Ban plastic food containers for any type of long-term storage or anything that gets heated up (and different plastics have different microplastic shedding profiles, so ban the worst first) and also ban PFAS in anything that gets close to food. It will increase costs, but the alternative is we poison ourselves, so it is sort of needed. Phase it in so that industries have time to adapt.
Synthetic fibres in clothing (like that cotton-poly blend shirt you're most likely wearing) and motor vehicle tyres are some of the bigger sources. These both also release particles directly into the atmosphere allowing them to get absolutely everywhere, unlike plastic in landfills that probably has a harder time escaping into the wider environment.
Can you give me some citations? I know that microwaving plastic containers is about the worst thing you can do with regards to microplastics, because it releases tons of them right into your food:
https://www.wired.com/story/for-the-love-of-god-stop-microwa...
This is a hot area of research but that means it’s a hotbed of flawed and sensationalist research. Dunking embryonic cells in a bath of ridiculous concentrations of nanoplastic chemicals and watching them die is cute and a tired, stupid trick. If you put any of your cells in your favorite drinking water they’re going to lyse. It doesn’t prove shit.
For tyre particulate : https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/101707/9/Tyr...
God, I wish I could go back to non-plastic packaging. Natural peanut butter I can still find in glass, as I can for my jelly. But mayonnaise, ketchup and countless other items are in plastic-only containers.
One idea is to stop consuming these, given they are not food and are not nutritious in the first place.
Your body (and mind) will thank you.
Plastic food packaging is crazy to me, but also lowers the cost of food because of transportation. I would love to see a situation where you buy food in glass bottles and take thise cleaned glass bottles back to the store for resuse, for example. On plastic, on strategy for healthy eating is to be as strict as you can about buying food packaged in plastic. This is getting harder, but it forces you to get the majority of your food from the produce and butcher. Of course, one lived in places (like DC) where such a strategy might seem less possible.
Sure, everything is multi factor. Saying things are complex is a way to ensure there is no action taken ever.
> And the plastics are already in the ecosystem and circulating for a very long time even if we banned all plastics today - which we won’t and instead every year we produce and use more
Sure, but the sooner we act, once we know for sure this is a significant contributor, the sooner we stop making the problem worse.
I want my children to be able to have children, don't you?
I hate to be that guy, but it's easy to say costs increase is a lesser problem when you are not in the lower end of the economic spectrum. What would happen to people who barely survive today? Corporations won't decrease their profit, gained by using cheap plastic, for the greater good.
Human ingenuity knows no bounds and it will be a market opportunity for new entrants and innovators.
- are the overall costs of plastics (namely pollution and its environmental and health effects) higher than the costs of banning plastics? Seems like a clear yes.
- what are the redistributive effects? Seems like: consumers are net winners (lower health effects, some or all financial costs of switching away from plastics are passed down to consumers through higher prices); some firms are losers (mainly those who produced plastics or used a lot of them) and some are winners (newcomers, producers of no plastics solutions, transporters).