Nanoplastics accumulate in land-plant tissues: study | Hacker News Reader

Nanoplastics accumulate in land-plant tissues: study

sciencedaily.com

230 pointsinstance120 comments

Plastics is an example when market economy fails. Plastics is to cheap to buy and manufacture so it’s found everywhere. Ie plastics is an example of tradegedy of the commons where to purchaser of plastics benefits but everyone else sees a loss of the environment.

Trying to explain we need to develop an economic model better than market economy or else earth will become a big waste dump. Ie we need to prize the waste.

Tragedy of the commons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_common

Environmental economics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_economics

The market seems like any system really. It can be stable, but this is only common with a diverse array of variables. Otherwise it gets into positive or negative feedback loops. Human behavior acts as a dampener or an amplifier.

No, this is not an example of the tragedy of the commons. It is simply a negative externality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative

And I guess it is an example of market failure in the technical sense but I don't think I would phrase that as "when a market economy fails" as it is not clear whether you are talking colloquially or technically.

EDIT: Just to clarify why it is critical to be specific, positive externalities are also market failures. Caring about a technical market failures is a bit abstract, I would not lose sleep over it, they happen.

Caring about a negative externalities and advocating for them to be internalized is a lot more concrete and actionable and not something I think anybody really disagrees with on paper.

You will have more practical disagreements though because it is unlikely that microplastics being used in say Denmark has the same environmental impact as microplastics being used in say Asia or Africa: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti... and applying a tax to people in Denmark won't result in the externality being internalized in Nigeria.

Nigeria can easily make the same argument for Denmark then nothing ever changes.

Well I mean they could but they would have to provide actual data (similar to what I cited) to back it up. Just because people can make absurd claims is not a good reason to entertain them.

> Caring about a negative externalities and advocating for them to be internalized is a lot more concrete and actionable and not something I think anybody really disagrees with on paper.

Nobody would let you write it down on paper. But a lot of corporations put a lot of money and effort into preventing this from happening. I believe almost all of our economic woes could be fixed with an economic approach that treated negative externalities as an expected and common case in a free market and actively pursued policies to mitigate them (as opposed to idolising the free part of "free markets" and treating regulation to fix externalities as a last resort).

> Nobody would let you write it down on paper.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, it's a regularly advocated for position at all levels.

> it's a regularly advocated for position at all levels.

The position that we shouldn't internalise negative externalities? Who is openly advocating for this?

Oh I see, sorry, I interpreted the exact opposite.

I thought that might be the case. No worries!

> it is unlikely that microplastics being used in say Denmark has the same environmental impact as microplastics being used in say Asia or Africa

Did you ever wonder why Asia and Africa are responsible for so much pollution ? I'm asking that because any amount of research will show you that first world countries are sending hundreds of tons of appliances, computers, smartphones, &c. per day over there for them to be "recycled", and by "recycled" I meant burned/melted in open air dumps. (And also because they're manufacturing all our shitty ultra short lived gadgets, cloths, &c.)

It's literally like throwing your shit on the neighbours lawn and blaming them. Actually it's even worse now that China told us to fuck off with our trash.

> Until recently, half of the collected plastic – especially low-grade plastic – was exported to China, but China has completely stopped its [used plastic] imports. Therefore the majority of plastic will likely end up burnt while just 15 percent will be recycled”

Are we talking about the future of Humanity or about "it's not my problem it didn't happen in the country I was born in" .... we're doomed. The world is a closed eco system so of fucking course the European plastic and the African plastic will eventually end up in your plate (especially if the Europen plastic is sent to Africa for "recycling")

https://www.thelocal.dk/20180910/danes-are-sorting-more-plas...

Well Asia and Africia also often lack proper garbage infastructures in many areas (they are kind of big continents) in addition to being poor enough to wind up regularly taking external trash.

> Did you ever wonder why Asia and Africa are responsible for so much pollution

I hate to parse words but the nuance is important. They are not responsible. Yes, they generate it. But the responsibility belongs to the source (i.e., countries up the economic / development food chain.)

This is why it persists: out of sight, out of mind. Nearly all the consumers in the source countries are oblivious to their contributions. Enlightening them would throttle the consumption-based economy. That's not good for profits.

That's because humans act on a country-scale. We need planetary scale to act reasonably on matters like that. Until then it's always cheaper to exploit poor countries rather than building proper waste recycling. And for some strange reason world government is not happening.

>> ... over there for them to be "recycled", and by "recycled" I meant burned/melted in open air dumps.

I thought the Basel convention covered this in some way. Larry Summers had (has?) a rather infamous opinion on this [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo

> Caring about a negative externalities and advocating for them to be internalized is a lot more concrete and actionable

It's less concrete and actionable than you'd think, because measuring (and therefore identifying and internalizing) externalities requires utility assessments, and experienced utility is subjective and immeasurable and it's very, very easy for ones preferred outcome to influence one’s choice of utility estimator. (And even easier for it to lead you to find an excuse to dismiss someone else’s.)

> and not something I think anybody really disagrees with on paper.

I think the general opinion of both the Chicago and Austrian schools is that efforts to internalize externalities are generally a bad idea, and in the Austrian case specifically wrong on principal.

Public figures adhering to those viewpoints are likely to couch them in circumlocution outside of addresses to selected audiences because they are very large groups with which they are dealbreaker positions, but they aren't exactly obscure positions.

> I think the general opinion of both the Chicago and Austrian schools is that efforts to internalize externalities are generally a bad idea, and in the Austrian case specifically wrong on principal.

Why?

What is the distinction between negative externality and tragedy of the commons. I had always figured the latter was an example of the former.

Tragedy of the commons is exhaustion of a shared renewable resource as everyone has the incentive to take now when they can and none to steward its growth. Negative externalities are a cost bared by people external to the activity. A common example would be pollution of air or water.

In that view, the air and water are on their way to exhaustion, but not exhausted. So perhaps tragedy of the commons could be viewed as an endpoint on the same process. It’s certainly caused by externalities. (Grazing has costs to others, who lose the ability to graze)

> applying a tax to people in Denmark won't result in the externality being internalized in Nigeria

What if Denmark imposes a tariff equal to the tax on imported plastic goods from any countries not implementing such a tax?

Nigeria doesn't export much plastic to Denmark, or to anywhere, really, so it has very little impact either way.

Why is it not a tragedy of the commons?

"The tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource through their collective action."

In this case, given that everyone else is going to use plastics, it is in my interest to use them too. But I would be better off (maybe) if noone used them. Does that not fit the definition?

The important bit is "by depleting or spoiling the shared resource".

Plastic is not a "shared resource". It's not at risk of depletion or "spoilage". It's obviously the opposite problem.

I think the example with the sheep makes it perfectly clear what the concept is and isn't.

Soil and oceans are shared resources, which we're (probably) spoiling by permeating them with countless minuscule bits of plastic.

Or maybe I don't properly understand what "spoil" means.

The spoil is by polluting shared natural resources that we depend on for quality of life. Such as clean water, clean air an functional eco system that provides enough oxygen, stable earth temperature.

“The tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource through their collective action.” It is definitely a Tragedy of the Commons at least according to the Wikipedia definition...

Seconded. Both concepts apply, as is very common.

Attempting to generalize: A tragedy of the commons is when everyone would be better off if everyone avoided an action which produces more negative externalities than captured value, but each one is individually better off if they take that action, so most do take it.

The world's first synthetic plastic was invented in 1907, and the field has since expanded to include a wide range of variant materials that have permeated nearly every aspect of our lives. I think it's hard to understand the net quality of life benefits that plastics in general have brought to humanity because most of us alive today were born into a world where these great technical achievements have already suffused daily life, so it's easy to take them for granted, while we are only now beginning to discover some of their negative consequences. For example, single use plastics: largely unnecessary in most cases, although not all -- think medical applications. Non-renewable sourcing: the production of many of these materials is contributing to a carbon debt that we're only now beginning to understand the magnitude of. Etc etc... But don't "throw the baby out with the bathwater." I don't think the market economy failed with plastics. The scale of their production and myriad applications was and continues to be an incredible success with both positive and negative externalities. The market needs to adjust given society's new understanding that we've gone too far in some areas, and not far enough in others. As people become aware of the environmental persistence of materials like polystyrene (tradename Styrofoam) for example, and are offered biodegradable, price-competitive offsets, they'll stop buying polystyrene. Closed-loop recycling, carbon capture, renewable sourcing etc are all examples of course corrections that will hopefully gain steam in the market and point us in the right direction.

I wish we would use less plastic and packaging in general. Its depressing when you buy a product and it has layers and layers of packaging. When I visited a poor part of Mexico in 2000 they still had a system where you purchased a soda in a glass bottle and then returned it for a small refund from the place you purchased it. If a poor city in Mexico does this why cant we do so in the USA? Please do understand that in almost all other ways though this city in Mexico had garbage ever-where.

Glass bottles are being removed more and more in Sweden, and it would be interesting to see the microplastic waste created by recycled plastics, and the comparative energy requirements to produce and ship a glass bottle vs. a plastic bottle - Esp. plastic made from plants or sugar cane.

All soda/beer bottles and cans sold give you a small refund, and pretty much all waste is recycleable in some way. Slightly dependent on infrastructure in your vicinity, but most municipalities ought to be able to recycle food waste, cardboard, plastic, glass, and metal easily.

Bottles aren't a substantial source of microplastics, partly because they're easily recycled. In developed countries synthetic fibers like polyester and abrasion from tires are two of the largest contributors to environmental microplastics; there's no capturing system in place whatsoever, yet they're ubiquitous in modern life. See https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documen...

"the net quality of life benefits that plastics in general have brought to humanity"

The plastics production before the late 60's had virtually no impact compared to what followed. Quality of life when i was a child was just fine.

> Quality of life when i was a child was just fine.

I bet you grew up in the West or Japan. Otherwise across Africa, China, India, quality of life for the average person is massively better now than in the 60’s.

Yes but their improvment of quality of life as absolutely nothing to do with them using plastic, which is what the subject of the conversation is about.

Cheap, disposable plastic contributed a lot to globalization. It is easier to preserve food in plastic wrap. In addition, it is much lighter and/or cheaper than metal and thus easier to transport long distances. Global trade was probably the biggest driver for the improvement of the quality of life in the places mentioned.

Whenever there is a faulty complex system (economic, civic government, other) people insist we need an entirely new system. But if you design a car with faulty brakes, you don't invent a brand new car. You fix the brakes.

It doesn't seem immediately obvious how we could change a market economy to resist negative externalities, but I think it's the best solution (especially when the system is well studied).

> if you design a car with faulty brakes, you don't invent a brand new car. You fix the brakes.

Funny, this immediately came to mind:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/car-manufacturers/volks...

> “The Kombi was designed 60 years ago so it would not be possible now to put an airbag and ABS into the car. That’s why we now have to stop production,” said Jochen Funk, director of sales for VW Brazil.

So yeah, maybe we've been driving a (now 70)-year old Kombi and trying to convince ourselves one day we'll be able to just bolt ABS brakes on it.

If what we have today is a market econmy, then a market economy is perfectly acceptable way to address the issue: taxes of some sort.

taxes aren't a silver bullet. if the affected companies were to just pass the extra cost to consumers (why wouldn't they?), then you effectively have implemented a regressive tax that affects the poorest consumers the most.

clearly there's more to it than that, but assuming that the market can address any negative externalities just with taxes is pretty naive IMO

I heard of this first with respect to a carbon tax, but one solution is to evenly redistribute the collected tax among all citizens. This way, the market can internalize the externality while keeping the average person no poorer.

You set the price of the tax equal to the mitigation cost. In this way consumers pay to mitigate. If mitigation is coat prohibitive, consumers substitute products that are not harmful.

Edit: W.r.t. regressive taxation... No one has the right to force their externalities on someone else. Just because you are poor doesn't mean you can dump your garbage on my lawn because it's cheaper than paying to haul it to the dump.

That isn't how pigouvian taxes work. The point is adjusts the price so that it correctly includes all external costs not already reflected in the costs. It is not about raising revenue to deal with the problem, but changing relative incentives.

For this reason, if the tax is regressive, its perfectly OK for the revenue to be redistributed in tax breaks to lower income.

Affected Company A passes the 1% cost increase of the tax to the consumer.

Affected Company B changes their packaging, e.g. to recycled paper, to avoid the tax at a 0.1% cost increase and passes it to the consumer.

You tell me what happens next.

Problem is company B increased their costs by 5% to avoid the tax. Plastics are so cheap compared to alternatives that this is a real situation.

The very companies that cause that cause the negative externalities hire lobbyists and buy politicians to write the tax code.

Would things be any different in a different type of economy? I think that's ba political failure, not a market failure. I think at the very least, you're likely to run into corruption issues no matter what economic model you use.

Economists solved this problem a long time ago; Pigouvian taxes. No need to dump markets. You just make them pay for their externalities.

This is an externality, and the best role of government in a market economy is to tax externalities such that the tax imposed is enough to "fix" the externality. Fixing it would be extremely expensive, so it would make plastics only viable where they are needed most, and in applications where there is tracking and accountability in recycling and waste management.

Also note two major flaws in your reasoning about trying to blame pollution as a "market economy" failure.

1. The US military is the biggest single polluter around [0], outside of perhaps some "non-market-economy" country's militaries like China and Russia. It's hard to know exactly how much damage they do and impossible to hold them accountable for it. The substances they leak into groundwater tend to be worse than plastics. Good luck finding a government model that doesn't have a military.

2. Most of the microplastics in the ocean are coming from third world countries, where there simply isn't enough wealth for there to be political willpower to reduce externalized pollution.

The real solution we need is more futuristic waste management technologies that can break down harmful pollutants and turn them into usable material, and I expect they will come from the "market economy."

[0] https://qz.com/1655268/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter-than...

It makes me wonder if, in 50-100 years, plastics will be the "lead paint" of my generation.

Plastics are undeniably useful, but it does seem like the unforeseen consequences might be too large to ignore at this point. I just hope that it doesn't have neurological problems.

Isn't any potential, as yet unknown, health risk vastly outweighed by the proven benefits in food safety and disease control?

From the known risks, yes, but the unknown risks seem to possibly include biodiversity collapse and other terrible things. I think we can remain cautious either way, keep using plastic for food where it is necessary and reduce other plastics elsewhere.

> the unknown risks seem to possibly include biodiversity collapse and other terrible things

Can you expand on that? It's not the topic of the linked paper and DDG doesn't show much on a link between biodiversity collapse (a proven problem) and nanoplastics.

And what other terrible things might they cause?

I believe this main comment thread, and GP in particular, is about plastics in general, and not limited to nanoplastics. Thus it involves (big) plastic ingestion and plastic islands blocking chunks of the ocean.

Fair point. Then what's the link between plastics in general and biodiversity collapse and other terrible things?

That fact that animals end up with plastic in their digestive systems is quite uncontroversially a terrible thing, wouldn't you agree? I can't elaborate on the potential biodiversity collapse, as I didn't make that comment.

Edit: Clearly I just gave the easiest example, not the most relevant one. A basic Google search points to [1], for instance, where you find observations such as

If algae and plankton communities are threatened, the entire food web may change. Animals that feed on algae and plankton, such as fish and turtles, will have less food. If populations of those animals decrease, there will be less food for apex predators such as tuna, sharks, and whales. Eventually, seafood becomes less available and more expensive for people.

These dangers are compounded by the fact that plastics both leach out and absorb harmful pollutants. As plastics break down through photodegradation, they leach out colorants and chemicals, such as bisphenol A (BPA), that have been linked to environmental and health problems. Conversely, plastics can also absorb pollutants, such as PCBs, from the seawater. These chemicals can then enter the food chain when consumed by marine life.

So, I frankly haven't carefully looked into the prospects of "biodiversity collapse", but even that stark term sounds justified. Surely another terrible thing, in any event.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/great-pacifi...

Humans breed, torture, and kill billions of fish, birds, and mammals intentionally, every year.

Given that, why should we care about accidentally killing a few on the side?

Are you vegan?

Not yet.

You have to integrate over a period of time that includes the future, so it's impossible to tell (without a reliable oracle.)

What if those benefits in food safety and disease control could be solved with less disastrous means in let's say a timeline of another 50 years, but the current dumping of microplastics into all soil and groundwater systems is near unfixable for thousands of years?

the way I see it is it's much faster and easier to ruin something than to fix it.

> Isn't any potential, as yet unknown, health risk vastly outweighed by the proven benefits

It's irrational to assert that "unknown" risks are outweighed by known/"proven" benefits.

By definition, the risks are unknown.

Not quite; you can put an upper bound on the "badness" of unknown harms, because if it was bad enough, we'd have detected it already.

For a reductio ad absurdum proof, imagine that microplastics kill you on contact. This would show up in the death statistics very quickly. So in practice we can say with confidence that the possible unknown harms don't include mortality effects above a certain level.

There's definitely room for effects that we'd consider to be serious like "reduces male sperm counts by 50% over decades of exposure" or "increases cancer rates by 100%", but it's certainly possible (indeed, the correct and rational way of approaching this problem) to attempt to bound the upper limit of harm based on what we should be able to detect.

Note, I'm not commenting on the object-level question of _whether_ the benefits outweigh the costs or whether this is known; I would like to see a citation for that as I've not seen such an analysis. I'm just addressing the meta-level question of if it's possible to know.

Are there really that many tremendous public health benefits? Autoclaves, steel, cardboard, and wax paper did the job for decades.

At what cost. Autoclaves use a lot of energy. I don't know how they compare, but I doubt you do either.

Depends on the type of plastic and what was used in its manufacture. Most plastics eventually degrade into water and carbon dioxide. However, until they are completely broken down they cause all sorts of problems not the least of which is mentioned in the article.

Some plastics like PLA and PHA are highly unlikely to cause problems 50-100 years in the future because they don't last that long unless carefully preserved. California funded a study of how long it takes PLA and PHA to break down in the ocean and figured out that PHA is basically gone in six months while PLA will last about 3 years:

https://www2.calrecycle.ca.gov/Publications/Download/1006?op...

> Most plastics _eventually_ degrade into water and carbon dioxide.

Plastic straw decomposition:

200 years [0]

Plastic bootle decomposition:

450 years [0]

PLA is a fraction of the world's plastic pollution. Mixing in this marginal example is misleading. We shouldn't downplay the decomposition time of _most_ plastics. Plastics and fossil fuel emissions are the asbestos of our time.

Single-use plastic, outside medical applications, should be banned worldwide.

[0] https://www.wwf.org.au/news/blogs/the-lifecycle-of-plastics

By the way there is a solution to this plastic issue. Compostable plastics are a reality. See, for example, www.naturtec.com.

We could have a world where all cheap plastics that are not expected to last (e.g., water bottles, cutlery, packaging, bags) are compostable, and the expensive high performance long lasting plastics (e.g., those that are part of cars, computers, etc.) are made of traditional plastics. The latter will not create waste because they are expensive and would not be discarded willy nilly in large quantities. Hopefully they will be thrown in a proper landfill. The former will simply decompose regardless of how they are discarded (although for purely aesthetic reasons it is preferable they be discarded in a designated compost bins).

At this point the barrier is not technological, it is purely political. We just need to address the externality and force everyone to use compostable plastics for things that are expected to be discarded quickly.

Bio-degradable plastic is a scam.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/04/biode...

https://theconversation.com/when-biodegradable-plastic-is-no...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/23/biodegra...

Here's the problem: Take a biodegradable bag and grind it up into dust, then sprinkle it on the ground-- no problem. Bacteria in the soil will eat it and turn it into biomass and gas. Do the same with a plastic bag, and the tiny bits of plastic will just stick around, and plants grown in that soil will be contaminated by plastic per the study.

These bags aren't breaking down quickly simply because they are big. Decomposition is like any other kind of eating; you keep breaking the stuff down into smaller bits until it's gas and biomass. But with plastic, where biodegradation can't happen, the tiny bits (nanoplastics) accumulate.

Fun fact about nanoplastics: we can't reliably measure them! We can make a reference solution and apply it to arabidopsis, but we can't count nanoplastic particles in wastewater. I'm told they can be as small as a protein molecule.

> I'm told they can be as small as a protein molecule.

Sounds about right given that we've just learnt that plants can take up plastic though their roots: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-020-0707-4

There are established standards for compostable plastics (ASTM D6400 in the US and EN 13432 in the EU). The products of the company I mentioned above comply with those standards as well as many other products I am sure.

So if you are looking at a biodegradable product, you should check whether it complies with the above standards. It is better to look for "compostable" as that implies compliance with those standards (at least if sold in the US or EU).

The standards have been criticized because they assume an industrial or municipal composting environment (which mostly differs from normal environments due to relatively high temperatures). So even if you have a compostable plastic it is better to put it in a compost bin and have your municipality compost it in an industrial manner.

But the compostable plastic under those standards will degrade under normal environments too it will just take longer. Even in your article, the compostable bag disappeared in the underwater test and disintegrated in the open air test. It only survived the under ground test, probably because of lack of oxygen.

So in summary compostable plastics should be composted and not just tossed away anywhere. But even if they are tossed away at random places they will degrade much sooner than actual plastics and thus present much less of a problem for the environment.

But you haven't answered the most important question here: is this plastic actually biodegrading, or is it just breaking up into plastic dust?

and the expensive high performance long lasting plastics (e.g., those that are part of cars, computers, etc.) are made of traditional plastics

Do you really think they'll continue to use non-biodegradable plastics if they become more expensive?

I've long held the belief that "biodegradable" is really just another euphemism for "forced obolescence". The real problem is with people not reusing plastics that can theoretically last a long time, and the encouragement to not do so.

This is an absurd objection. When a manufacturer wants to break a product, they don't need weird new chemicals to do it.

Things that biodegrade will break long before they biodegrade.

It just gives them the "environmentally friendly" excuse, which the masses will unthinkingly accept with much joy.

Do these actually break down, or do they just crumble into microplastics?

This along with antibiotic resistance, ocean acidification and others are silent civilization killers. Male fertility has been dropping for the past several decades and accumulation of microplastics has been suggested as a possible cause. Will the species become infertile because of this? Will we sterilize our oceans? Will we go back to the 1800s medically where invasive surgeries will be nearly impossible due to no working antibiotics? Few people are aware of these problems and even fewer are working on solutions.

People are adaptable. Happiness is more determined social status than improving physical comfort. Dead people aren't unhappy. Never born people aren't unhappy either.

Relevant reading from April 2020: "Atmospheric microplastics: A review on current status and perspectives"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001282521...

Can't interpret these results, without knowing the concentrations resemble anything like what is found in agriculture today. I suspect, but cannot seem to find it mentioned, that very large concentrations were used to make any effect easily measurable.

As I understood they put up to 1 gram of polystyrene per kg of growth medium. Which is easily achievable concentration when composting biomass contaminated with plastics, or near unregulated landfills.

So, no impact on agriculture. That's what I figured.

Is 1 in 1000 an unbelievable concentration in topsoil? Microplastics in the atmosphere and in water supplies could result in an ever growing amount in the soil, and since the only way it leaves is by being washed away to contaminate someplace else, perhaps those concentrations will exist in a decade or so.

It kind of is an unbelievable concentration except in certain exceptional circumstances. A 0.1% concentration by weight for just the first 30 cm of topsoil would require about 5 tons of microplastics per hectare (or about 2 tons per acre). That's a lot of microplastics. It would be the equivalent of about 52 plastic water bottles per square meter. Unless the farm is on an extremely mismanaged landfill, I don't think that kind of concentration is likely.

Edit: I'm not saying microplastics aren't a problem, they're just not likely much of a problem specifically for agricultural yields.

Sadly, mismanaged landfills are probably more common than you think. Even if having diminished yields might not be an issue, microplastics concentrating in edible parts of crops might be.

Farms are very rarely next to landsfills, mismanaged or not.

I agree. I also have been wondering a lot lately about where does all the tires that wear away each year go? Street sweepers, the oceans? Millions of tires each year. It’s frightening to think what that does.

Rubber is a naturally occurring compound. Vulcanizing it makes it a little tougher to break down, but it will still decompose in 50-100 years.

Which then produces oils, heavy metals, and mineral toxins absorbed by plant material and aquatic systems. An additional danger before decomposition are uncontrollable toxic fires from large piles of disposed tires. Only 35% of tires get reused or recycled, as it's difficult to do so cost-effectively.

Tires are also filled with carbon black, which is fairly similar to soot/ash from fires, so I wouldn’t say it’s a completely unprecedented compound in nature, either.

Tires are made with nontrivial amounts of plastic as well - this [1] link says 24%

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/nature/tires-the-plast...

Here is a post summarizing the paper: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200622152542.h...

We've changed to that from https://sci-hub.tw/10.1038/s41565-020-0707-4. For specialized papers it's generally better to submit the highest-quality third party description and link to the paper in the comments.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.

Every Sunday, I'm riding and collecting plastic trash along a bike lane. coke/beer cans and all sort of plastic and paper wrappings (+masks/gloves/gel bottles since covid19), in all sort of state (it's annoying when they start fragmenting)

You get extra points for picking up styrofoam, because its just a compound mess waiting to happen.

We used to survive without plastic just fine (milk in glass bottles, paper bags etc)

Don't see why we can't just go back to that.

Washing and returning glass bottles (even though the trips are made anyway) uses more energy than making virgin plastic so it isn't the win you might expect.

We have renewable energy. Better than having microplastics in the water and in the air.

The energy used to transport glass around is mostly not renewable

That also has to change.

Some amount of degrowth seems necessary. Would you quality of life suffer badly if you just bought a little bit less stuff?

Yes it would suffer. Who are you to judge.

In fact I buy less stuff than many people I know. It is how my family can live on just one income (though I do make far more than average), and save a fair bit. However that is my life choices, I avoid judging others with different lives.

There's a source of microplastics people don't see.

You ever notice how your lint trap doesn't quite catch all of the lint, and your dryer hose slowly fills with lint? What is lint from synthetic clothing made out of? And where does it go?

This makes me wonder if we could find out what else accumulates we might not have thought of. Perhaps certain carbon structures or metals that may not directly pollute but accumulate all the same to a point where it does become an issue; somewhat like the (iirc) mercury in some fish.

https://biggreen.company We're working on this specific problem. Our mission is to eliminate all single use plastic bags.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Graduate (1967)

    Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
    Benjamin: Yes, sir.
    Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
    Benjamin: Yes, I am.
    Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
    Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?
    Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?

Is this possibly a good thing? If nanoplastics accumulate in plants, that means less of it in the water and air, right?

You could say the exact same thing about dioxin, mercury, arsenic.

It's not when it's in the water that it's a problem. It's when it enters the food chain. Plastic in plants means plastic in ruminants. Does it stop there, or does the plastic degrade and enter the bloodstream?

Plants across the globe are thriving, with enhanced CO2 fertilizing driving record growth, and yet we still get sensational arguments about nanoplastics. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...

I can't imaging a just Mother Earth that would reward the massive destruction of the environment (r* and pilliage some would say) with a result that does not end in poisoning of the organisms that "benefit" from said activity.

How long until evolution yields a very potent plastic fed organism ?

Longer than we can wait for, that's for sure. At the time scales relevant to evolution to work its magic here, we would be long gone.

If it has to start from scratch, it took fungi about 50 million years to sort out lignin.

If it turns out that existing enzymes just need to be in the right place at the right time, then who knows. 100 years of trash could pile up pretty high.

OT/meta: It's really nice to see submissions linking directly to Sci-Hub :)

(It isn't yet that popular: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sci-hub.tw)

The more popular it is, the more worried I am it'll be shut down... I have very strong mixed feelings about seeing Sci-Hub linked from here :/

If it is shutdown we will reupload it somewhere else.

The biggest substantial concern is the .tw domain.

The data is all on Library Genesis (currently https://libgen.is/) which is very firehose-friendly (eg, the download section has top-level links to mirrors, torrents, and database dumps). And IIUC the ~35TB of data is actively mirrored fairly widely, which is awesome.

Chances are the Sci-Hub project has alternative domains lined up, and probably more than enough ideas for how to manage if all DNS failed.

Plastics are so enormously useful in modern life that I'm willing to accept the seeming low health costs associated with their pollution.

Yes they may be associated with certain cancers or endocrine disruption but the effects seem to be rather tiny in comparison to the myriad of ways in which plastics improve our quality of life.

I think the popular concern is that this problem is only going to get worse as more and more plastics are produced and old plastics continue to degrade into tinier pieces of plastic. It’s particularly worrying because we’ve found pieces of plastic in extremely locations, so containment is out of the question.

Oh wow ... :/

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