Visualising the amount of microplastic we eat
graphics.reuters.com
graphics.reuters.com
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/
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.
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
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?
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.
Obviously, my grandma isn't 40% plastic.
I was imagining things like plastic molecules wearing off the inside of an overused water bottle and consumed with the water
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.