Microplastics Are Blowing in the Wind | Hacker News Reader

Microplastics Are Blowing in the Wind

scientificamerican.com

236 pointspseudolus118 comments

Well, you can forget about worrying about whether microplastics are harmful to the environment, because they are out there now, all over the damn place and there's no going back. Plastic is literally and figuratively the 20th century turning itself to dust and getting sucked up in Earth's massive recycling systems. It's in everything from seawater to freshwater to salt (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/micro...) to the air we breathe. It's in the entire food web--our food, our food's food, our food's food's food, and our feces of course (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/news-...). And it's bad for everybody (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-fish-to-huma...). It will be in sediment for aeons, a permanent part of Earth's story, forever. There is absolutely zero chance of ever cleaning it all up.

Good job, 20th century. And right on, 21st century! We really doubled down on money-making at the expense of the environment!

After sifting through the dust, if they ever figured out that it was our refuse, future intelligent beings might well refer to us, quite aptly, as trash monkeys.

Trash monkeys - sounds like a punk band.

Don't worry, we can still worry - now the question is, how much more should we add to the environment beyond what is already there?

Up to the point where our profits start to dip.

Leaving aside the environmental damage, which is obvious albeit somewhat sensationalized in this comment, how is said plastic actually harming human health today?

The article from Scientific America in the comment refers to the harm plastic can have in other animals in words such as "may", "might", "could". Has there been any study on how it is, now and actually, harming our health? Any measurements, case studies, or collective data from people suffering from any sort of disease related to plastic pollution?

Has there been any study on how it is, now and actually, harming our health? Any measurements, case studies, or collective data from people suffering from any sort of disease related to plastic pollution?

No.

Note that this does not mean they're safe. It means we don't know if they're safe, or the extent to which they're harmful if they're dangerous. It goes from "we got lucky, it's all going to be fine" to "literally everyone will die from the plastics equivalent of asbestosis in the near future". If that doesn't scare the living shit out of you then you've misunderstood the scale of the problem.

But the environment is full of particulate matter. To fasten on this stuff as a special threat is, unreasonable? Sensationalist? Unscientific?

Personally I have only so much emotional energy to spend, and I spend it on real issues. Not made-up ones.

In all honesty, you're probably right to not waste (a lot of) energy worrying about it. The best you can do is not use many plastics and advocate for better policies to reduce, reuse, and recycle the plastics are out there, as well as cleanup programs for the huge problems like the macroplastics in the ocean currently.

As for "the environment is full of tons of stuff", microplastics are pretty new to the biosphere, so who knows what we should suspect? Personally I think microplastics are bad at all scales, and it'll just get worse. They weaken individuals, species, and whole ecosystems right as we're delivering them a big punch in the gut with habitat destruction, overfishing, and climate change. Are they what's going to kill the world? Nah, maybe only #4 on the list. Only!

No, maybe #220, if they're on the list at all. An nth-order effect.

If we treat microplastics as a symptom of business-as-usual, then they are a marker, and we can think of them as the canary in the coal mine. Entropically, we dug up a bunch of dead stuff and either burned it into the air or refined it into plastic, which we are now mixing into the biosphere at all scales. What other effluents are we dispersing that will have unwanted effects?

Structurally, we concentrate exotic materials and then disperse them. Nothing like that has ever happened at global scale to life before. The economic changes to achieve a system that doesn't make this its default trend are almost unthinkable. That's what I see as the real #4 (or whatever) on the list.

It is by no means unreasonable or unscientific to suspect whether plastics in your stool, the air and water around is a special threat. Animal studies have shown cause for concern. Sensationalist? Perhaps.

I've used this information to try to eke out my single use plastic use. (Use of single use plastic? single plastic use?)

Here's a study:http://www.fao.org/3/a-i7677e.pdf

The cause for concern?

"Adverse effects of microplastics ingestion have only been observed in aquatic organisms under laboratory conditions, usually at very high exposure concentrations that exceed present environmental concentrations by several orders of magnitude"

[deleted]

This is utterly bizarre. Do you literally believe no epidemiological study of the effects of plastics on human health has occurred?

Googling epidemiological study of the effects of plastics on human health is a decent place to start.

Asking about it here on hn is very definitely not.

Do you literally believe no epidemiological study of the effects of plastics on human health has occurred?

The question was about plastic pollution, and specifically the effect of micro plastic particulates on humans. I couldn't find anything after a cursory search, although to be honest I don't really know what terms I should be searching for.

> words such as "may", "might", "could".

It's Earth, not a deployment you can rollback, we don't get to play that game.

We're talking hundreds or thousands of years before we'll know how bad we fucked up. Almost every life forms on the planet are linked one way or another, every changes has an impact.

Remember when DDT, asbestos and lead plumbing were harmless to humans ? Then they were classified as "could" be dangerous or "may" be harmful. Now they're straight up banned everywhere.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5918521/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780651/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-fish-to-huma...

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-dangerous-are-mic...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor

https://environmentjournal.online/articles/microplastic-poll...

>It's Earth, not deployment you can rollback, we don't get to play that game.

>We're talking hundreds or thousands of years before we'll know how bad we fucked up. Almost every life forms on the planet are linked one way or another, every changes has an impact.

>Remember when DDT, asbestos and lead plumbing were harmless to humans ? Then they were classified as "could" be dangerous or "may" be harmful. Now they're straight up banned everywhere.

This is exactly the kind of emotional appeals the GP is complaining about. There are tons of different substances you come into contact with on a day to day basis. Most of them will not be harmful in any reasonable quantity. If paper or cotton clothing was invented today the parchment and wool industries would be talking up how it's not proven to not be harmful. Yes, some plastics are probably bad even in small concentrations. Just from a common sense point of view it's highly unlikely that all plastics are bad in all concentrations. No you shouldn't ingest it intentionally. Yes, I'd like to see less plastics in the world. No I don't think it's going to be a massive future problem. If it really does turn out to be a serious problem we'll find a way to solve it. Remember when CFCs were going to deplete the ozone and give us all skin cancer?

I hate to be that guy but, did you read any of the links I provided ? It's not as if a weird hippie guy was predicting the end of the world. It's scientifically proven, measurable, it's right here, right now. And it's just the beginning of a very long process.

I read the first few and skimmed the rest. Yes plastics are a problem, the same way that smog in cities (mostly solved in developed nations) and CFCs were problems. None of them present an existential crisis to humanity. Sure we might spend a fraction of a percentage of global wealth dealing with the trade-offs of spewing plastic everywhere but we'll be fine in the long run.

> the same way that smog in cities (mostly solved in developed nations) and CFCs were problems.

"were" ?

Unless you live in the country side it _is_ an immediate problem to your health and a time bomb for the planet.

https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/

> mostly solved in developed nations

That's exactly the type of thinking that will destroy us. It's always China, or Russia, or developing countries, or your neighbours, or the damn democrats/republicans. Nobody wants to take responsibility. Let's continue to act like 8 years old while our home is slowly burning.

I think their point was that technological advancements have 'solved' the problem of smog in the cities that have the legal and physical infrastructure (i.e. developed) to implement the solutions. They did not seem to be saying that pollution is someone else's fault.

I live it one of these cities. In California. Beautiful landscape. Fields and mountains and ocean. My car is always covered in filth from the air. As is my balcony. I often stand atop a mountain and look out over the thick, visible layer of smog that tops the city - a city that has made vast progress in the last 4 decades. That progress has gotten us from nearly inhabitable to simply disgusting and unhealthy. Where are these solutions, exactly?

I don't live in a city with a smog problem, and this is not my area of expertise. I was just clarifying what I thought @dsfyu404ed was saying, since it seemed to me that @lm28469 had taken it out of context and jumped to a nasty reply that wasn't really pertinent to what was being claimed.

You could argue that @dsfu404ed's reply was actually way "nastier", as nonchalant as their attitude was, in the sense that it downplays the effects of "nasty" pollution in general.

That's the way I took it as well. And it is true in some places. When I first moved to the Los Angeles area long ago it was quite smoggy. But look at it now http://aqicn.org/city/los-angeles/ (all green = aqi reading less than 50).

Not sure how to reply to you directly @welearndnothing, I think we reached max depth?

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44738952 -- CFCs are on the rise again.

> Sure we might spend a fraction of a percentage of global wealth dealing with the trade-offs of spewing plastic everywhere but we'll be fine in the long run.

If you look at each large scale environmental issue in isolation, sure, there's a chance that it will be mitigated down the line.

But at what cost in the mean time?

Because this stuff is hitting vital and fragile ecosystems now at scales unprecedented.

Might I remind you that we are well into a mass extinction that shows no signs of slowing down?

With regard to microplastics, it's only a matter of time before we microbes learn to digest them. Those little guys are gonna be everybodies' best friends.

Because of the likelihood that microbes will be learning to eat plastic pretty soon, I don't see microplastics as being quite as daunting of a problem, in isolation.

But I take issue with your casual attitude and prioritization of humanity over the larger ecologies that humanity evolved in and depends on.

We absolutely need to be alert about this and other ecologically issues collectively.

First we have to wait for the science, then we have to wait for the establishment to deny the science, then we have to wait for the establishment to lobby against the science. In the post-truth, post-science zeitgeist, should we acquiesce to all these demands?

We got lucky with CFCs because there was a cheap alternative, so the industry didn't really push against it. We are seeing a very different outcome with climate change, and now we enter another very similar debate with microplastics.

> * If it really does turn out to be a serious problem we'll find a way to solve it.*

We can only dodge so many bullets, that is even if we can dodge the current bullet. If society can only solve problems after they become a tragedy, it just takes a slow building tragedy to end it.

> This is exactly the kind of emotional appeals the GP is complaining about.

According to the book “Emotional Intelligence” rational thought and emotion are two sides of the same coin.

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/sites/default/files/cstream...

I'm more concerned about runaway warming at the moment.

> Remember when DDT, asbestos and lead plumbing were harmless to humans ? Then they were classified as "could" be dangerous or "may" be harmful. Now they're straight up banned everywhere.

DDT is banned for agricultural use, but is still permitted (and used) for vector control (ex: controlling mosquitos).

Asbestos is banned in many applications, but still has permitted uses in the US, although there's an open proposal to further restrict use [1]

I wasn't able to find any evidence of permitted use of new lead plumbing, however; so that one might be straight up banned.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/asbestos/us-federal-bans-asbestos#notban...

I think the point is that we might not know the dangers, but regardless of if they are dangerous, they are here. So figuring out the danger is just a matter of telling us how screwed we are, when we usually want to find ways to prevent a possible disaster in advance.

It is a bit fatalistic. We still have to care about things not getting worse and all degrees of severity matter.

> Any measurements, case studies, or collective data from people suffering from any sort of disease related to plastic pollution?

Plasticizers are endocrine disruptors. Sperms counts have been decreasing world-wide for decades (if you're male, your sperm count is almost certainly significantly lower than your father's), and epidemiologists believe plastics in the environment are the cause.[0]

[0] https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero

Seems like that might solve the problem then. Lower fertility leading to decrease in population and less pollution. Only being slightly sarcastic.

Microplastics have a large surface area, and that gets covered with other pollutants.

Animals eat the plastic (which can pass through them without much harm, or can get lodged in their guts causing harm to that animal). When the animal has eaten the plastic they're also eating the other contaminents, and these get taken up b y the animal and anything that eats the animal.

Allergies, asthma and autoimmune disease rates are skyrocketing and it's not at all clear as to why.

Weirdly, as a scientist by training, I am quite unscientific when it comes to these kinds of things. Nature is exquisitely subtle and it can be really hard to "measure" these things when you may not even know what to measure for.

That said, I know full well that physiological chemistry can be sensitive with reaped to down isotopic distributions due to competing kinetic pathways, even though isotopes are supposed to "behave the same". Meanwhile, we're just about realizing that gut fauna can influence a bunch of stuff that ought to be "orthogonal".

So when it comes to wide scale exposure to things like this I typically keep an open mind because biology is crazy complex and most our models are woefully simplistic.

In any case global spread of microplastics can't really be good...

Whoops s/"can be sensitive with reaped to"/"can be sensitive"

Additionally, what I find particularly frightening and unsettling is the possibility that we'll never be able to know just how harmful microplastics are, due to the rapid loss of anything we could call a "control group" on the planet. Rapid industrialization and globalization has led to land, water, and sky all being infused with this stuff; are there populated areas anymore where we could point to and say "this place is untouched by microplastics" and compare the health of the people and ecosystem there to the affected areas?

Indeed. And, whatever organisms are/were most likely to die out because of exposure to microplastics, probably already have, given this shit is everywhere now. Sobering thought!

Insects

Good shout. Rather frightening thought.

Microplastics have been shown to concentrate environmental toxins, so maybe the microplastics absorb pesticides and deliver high-dosage kill pills to insects? It's a terrifying thought. I'm not an expert, so I couldn't say that is really happening, but it scares me.

> microplastics can leach hazardous chemicals, both those added to polymers during production and environmental pollutants like pesticides that are attracted to the surface of plastic

It's not that they absorb pesticides, but that pesticides are attracted to the surface. Smaller microplastics have greater surface area to volume ratio than the equivalent volume of larger pieces.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-fish-to-huma...

Well, there are solutions. One is to breed bacteria and other organisms that can digest plastic.

Not to say this is a solved problem, or something we shouldn't be concerned about, but the response "There is absolutely zero chance of ever cleaning it all up" here seems overly sensationalistic.

Their numbers are probably only going to increase now anyway, so no need to breed them.

That's the price of running after (technological) progress at all cost.

Nothing in our day to day life makes sense on an ecological level, nothing at all. Food, all our useless tech gadgets, ICE vehicles right next to where we live / sleep, being able to take the plane to go 1000km away for the price of a lunch in a restaurant, mass tourism, iot shit, 90% of startups, &c.

But we're comfy and warm, plus at the end of the day we get to watch the new junk netflix produced this week on our 4k tablet. The very same tablet we'll have to dump in 18 months when the battery dies and it'll cost more to replace it than to buy the next iteration. We can even go on internet places like HN and Twitter to virtue signal about how bad we're treating the planet (as I'm doing right now) while sending 0s and 1s to servers all around the world, you know, the same servers used to share picture of cats and fake news while consuming terawatts of electricity. But I get my daily costa rican banana, my japanese tea, I can eat meat at every meal, my smart light bulbs know my location and switches on when I arrive home, my company sponsored laptop costs 5 time the annual age of a Chadian, everything's fine.

We sacrificed the future for instant convenience and comfort, we more than deserve what's coming to us.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/tomorrow/electronic-was...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y

https://www.boredpanda.com/award-winning-chinese-photographe...

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/your-kitchen-and-the-...

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/43jgdn/you-can-blame-ins...

Financial progress - where progress is often change for change's sake - at all cost.

Cheaper wins, more profitable wins, regardless of whether good or not. Frequently when we already knew it's not (leaded petrol, radium on watch dials etc). Far more quickly since the changes of the 1980s - deregulation, privatisation, and so forth. If it wasn't deregulated enough, move it out of sight and offshore it somewhere with weaker standards.

So I would tend to say we sacrificed the future for an extra 0.5c on the dollar.

Yeah I think you are right about shaving costs. From the business perspective, you shave off 5 cents, times 10 million sales.. you got some serious $$$ there

Yep. Most people don't even seem to admit to themselves that they're doing a lot of harmful activities.

A lot of people like to say they're worried about the environment, but very few change their life in significant ways to help it.

How will any individual's actions counteract the approval of a single fracking or tar sand site? Or the choice by a supermarket to package everything in plastic, and continue to add to this in 2019? Or any other multi-national?

Starbucks straw-free solution was a plastic lid that uses more plastic than the straw.

Family made major changes, but it feels increasingly pointless, and increasingly like spiting ourselves for no reason. Every shop brings home more plastic, used in ever more profligate ways, and mostly impossible to avoid. What was the point changing?

It’s cumulative. Single use plastic should be highly taxed.

> Starbucks straw-free solution was a plastic lid that uses more plastic than the straw.

This may be true, but it was still a worthwhile initiative. The new lids can be recycled, whereas the straws couldn't[0], and their new policy has drawn a considerable amount of attention to the issue of single use plastics.

0: https://mic.com/articles/190171/starbucks-will-ban-plastic-s...

That's because it's hard. I've done it but I would be lying if I said it was easy or didn't have an impact on my life. Just this morning I had to fix a puncture on my bike before I could go to the shop, it's only ten minutes to fix but there are a lot of these frictions if you want to have a low impact lifestyle.

> very few change their life in significant ways to help it.

I did it, and it is really worth the effort.

What I changed:

- buy liquids in glass only -> healthier and reduced container garbage to 2/5

- use soda stream for mineral water

- buy fresh food -> healthier and reduces plastics packing

- buy used devices (where it makes sense) -> cars, phones, pc's etc. -> much cheaper, reduces waste -> don't be beta tester for newest products

- use rechargable batteries with smart recharger (to benefit the life cycle)

- avoid unfixable devices in general

- use grandma's household remedy, e.g. baking powder and vinegar instead of chemicals (packed in big one-way plastic bottles) to clean your house drains

There are many more tips in the Internet. For instance:

7 Ways to Support the Environment in 2018

https://www.care2.com/greenliving/7-ways-to-support-the-envi...

Further recommendations are appreciated.

You've shifted responsibility from the large scale producers of industrial waste to the individual consumer. Consumers do bear some responsibility for the current state of things, but the slow rogue AIs we've built called "corporations" bear the brunt of the responsibility. Trying to convince individuals to stop using single-use plastic bags is a losing battle. Creating a regulatory environment that makes the manufacturing and distribution of single use plastic bags difficult could actually help.

Corporations have done a pretty good job of misleading and distracting consumers, but it's not like the information isn't out there. I'm inclined to put at least half the blame on the people voting with their wallets here.

Most people don't have reasonable alternatives or any way to override the instinctual social mechanisms that drive their behavior.

Not to mention monopolies/oligopolies prevent real choice with most products.

No one can DIY everything.

> No one can DIY everything.

Well, technically they can, it's just that that sort of lifestyle is unrecognizable to us today, and would basically take all your time. They would be totally left behind by modern society, ie hermits.

I mean you're right in a unabomber type sense (i.e. living in a log cabin trapping small animals), but if I wanted to build my own smartphone from scratch, my whole lifetime is spent extracting materials to build the equipment required for making the smartphone. Even if I somehow made the smartphone, I would have immediately violated some patent law.

Even if I were a globe trotting immortal, I cannot legally DIY most common electronics because of patent law.

Sure you can. You just can’t sell the item.

That is true, but it is also true that most people who do have reasonable alternatives still don't take advantage of them. This could be due to laziness, inertia but mostly I'd guess comfort level. We live in a society where people yell at McDonalds employees if their stupid chicken nuggets isn't available one day, out of 5,000 days they've eaten there. Point being, most of us have become too comfortable and expect too much, while not doing enough ourselves at the same time.

Most of these things are very hard to analyze. Let me give you a real-life example.

This winter, my driveway developed some major cracks from the snow melt. How can I solve this problem responsibly?

Not fix it? Then I have to park on the street and drive my car unnecessarily to keep it out of the way of the plow. I will end up with craters and mud slide in my yard, a useless garage, and I'll probably have to fix it anyway if I want to use/resell my property.

Move to a warmer climate? Then someone else moves into my house and we've wasted resources just shuffling people about.

So what I will probably do is go to a company that does driveway repair and have them fix it, because then the space is usable and I don't have to change my whole life or live with a dangerous/ugly pit in my yard. But I can't tell you if they will do it efficiently. They're the experts, so obviously they know more than I do.

What would you do? What would anybody do? How am I supposed to both identify an environmentally-friendly alternative and muster the courage to act on it?

What would you do? What would anybody do?

I don't have an answer to this specific scenario that you described. That said, I wasn't saying we should all suddenly become 100% socially responsible overnight - it is just not practical.

There are lots of things that are super easy to do, and yet have positive influence on the environment, society etc. We can keep a handful of cloth bags handy, when we go grocery shopping. This isn't hard to do, and will help reduce plastic bags. We don't have to wait for legislation to act on this. We don't have to replace our perfectly working phone, every other year (or every year) and throw it in the landfill. And so on.

These are definitely small compared to the pollution caused by corporations. But corporations exist to sell to consumers. Plus, change has to start somewhere. Why not start at home?

>We can keep a handful of cloth bags handy, when we go grocery shopping.

That probably doesn't help. A cotton bag requires about 130x more resources to produce than a standard HDPE carrier bag. If you re-use a plastic bag three times, you'd need to use your cotton bag nearly 400 times to break even. The cotton bag is likely to wear out substantially sooner than that. The plastic bag can be disposed of responsibly by recycling, incineration or as a container for non-recyclable domestic waste.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Isn't that hypocritical though? You want to assign blame to me for not bringing cloth bags, yet you want to coddle me for making that mistake by offering me free plastic bags when I forget? Perhaps I would be more incentivized to bring cloth bags if I had to suffer some for not doing so. Make me buy some at the register, run to my car to retrieve them, or make multiple trips. (Point in fact, I have cloth bags in my car, but I have not once remembered to bring them into a store. Habits are not easy to form. And I'll be thought rude to run to my car after dumping groceries on the checkout line rather than using the provided bags.)

It doesn't really matter who you blame in this case, because the solution is the same either way: stop allowing stores to offer free plastic bags.

And if anyone would accuse my of rationalizing my inefficiencies, then that is just one more reason why you cannot trust individuals to make the right choices.

You are expecting someone to say "do this, do that"? This is the opposite of responsibility. One possible responsible way is to learn how the natural biotope in your area looks like and then apply it to your problem. This does not mean to leave some ugly "natural" pit unusable for you there. Instead, recognize ways how nature fights erosion, and then combine stones or permeable pavement with the same plants that do it naturally.

How to muster the courage... I don't know, that's very personal. But it's encouraging to know humans communicated in this manner with their natural environment for thousands of years.

The driveway problem isn't a major problem in my life. It's practically already solved. I cannot go around turning every minor problem into a mountain of effort, and it'd be stupid to think that everybody doing this is going to fix the environment. I won't do it. And nobody else will either.

If they were going to do it, it would already be done. The reason we haven't done it yet is the same reason we won't ever do it. Individual responsibility is not a solution here, so I'd rather we not bet the future of humanity on it being one.

> I'm inclined to put at least half the blame on the people voting with their wallets here.

I don't agree. The sheer volume of information that's available in the public space and the size and scope of large corporations makes "voting with their wallets" impractical.

There's a huge proportion of the population that doesn't even have the luxury of voting with their wallets because the only thing they can afford is the cheapest possible. Cost of living has gone significantly up in the last two or three decades.

Also a bunch of companies out there are actually under some megacorp. Have fun completely cutting off Nestle or Unilever out of your life[0], for example. The information is there, but it's delusional to think everyone can manage to avoid all these brands altogether for various reasons (access to alternatives, price vs. income, etc.).

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/companies-control-e...

Easy to tell people to vote with their wallet, harder to provide them with real alternatives.

I understand your point, though I think the single-use plastic bag argument isn't a great one [1]

[1] https://qz.com/1585027/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-cotto...

This article explicitly says:

> This assessment does not take marine litter into account—so as far as that gigantic problem is concerned, plastics are almost certainly the worst

> we more than deserve what's coming to us

But do our children

Not having any seems more reasonable every day.

Eh. Plastic packaging is unnecessary for progress. Paper was and is always an option for packaging. This specific case seems more like an arbitrary screw up here rather than a price for progress.

The Plasticene.

"Give it fifty million years, and all that will be left of our era will be a layer of rock an eighth of an inch thick with an unusually large number of radioactive isotopes and some odd carbon compounds."

What's the deal with the over the top misanthropy we see in so many people with an environmental cause? Is it a cultural thing?

Maybe it comes off as kind of edgy. Or maybe they're enjoying a preemptive "I told you so - idiots!" victory lap.

This attitude does not make me take your point seriously. It sets off my ideologue detector.

Well, it's occasionally hard to see clear evidence that earth (or, specifically, tolerable conditions for human life on it) is rapidly heading towards the shitter - and there are plenty of people who'd rather go ad hominem than engage with the scientific evidence of the problem at hand.

In other words: You are the deal.

pointing out a pattern of strange behavior != denying scientific consensus.

Way to make the parent's point with a misanthropic misunderstanding of what was actually said.

In the long run, the lack of a core mechanism to accurately price externalities will perhaps be the dominating failure mode of capitalism.

People go length before considering Capitalism may have failed as a framework for organizing society.

I couldn't agree more with the long term consequences. Maybe someday we will target these plastics with plastic eating microbes.

Is warming not the more pressing issue? Given recent findings about permafrost decline in the artic? By some estimates we may have 50-100 years at best before things get really bad, and we are already undergoing a mass extinction event.

>Maybe someday we will target these plastics with plastic eating microbes.

I expect they will come along on their own.

I completely agree with your point! It's so important for all of us to change our lifestyles, but nobody wants to trade in convenience for long-sightedness if they have the choice.

What makes me more angry than anything else are the obviously evitable things like the sprinkle pool in San Francisco's Museum of ice cream. This kind of pollution could so easily be avoided without making huge changes to our lifestyle: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/San-Francisco-Museum-of...

I am fine with this, another twist in humanity's play.

Just to point out that for decades there has been asbestos flying around in the air many of us breathe, yet asbestos-related diseases not related to habitual exposure are incredibly rare.

How do we know that? Isn’t it just as likely to cause an amortised increase in diseases world wide , which is hard to measure, let alone attribute?

I’m not saying “we can’t measure it therefore it’s harmful”, but the opposite can’t be true by default, either.

I really don't think I'm saying anything controversial here:

'Most people who develop asbestos-related diseases have worked on jobs where they frequently breathed in large amounts of asbestos fibres.'

'A very small number of asbestos-related disease cases occur each year in people who have not worked with asbestos products.'

http://www.health.gov.au/internet/publications/publishing.ns...

Add smoke from wood fires, pollen and microbes from flora, Cross infection from living in close proximity to livestock, and balance that all out against better hygiene standards, better nutrition etc. Micro plastics don't seem like a great thing, but we're probably going to be OK with it in the environment.

Plastic is a lot more ubiquitous and less biodegradable though

We passed strict laws to protect us from it.

I, for one, support following that precedent by passing strict laws limiting plastic.

And we mandate by law in more developed nations that workers exposed to dust of whatever kind use PPE. Your point is a bit of a red herring when applied to asbestos really, because there is still plenty of atmospheric asbestos from historical sources blowing around (Wittenoom) and indeed being newly produced (Asbest, Russia). Don't get me wrong though, I completely agree that it's desirable to limit it if economically viable but I'm not about to start worrying my little head about it when tomorrow there will be another civilisation-threatening environmental/health/economic/social problem to worry about, and the day after, and the day after that, apparently ad infinitum. I'm sick of the negativity. The modern world isn't perfect but is preferable to the alternative. We need to start thinking of solutions.

Here we are on a forum with highly educated ppl. talking about what's happening. But what should we do to effect change? It seems to me that some way for us to unite our efforts in some modern internet/technology/mass-communication kinda way might help us break through the barriers to actually making progress. I honestly don't know what that looks like, but I believe if even the ppl. on this thread were able to band together effectively to work on this problem that is whatever-it-is-our-worlds-become I would have hope. I don't know what this "solution" looks like though. A website? A forum? A technology of some form? Unfortunately, I don't think anyone else knows either :(

We know what it looks like because it has been done in the past: Join/form a union with your fellow workers. Use your political power -- including threats of strikes and other acts of non-compliance or civil disobedience -- to demand meaningful changes to the structure of our society. You're right, the work of many people on HN is crucial to the logic and function of the current system. United, they could hold significant power over it.

There are groups all over the world with intimate knowledge of every thematic and regional issue working their brains & hearts out trying to effect change. Reinventing wheels is a luxury our living planet doesn't have the time for right now. If you feel strongly about one of the many ways our 'civilisation' is killing our common home, join up with a group you find congenial. The best action is one you can maintain over time, so find something you think you'll enjoy.

Tech isn't a cheap & easy shortcut unfortunately. It's already used with some sophistication all over the world. Attention is in short supply, and grabbing it tends to be expensive or risky. Personally I think Extinction Rebellion is on to something - they've done their empirical homework and are willing to take the necessary risks. But only time will tell.

We all might be dead before it pays off, but on the upside this could lead organisms the world over to figure out how to deal with our plastics problem.

It feels like this development will eventually force us to "help evolution" in this regard and heavily invest in engineering plastic eating organisms that can sustainably live in the environment.

We might not need to engineer them, they already evolved, and they might succeed us.

Wikipedia suggests the first man-made plastics were made around 1856. I'm not sure 163 years is enough time for evolution to do it's thing.

For bacteria that is more than 10000 generations.

For microorganisms it's plenty of time. Things with very short reproductive cycles can evolve quicker than humans. In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex... they state that the e. coli went through 66,000 generations in 28 years. That allows for a very large amount of genetic differences to respond to environmental pressures.

It already has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis

Sure they exist but we could and perhaps should make them more efficient?

"Scientists accidentally create mutant enzyme that eats plastic bottles"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/16/scientis...

"The _planet_ is fine. The _people_ are fucked." - George Carlin

Anyone know of any water filters for home use that absolutely 100% filter out microplastics? Brita has no mention of it on their website, and I'm guessing if they don't, competitors most likely don't either.

I'd look at ceramic water filters. Seems like microplastics would slowly work their way through sediment-based filters.

EDIT: quick google search also points at 'carbon block' and reverse osmosis filters

How dangerous are microplastics?

We'll see in a few years. We just don't know the long-term effects yet. And even if we stopped using plastic today, we probably haven't reached peak microplastic yet.

i can imagine this stuff works miracles for our lungs too

It's likely to be negligible relative to everything else that gets into our lungs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com