Microplastics are finding their way into fruit and vegetables as they grow
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At a certain point, apathy sets in. If this is our generation's mesothelioma, so be it.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
Current consumption and wealth levels are not sustainable but reducing consumption is completely antithetical to the capitalist and consumerist society of present day.
Buying less stuff, going on fewer vacations, driving less, eating less varied food. Unthinkable to almost everyone, including the overwhelming majority of those who actually recognize the problems and what's at stake, let alone those simply claiming that they do for social brownie points.
And don’t get me started about food packaging. Every 100 gram of food comes with at least 5 gram of plastic packaging. Sadly I must eat sometimes and can’t do anything about packaging.
People seem to accept that it's all downhill from here, and sometimes even cynically applaud it. Like with the male sperm story. It's catastrophic and accelerating, yet got near-zero attention. The few responses to it seem to celebrate it.
Humanity lacks a story for the future. It can't just be "it's going to get so much worse" nor can it be "if we try really hard, we may slow down the decline, but a decline it will be". Those stories just aren't good enough. Nobody invests in a sinking ship.
Strange, I know plenty of people that do see an upside, including myself. It's a choice to believe things can and will get better.
Unless you have a crystal ball, we're both choosing to believe in an unknown future. So choosing to believe it will get worse is no different from believing it will get better. Although one is arguably better for mental health.
The distortion lens of media and social media is a thing. The real world and its people are vastly different from what one might read online. Yet an increasing amount of people barely interact with the real world and real people, hence they internalize the doom and gloom as if it is reality.
If you want to identify as black why not simply say you are black? Especially if you can pass as black without further modifications?
Most people’s lineages aren’t even so pure that you can say they are a pure example of a certain “race” anyway. We just accept people at face value. You could be 50% black and say you’re black and people accept it wholeheartedly (i.e. Barack Obama) So why not 40%? Or 5%?
But regardless, we can't ignore some major cultural shifts. LGBT is an example where you have real LGBT and what seems to be a cultural version of it. People honestly probably not belonging to that group in a lasting way, but joining in regardless.
It's fits a larger pattern of creating a persona with as many victim labels as possible. These labels creating the self-fabricated identity, which are then used to excuse yourself from your own flaws and bring down the "privileged", those with less labels.
This may be fun for a while but the obvious danger is that this self-obsession over identity gets you nowhere in the real world. Nobody gives a crap about these labels nor can you hide behind them.
You should not read this stereotyping the wrong way. I have empathy for minorities, I loathe the cultural version of it where it's worn like fashion or weaponized.
And I do worry about social contagion. A teenager chronically online in the most gullible part of their lives are absolutely affected. A teenager will believe anything you tell them and they'll copy anything other teenagers do.
Teenagers are idiots. Source: once was one.
Endocrine disruptors [0] are widely distributed by humans within our environment, for use directly or indirectly within food & water resource streams, such as:
- Polymers within plastics, used in food, water, and other human-consumed product containers (and other lifestyle commodities, such as clothing, toiletries, etc.). Example: Phthalates [1]
For more examples google "Plastic polymer endocrine disruptors"
- Herbicides. Example: Atrazine [2] (As well as Pesticides and Fungicides)
For more examples google "Herbicide endocrine disruptors", "Pesticide endocrine disruptors", and/or "Fungicide endocrine disruptors" (Many chemicals in each of the three categories are endocrine disruptors)
You can thank the EPA & FDA for being revolving doors for chemical industry lobbyists, for companies such as Bayer (which purchased Monsanto), Syngenta (which produces Atrazine), and Dow Chemical.
[0] "Many chemicals, both natural and man-made, may mimic or interfere with the body’s hormones, known as the endocrine system. Called endocrine disruptors, these chemicals are linked with developmental, reproductive, brain, immune, and other problems."
National Institute of Health Environmental Services. https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/endocrine/ind...
[1] "Some types of phthalates have affected the reproductive system in animals. Human health effects from exposure to low levels of phthalates are not as clear. More research is needed to assess the human health effects of exposure to phthalates." "CDC researchers found measurable levels of many phthalate metabolites in the general population. This finding indicates that phthalate exposure is widespread in the U.S. population."
CDC. National Biomonitoring Program. https://www.cdc.gov/biomonitoring/Phthalates_FactSheet.html
[2] "Atrazine induces complete feminization and chemical castration in male African clawed frogs". Tyrone B. Hayes tyrone@berkeley.edu, Vicky Khoury, Anne Narayan, +7, and Sherrie Gallipeau. University of California, Berkeley, CA, and approved January 15, 201 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0909519107
But you went for gender politics.
Not everything will go downhill. Some things surely, but not everything - some things will go uphill. For example, suppose climate change eliminates half of Earth biosphere, including half of humans. Chances are, their medicine, technology, education, social structure will still be better.
I believe the GPs point was that there needs to be a positive story about the future to inspire people to realize that future. Like if all that the future holds is the death of your loved ones, why would you care about issues facing society?
Again and again we’ve shown we can make these transitions, including surviving a major ice age. While there’s good reason to worry, as lack of worry denotes foolhardiness, despair is both self-defeating and counterfactual to the whole of human history.
This time it may well be different, but if it is, then your attitude is guaranteed to lead to failure, as we will then not take the necessary steps to secure the future.
My money is on a technological solution overall, but there are many things regular people can meaningfully do, such as driving less, giving up one or more cars, or choosing to build or renovate toward highly insulated, potentially net carbon sequestering house as with the passive house standard, switch to heat pump based a/c and water heating, and voluntarily contributing to carbon sequestration efforts such as through YC alum Wren https://www.wren.co/join/Empact
If you think that’s not enough, and perhaps you’re right, what lever do we need to press to make change? It is our responsibility as the current generation to identify and press that lever to secure the future for our descendants.
Politically, my money is on the Citizen’s Climate Lobby effort to bring about a carbon tax, and the American Conservation Coalition for its effort to raise the prospect of environmental policy in the Republican sphere. If enough people vote on this issue alone[1], as the second amendment and abortion communities have effectively done over the past forty years, then we have a chance to shift policy in the direction of conservation/protection.
For me that means: a carbon tax to reduce demand, unleashing zero-carbon sources like nuclear to further out-compete the fossil fuel plants, while also embracing efficient infrastructure like pipelines to efficiently convey that supply we continue to use. On this last point, remember that the demand is constrained via a carbon tax.
The world needs our earnest efforts. You can keep your despair.[2]
[1] particularly in the primaries, as most house districts are now non-competitive between the parties
[2] Incidentally, I think the hysteria on the left is also counterproductive, as “the sky is falling” only reaches so many people before it discredits the speaker, and the goal should of convincing the middle does not require them to be terrified - IMO the easiest way to do that is to make the behavior high-status and motivate people that way, e.g. see Tesla, solar panels, etc.
The left is definitely more vocal about it, but it seems like it's a state of mind created by tough personal circumstances which act as a base of projection + poor education which doesn't throttle the projection, and those two things affect many people across the political spectrum. Right-wingers have the steam valves of denial and religion though.
If, instead of climate change, the hysteria were about engineered pandemics escaping labs (not COVID; I mean an actual engineered pandemic sometime in the future), I think it would actually be warranted but equally unhelpful. :p
This kind of adlib really works against getting people to care. Given the immediate (and intentional) destruction of all evidence that could point either way, such definite claims are ill-advised.
By the time these things are 'microplastics' I am having a hard time feeling scared that they are harmful. I'm not saying they aren't, but until someone can tie them to an actual problem, I don't see an issue -- especially since there is nothing we can do about it.
That said, one-time-use plastics are absolutely obscene and need to be removed from society as soon as humanly possible.
Paper straws suck.
While we still use hydrocarbons for a while for power, we might as well let some of them hang out as our stuff for a bit before being burned for energy.
Sure, small-scale "energy recycling" makes sense, but if everyone did it with all our waste plastic outout then we'd pretty much just be using fossil fuels with extra steps, and the carbon will end up in the atmosphere.
Therefore you get to leave some oil or whatever in the ground instead of going to the trouble of burying garbage.
Burning garbage instead of fossil fuels should be carbon neutral with some benefits of not filling landfills etc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
Unfortunately it's more expensive than just throwing waste into a hole in the ground.
Edit: Source: "The recycling lie" https://www.daserste.de/information/reportage-dokumentation/... (german)
Edit: MorrisMinor suggests this further down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34293509
Go to pretty much any beach and sift through the sand. Again you will find an abnormal number of plastic mixed in. Even in "clean" places with not a lot of litter plastic bits are visibly everywhere.
Own any synthetic clothes? Look at your lint trap after running a dryer or shaking out your clothes. The dust and lint coming off will quickly become microplastics. The wastewater from your washer will also be filled with them
There’s a lot we can do about it. Clothes tires and mismanaged waste are leading sources for microplastic that can be reduced.
For example, drinking delicious Coca-Cola Zero Sugar at McDonalds from a paper straw is disgusting. The straw usually disintegrates before I am done and sticks to the lips at the start.
I love single use plastic.
Keep your plastic straws.
It would have been easier to believe in a better future if people could stomach tiny inconveniences.
A ban on plastic soda bottles? Great! There's are existing non-plastic solutions, nobody would be negatively impacted, and we'd see that reducing our plastic use can be easy and not require major sacrifices. Instead we come up against it every time we buy a beverage or go to the grocery store.
I wonder if those who come up with these ideas realise the irony of forcing people to buy bags which are truly going to be single-use instead of reusing what they would've already had.
The problem is not the burden of changing my behaviour, or the extra cost of buying exactly as much single-use plastic as I need in the form of a box of trash bags a couple times a year - the problem is why are we starting with this?? I'm dead certain that there are a ton of single-use plastics we could ban that would have close to ZERO impact on 99.9% of people's lives, because it would be handled entirely by industry doing a single re-tooling of their lines, but we're not doing those for some strange reason?
It doesn't really matter though; the ban on straws and taxes on shopping bags have resulted in a noticably lower amount of said products blowing around main roads. Totally worth it in my opinion.
Now, if we could just get biodegradable coffee and soda lids...
I bought a celeriac the other day, it was in a vacuum wrapped plastic cover. What a waste of resources.
> Celeriac (Apium graveolens var. rapaceum), also called celery root, knob celery, and turnip-rooted celery (although it is not a close relative of the turnip), is a variety of celery cultivated for its edible stem or hypocotyl, and shoots. Celeriac is like a root vegetable except it has a bulbous hypocotyl with many small roots attached.
I'm not sure I've used a straw in my adult life, yet I see people drinking coffee with a straw. Isn't the taste affected? Lots of what we think of as taste is actually smell and texture.
No wine connoisseur would order a straw with their expensive wine! I fail to see why one would be necessary for coffee or water, except for long distance runners and other situations where one needs to drink while moving.
That said, one-time-use plastics are absolutely obscene and need to be removed from society as soon as humanly possible.
Those seem to be somewhat conflicting viewpoints. The overwhelming majority of single-use plastics are PE or PP, which also don't really have much in the way of additives.
PVC, ABS, and others in those families are what need the really harmful plasticisers, and also cost a lot more; as a result, they aren't going to be chosen for single-use applications unless there are other important reasons to do so.
Then the article goes on to mention PFAS, which is related to fluoropolymers, another very different category. I'm sure FPs are used in some single-use applications, but they are not cheap compared to PP or PE so they'll be massively lower in volume.
I hate how articles like this just promote a "plastics = bad" narrative, and they didn't even mention what type of microplastic they found.
Found:
"Stabilizers are the most widely used additives in the PE industry.
Other additives commonly added to polyethylene are stearates (e.g., calcium and zinc stearates to neutralize acidic catalyst residues and to impart lubricity),
pigments (e.g., carbon black, cadmium yellow, and titanium dioxide),
metal deactivators (e.g., oxalyl bishydrazide for PE cable insulation),
processing aids (e.g., Dynamar, Ucarsil, Viton-A, to improve flow of the molten polymer),
optical brightners (e.g., Uvitex OB to enhance appearance).
Additives commonly added to polyethylene include antioxidants (hindered phenolics and phosphites for process stabilization),
antiblock compounds (e.g., silica, talc, and kaolin to reduce sticking of adjacent film layers),
and slip agents (e.g., erucamide and oleamide to reduce friction)."
"POLYETHYLENE (Stabilization and Compounding)" https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/polyethylene-stabilization-co...
Patagonia's stated mission is to save the earth and microplastics entering the oceans is a major environmental concern. However, it is also true that many of Patagonia's clothes are made from synthetic materials such as plastic. The use of synthetic materials in clothing (and each washing) greatly contribute to the problem of microplastics in the oceans.
I’m I missing something? Is the above wrong? Or is Patagonia lying about their mission driven approach?
The short of it is that all product manufacturing has an impact on the environment, and they are investing in minimizing their impact over time.
Something they note is that the biggest way to reduce impact is to create longer lasting and high quality products, because the less frequently you need to buy something the less pollution you create.
Polyester is one of the few success stories around recycled plastic. It’s not like the alternative is to turn your old plastic bottle into a new plastic bottle, plastic recycling is almost always downcycling the material into a lower grade product.
Like most things around conservation and the environment, it is complicated and there are loads of stakeholders - biodiversity, micro plastics, chemical accumulation, CO2 and greenhouse gases, deforestation, waste management, just to name a few.
One thing we can be sure of is the best thing is to not buying new clothes. In fact this philosophy should be applied to every consumer good. Making things is extremely bad for the environment. Patagonia have been pretty consistent around this point, for example as far back as 2001 they had their “don’t buy this jacket” ad: https://blog.yorksj.ac.uk/jovanalleshi/patagonia-sustainabil...
This is the elephant in the room that most consumer goods companies don’t want to talk about. They can make things out of bamboo or produce paper straws or have recyclable packaging, but fundamentally even environmentally friendly products have a huge environmental impact.
Ultimately Patagonia’s mission statement is at odds with the reason it or any company exists. Saving the earth isn’t profitable.
Saving the earth isn’t profitable for companies in the business of making consumer products (in most cases).
But for companies that make essential sustainable products/technologies and services like wind farms, or various green technologies, or electric car infrastructure, or waste-to-energy plants, or recycling plants, or any number of things we will need to reach net-0 carbon, there will be a lot of jobs and profit to be made while also advancing humanity and helping solve this big problem.
If it was just companies not wanting to talk about this, things would be fine. Problem is that neither policymakers, nor common citizens want to talk about this apart from a miniscule minority. This includes the overwhelming majority of those who claim to espouse eco-friendly values and to be willing to make lifestyle changes to stick to them. If you're not buying less new things, including e.g. doing a house renovation using new materials, you're almost certainly far less eco-friendly than the less wealthy who can't afford these things in the first place. One might try to placate their conscience by buying indulgences in the form of donations to climate causes but this doesn't really work.
Even what's commonly thought to be the biggest elephant in the room, "having kids is the worst thing you can do for the environment", is all but a sibling of the "making things is extremely bad" elephant, as the former is bad only because of the latter. If youre raising your kids in the woods living off the land like hunter-gatherers, or if you're raising them at the wealth level of the average Sierra Leonean child, having one isn't bad for the environment all.
Patagonia uses synthetics because they're cheap.
Standard sewage treatment processes also capture most microplastic with the solid waste, if you live somewhere with sewage treatment.
>In the UK, of the sewage sludge screened out by treatment works, 87% is sent to farms. The microplastics so carefully removed from wastewater by the treatment process are then spread across the land in the sewage sludge the water companies sell to farmers as fertiliser.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/26/microp...
Sure some plastics get into natural water sources from clothes washing, but how much of an issue is this actually compared to other sources?
They make very high quality clothing which lasts a long time, mostly out of recycled polyester, which is of course better than making more sources of microplastics ?
On the other hand, I purchased a "synchilla" top, it was absolutely ridiculous how much polyester fiber it shed, like absolutely crazy, I was vacuuming my house constantly. In the end it did stop, but it was ridiculously bad. I should've sent it back.
And we've never cared much about plastic in our water; everybody knows that water that's spent some time in a plastic bottle tastes different from water from a glass container, but we never had any problem drinking water from plastic bottles.
Is this issue really worth worrying about? And if it is, is there any chance it can be turned back? Because it seems like plastic is in everything already. Though we should probably stop producing more plastic for temporary packaging; that only exists to get thrown away.
And most of the mineral nutrients in your food were indeed something’s poop at one point. I’m not sure how you want to escape that.
Of course, saying "we are doomed" is the easiest way to continue to do what we are doing. It's just a defensive mechanism at this point.
We should be stopping the production of plastic and replace it with bioplastics immediately.
Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No.
I believe it might be a good analogy to how those microplastics are destroying our kidneys
Hey go ahead and disagree, but maybe post a link to some evidence beyond 'microplastics exist'?
Many countries, desperate to make use of the gargantuan flow of waste plastic, and desperate to avoid it going into landfill, are putting the waste plastic into roads.
This is called “recycling”.
Sounds like a great idea until you realize that cars and trucks drive on the roads and grind them into dust - dust containing microplastics.
The microplastic dust will go into air, waterways, rivers, oceans, food, plants animals and people.
All this is because the environmentalists have decided that “keeping plastics out of landfill” is more important than anything.
Plastic roads are an environmental disaster in an epic scale being created in the name of “recycling”.
The worst thing is that for some reason it’s not obvious that this is a disastrous idea, and all around the world people are breathlessly talking up plastic roads like its a solution to the plastic waste problem.
“In 2015, the Indian government made it mandatory for plastic waste to be used in constructing roads near large cities of more than 500,000 people”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210302-could-plastic-ro...
Mandated madness. The safest place for the fire hydrant of waste plastic is in landfill, not “recycled” into microplastic dust.
Would you like a plastic road outside your house, or outside your kids school?
They only want to sell it because it’s dirt cheap and lightweight.
Zero cares about what I’ll be breathing in for 10 years
Wool is still popular in the UK despite carpet shops trying to sell the “bleach cleanable” benefits of plastic flammable carpet for many years
Even if it were plastic, is that a reason to have more plastic?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=plastic+roads
Here is a better article "The plastic road to hell is paved with good intentions "
Car tires themselves wear down and produce microplastics. I would guess the tires wear down more than the road, so the contribution from road would be minuscule, comparing to the contribution from the tires.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/tires...
By your reasoning, if the micro plastics from cars increased, so could the micro plastics from the road, even to astronomical levels, so long as it's less than the cars.
If you want to refer to something you wrote elsewhere (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34153694), a link is great. Even better, if possible, would be a link along with new information drawn from the specifics of the new discussion.