Pretty much everywhere. Tap water in the us is perfectly safe in most places.
"Allaire found the amount of violations varied by year, affecting as many as 45 million people in some years, representing about 28% of the U.S. population."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2018/02/12/tens-m...
"Tainted tap water isn’t just a problem in Flint, Michigan. In any given year from 1982 to 2015, somewhere between 9 million and 45 million Americans got their drinking water from a source that was in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act, according to a new study"
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/millions-americans-dr...
> Wrong [...] 45 million [...] 28% of the U.S. population
I don't think it's fair to call the comment "Wrong". If anything, this supposed refutation is saying "Right".
Most people in the world have it far worse off than the US. We tend to easily fly into a panic and start drinking bottled water instead, which only pumps ever more plastic and carbon into the biosphere. That exact phenomenon happened in Austin recently. People went into a prepper panic and raided the grocery stores anyway, completely cleaning out all the bottled water in the city. Again. The water was perfectly fine, it turns out.
My travels through the third world have made me more aware of how much we take our highly reliable infrastructure for granted. Of course we still have some problems to work out, but acting like most tap water is unsafe is hyperbolic and just not helpful.
"The US had the highest contamination rate, at 94%, with plastic fibres found in tap water sampled at sites including Congress buildings, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters, and Trump Tower in New York. Lebanon and India had the next highest rates." https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/06/plastic-...
Other studies indicating harm are available, while others have shown mixed results. For example, one where polystyrene microplastics depress and then appear to stimulate growth of algae: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004565351...
Vote to pass legislation that taxes synthetics and the money is used for mitigation.
Company’s make what consumers want.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/20/microfib...
While the synthetics and artificial fibers are bad as they pollute the environment downstream, cotton production requires roughly 20,000 liters to produce 1kg of fiber while polyester requires SEVENTEEN liters of water.
Just regulate the items you don't want with rules. If you want it gradual, make the rules gradual. No need to build more money-collecting bureaucracy and keep asking people to pretend the gatekeepers/spenders are trustworthy.
I thought the major, overwhelming source of microplastic pollution was from plastic beads in makeup and skin products.
Are synthetic fabrics, laundered, a significant source ?
Genuinely curious and would appreciate a citation.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jun/29...
> Multiple studies have shown synthetic fibers to make up the lion’s share of microplastics found in oceans, rivers and lakes, and clothes made from synthetics (polyester, nylon, and so on) are widely implicated as the source of that pollution.
You're right, it is pretty obvious
"The chronic biological effects in marine organisms results due to accumulation of microplastics in their cells and tissues. The potential hazardous effects on humans by alternate ingestion of microparticles can cause alteration in chromosomes which lead to infertility, obesity, and cancer."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28815367
"Not only is the potential migration of the plastics throughout our body a concern, but the additives in plastics may carry health risks. Many of these additives are known endocrine disrupters. According to Dr. Herbert Tilg, president of the Austrian Society of Gastroenterology and chair of the UEG Scientific Committee, microplastics could possibly be one of the factors contributing to inflammatory bowel syndrome or even colon cancer, which is on the rise among young adults."
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/10/22/659568662/mi...
We're still learning a lot about the hormonal effects of consuming microplastics and plasticizers (among other things) but it's all pointing in some pretty nasty directions, and until recently we didn't have much awareness of how much of the stuff we were consuming. We have to decide how much of the stuff we're going to try and prevent from entering the environment and our water supply, and I wouldn't want the people making that determination to be informed by ideas like "well, it's not as dangerous as uranium or lead so let's just not worry about it."
E. coli, arsenic and heavy metals don't really have the same economic and lobbying power the plastic industry does.
Tobacco and climate change give us better models for how easy it is to suppress or cast doubt on pretty solid evidence if there's a profit to be made in doing so.
Microplastics aren't necessarily dangerous like those things, but they've been shown to be potentially dangerous in different ways. Really acute problems of the sort you're thinking of, like long-term cancer risk and short-term infection risk, can be considered alongside reduced fertility in men and developmental problems in infants and children.