So what do we do about them?
Is there any way to remove microplastics from a person/animal once already ingested?
What technology if any is being worked on to help alleviate this?
Is there any way to remove microplastics from a person/animal once already ingested?
What technology if any is being worked on to help alleviate this?
I've been trying to make small moves away from car infrastructure in my town and the response is, well, less than positive.
We already tacitly accept that cars are one of the biggest causes of death. Reducing car infrastructure to reduce microplastics, where we don't even really know the harm, seems far far more challenging.
However there's also a regressive aspect that refuses to make any accommodations for anything except cars, and these people have veto power over non-car infrastructure. There is no built-in veto power for new car infrastructure, and in fact existing law requires car infrastructure as a base for any sort of building, for example parking minimums.
Most of the city was built 1960-1980, so based on car designs. But it's small enough that small amounts of change would eliminate car dependence.
[1] https://www.ustires.org/whats-tire-0
Tires generate more particles of pollution than exhaust.[2] EVs are good. But eliminating car exhaust apparently isn't the big car pollution problem.
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...
Looks like most of the rubber used these days is synthetic[1], usually made of styrene and butadiene which could easily degrade into base monomers or at least shorter chains.
Not a realistic solution. The vast majority of people will take the microplastics over not driving.
If we were to even legalize non-car options, we might discover what the market actually wants. And the necessity of those laws kind of shows that the non-car option must be legally suppressed to prevent its true market preference from being revealed.
To everyone who thinks that the "vast majority" of people prefer driving, I say: show the confidence of your convictions and make it legal to build other options.
What do you mean by that? Which non-car options are outlawed?
Water pollution from brake and tire dust, (and oil drippings,) is well proven. If you build infrastructure to handle runoff from roads, you need to mitigate pollution in that runoff too.
> Most microplastic in water comes from washing machines. Synthetic fibers from clothes.
I know less about that but from what I've skimmed it appears to be true too.
> Seventy-eight percent of ocean microplastics are synthetic tire rubber, according to one estimate.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/tire-pollution-toxic-chemical...
> About 34% of the emitted coarse TWPs (tire wear particles) and 30% of the emitted coarse BWPs (brake wear particles) (100 kt yr−1 and 40 kt yr−1 respectively) were deposited in the World Ocean. These amounts are of similar magnitude as the total estimated direct and riverine transport of TWPs and fibres to the ocean (64 kt yr−1).
And also synthetic clothes. According to the study they found more plastic fibres than plastic particles in many samples.
These get released when you launder your clothes, ending up in the drain water and ultimately the ocean.
Solution? Buy clothes with natural fibres (cotton, wool, etc) instead of plastics. And wash your clothes in a modern washing machine with a microfibre filter on its drain outlet.
That doesn't solve the whole problem because the microfibres eventually need disposal.
Depending on your location, they’ll either get destroyed by incineration or put in landfill where they’ll do less harm and hopefully break down after a few centuries.
Of course, if you clean the filter by flushing the sludge down the sink then you didn’t solve anything.
Obviously these are geography-relative concerns. But they aren't rare.
> The study found evidence that food processing is a likely source of microplastic contamination, as highly processed protein products (like fish sticks, chicken nuggets, tofu, and plant-based burgers, among others) contained significantly more microplastics per gram than minimally processed products (items like packaged wild Alaska pollock, raw chicken breast, and others).
Note the tofu and plant-based burgers.
The press release does a disservice to the study by referring to the highly processed group as a whole and not excluding tofu. For reference, the breaded shrimp and fish sticks were measured to have 1.2 and 0.26 particles per gram.
Table 3.7 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026974912...
Regardless if a processed food like tofu has minimal plastic concentration, I would assume minimally processed whole plant food like beans and nuts would also have low microplastic exposure. The study found little total plastic from packaging, their evidence pointed towards the processing.
I would guess plants have more microplastics as they just pull things out of the soil and store them (why many plants have a ton of heavy metals). Animals at least have some systems for filtering and processing unwanted items.