more long lasting, and worse for the consumer's health to increase our profits), in the car industry (let's lie about our emissions, and save billions to the company), in the internet industry (from "dark patterns" to privacy violations, to bait and switch schemes), ...

jus cuz this comment is near the top, ill mention the major contributors according to the article: "plastic bags, styrofoam takeout containers and plastic cutlery"

> the people who decided to use them in shampoos and body washes must have known exactly what the long-term consequence was going to be, but went ahead and did it anyway.

It took years and years of use before people started finding evidence of microbead contamination and problems. And before that nobody was screaming about it. Why is it that the inventor "must" have been able to predict something nobody else did either?

I remember reading about microbeads years before they were an "established problem". It was pretty clear from the beginning that they would end up in the oceanic food supply. It was perhaps not obvious that they would manage to find their way into the flesh of fish, but it was plainly obvious that they would wash down the drain and end up in the oceans, that they would stay there for a very long time, and that they would be consumed by ocean life.

As someone who used a body wash with beads in it for several years, I was horrified when I learned those beads were plastic. I'd always just assumed they were designed to dissolve. Or something. I share your anger with the manufacturers, who obviously knew better.

There are some brands that use things like ground nut shells or stone fruit pits instead of plastic beads, if you like the scrubbiness but want to use a safe version.

> What kind of soulless, dead-eyed scumbag do you have to be to wilfully introduce something so utterly pointless and utterly destructive just to sell more shampoo?

If it's the cheaper solution, of course there's going to be someone trying to sell it. If it sells it will give the company an economic competitive advantage and other companies will be tempted to follow suite in order to keep up with the competition. Some other company will try to market a shampoo without the plastic beads, at a premium price. Most consumers wont have the money (or interest) to vote with their wallets and so plastic beads will continue to fill or oceans.

Looks like capitalism at work to me.

And failing because virtually none of the externalities are built into the price. Society has to come in later and clean up the mess giving capital uncountable subsidies through future tax expenditures.

You're assuming that they are aware of the dangers. I think that's incorrect.

It's much safer to assume people making "obviously" bad decisions are getting exposed to a different narrative than you are, and making sensible decisions given what they've been exposed to.

How do microplastics get into the tissue? I sort of assumed extracting nutrients from the digestive tract was a chemical, molecular-scale process, and anything big enough to be meaningfully called a chunk of plastic would be ignored.

The particles are indeed very small. Smaller than what you would call a "chunk". What you might think of as a molecule (say H₂O) of course is smaller yet, but there are many proteins and larger-chain carbohydrates and lipids that pass into the body that are much larger.

Proteins don't get absorbed via the gut, they get broken down, the components get absorbed, and they get rebuilt.

Good point. Thanks.

I don't see a cite for the "report prepared for the International Maritime Organization", but it's clear that Rochman et al. (2015) sampled GI tract content for fish.[0] Oysters are filter feeders, and don't have GI tracts per se.

0) http://www.nature.com/articles/srep14340

The little beads are consumed by things at the bottom of the food chain, then those things are eaten by bigger things and so on.

They appear to bio-accumulate.

that's a great question. please post here when you find the answer!

From Wikipedia: 10 micrometres (0.00039 in) to 1 millimetre (0.039 in)

I was shocked to learn how small a microbead is I was expecting a few mm maybe 1mm but 0.01mm holy crap that's incredibly small.

There is some scientific misunderstanding here - this is zillionth time I read that something bigger passes from the guts into the body.

There is a leaky gut syndrome however, but I doubt it explains it all. For example higher molecular weight molecules such as protein fragments and plant miRNAs can be found circulating the blood after the meal. The accumulation of microbeads is yet another example.

> Microplastics absorb or carry organic contaminants, such as PCBs, pesticides, flame retardants and hormone-disrupting compounds of many kinds, he says.

I wonder if this absorption of high surface plastics could get used to actually filter out those organic compounds from highly contaminated waters. For instance the baltic sea has high content of them, that even lead to some heated debates in the EU, as Sweden and Finland allow the sale of contaminated baltic fish.

The EPA will likely not be of help to Americans on this matter. The nominated chief is viciously anti-regulation, and also has received over $200,000 in campaign donations from oil & gas companies.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Pruitt

To be fair, the EPA has been pretty shite on this issue regardless of its leadership.

While I have no doubt that the EPA will be more hampered than helped by the current administration, I think we could leave politics aside and ask what can practically be done short of banning all plastic production? As long as plastic exists, these microparticles will continue to be produced. I don't really see a way around it. Before we freak out, however, we should try to understand what this even means. Most plastics are relatively inert, so this may be basically harmless. Or, it may be a complete disaster; we don't know.

Indeed, it will be a difficult problem to fix. For starters, being tougher on industrial waste will help. Incentivizing the production of biodegradable materials. Funding research into understanding the full impacts of microplastics upon our food chain. Funding research into how best to clean up our oceans, and practical clean-up efforts. (See http://www.dailypress.com/news/science/dp-nws--pruitt-bay-ab... as an example).

I hate hate hate talking about politics. But I'm starting to realize that for big issues like this, it's impossible to have a meaningful conversation without getting into government policy.

I never got all this government hate. Governments can solve problems, which is why we have them in the first place. Yes, they are dangerous, so are cars.

We can do something without banning all plastics. We could just ban plastics that don't degrade fairly quickly when broken into tiny bits. Wood for example with a coating can be stable for decades, but microscopic bits of wood are not around for long.

I saw in a Dutch documentary that micro plastics were found in beer, honey, and bottled water.

I found a link describing this: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/press/news/160623

http://elryderphotography.com/the-forever-project-1/

Fish is also a great source of iron, and those omega-3 fats are really important in terms of our heart health

Or aren't they? It is a controversial subject.. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22968891 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24885361

That's not what the link says. To quote:

"While supplementation with omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) has been shown to improve vascular function, it remains unclear if supplementation decreases serious clinical outcomes. (...) Our results showed that insufficient evidence exists to suggest a beneficial effect of omega-3 PUFA supplementation in adults with peripheral arterial disease with regard to cardiovascular events and other serious clinical outcomes."

So it does improves vascular function -- it just doesn't "decrease serious clinical outcomes", which makes sense: if you have blocked arteries and eat all kinds of crap all day and don't exercize nobody expects that Omega-3 itself will decrease the chances of you getting a heart attack or worse...

ok but I'd still call that controversial. Also the other one says:

"CONCLUSION: Overall, omega-3 PUFA supplementation was not associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality, cardiac death, sudden death, myocardial infarction, or stroke based on relative and absolute measures of association."

I mean, for years it sounded like omega-3 was the new miracle thing and even now you get people saying it is 'really important in terms of our heart health' but it doesn't seem to be quite that simple.

Yeah, there's no silver bullet.

Then again, until something goes in university textbooks on nutrition, I'm suspicious of all studies. So not sure if the study above is any better than the tens of studies claiming they found positive results (and meta-studies are not always definitive either).

It seems omega-3 can improve all kinds of measurements regarding heart health on an individual level, but it's not certain whether it can improve strokes etc alone. Which I take to mean it's more of a whole lifestyle + omega 3 issue than "just add omega-3 and you can eat/live anyway you like with perfect heart health".

> So it does improves vascular function -- it just doesn't "decrease serious clinical outcomes", which makes sense: if you have blocked arteries and eat all kinds of crap all day and don't exercize nobody expects that Omega-3 itself will decrease the chances of you getting a heart attack or worse...

Sure they do! If ten things contribute to your chances of heart attack, than improving any single one should improve your overall odds by a small amount. Nobody expects a single factor to make the risks go away, but that's vastly different from decreasing the risks at all.

You imply that even if omega-3 by itself doesn't help, exercise+lifestyle+omega-3 should improve clinical outcomes more than just exercise+lifestyle. But think about it this way. For every lazy fat guy you find, I can find you a lazier, fatter one. Compared to him, this guy is exercising more, and living a better lifestyle. So why is omega-3 not helping? Is there a specific threshold of health you have to reach before omega-3 will kick in?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com