Nanoplastics in water – surprisingly large amounts discovered and its not good
molecularspec.substack.com
molecularspec.substack.com
Their startup, which has 2 employees according to LinkedIn, is billed as such:
"Volatile AI researches and innovates in the field of chemical analysis and molecule detection."
A finance guy with absolutely no credentials is writing blog posts telling us how dangerous these nanoplastics are while pitching us his startup that can "detect molecules with AI."
I hate to see this absolute junk on HackerNews.
If you're going to shit all over someone's work, at least come up with legitimate reasons.
+ the primary source of microplastic particle generation in most households is the washing and drying of (plastic) clothes. I don't have evidence to back this up, but I have a feeling you breathe in more plastic fiber particles every time you remove lint from your dryer than you ingest through your mouth the whole year.
+ the more processed a food is, the higher its microplastic concentration [1] - apparently breaded shrimp is the worst.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/01/12/...
Source: put on a hoodie while standing in a sunbeam.
I been wearing their plastic fleeces for years, I guess I’m fucked.
And its not that big mystery - people got properly dumb and do literally everything to destroy themselves, and completely ignore advices coming from every direction about healthy living. Its not 'they evil corps', is us(them) dumb shits who can't act like balanced mature adults and contain those few vices you may gather as life goes along. You can't tackle all of it, but most folks are not even trying and just complain.
A random example - all guys everywhere would massively benefit from consistently wearing loose pants and underwear if they want to increase their fertility, especially in summer. It would skyrocket in stats. Now show me how popular this 'simple trick' is in mass media. There, maybe 30% of couple infertility cases tackled.
I don't want to downplay the topic, the idea that nano-plastic-infested meat is grilled/cooked/even just boiled and eaten by literally everybody... we know what great things high heat does to all plastics, and eating that yummy is probably a bullet train to ruined health decades down the line.
Any source to back that outrageous number?
The answer is yes, and it is absolutely important. If plastics disrupt our endocrine system, then that touches every facet of our bodies from development, sexual health, mental health, disease, and more. We can’t underestimate the effects plastic exposure has on our health.
This is the same reason "BPA-free" drink bottles are now a thing.
The point is that "plastic is toxic" people sure seem to have a lot of trouble being honest about their own sources.
(I assume that, four years after an airborne virus ran pandemic, no one need explained the inverse relationship between particle size and length of mean free path in air. I hope no one needs that explaining, at least...)
It may be true there is less risk here than some suspect, or it may not. It is certainly foolish to assume either without bothering even to investigate the question.
There's few things that destroy them further.
That and many of the effects may not occur until a sufficient amount of microplastics have accumulated which we may only now be approaching.
The biggest issue is that they break down so poorly. Even if we stopped all plastic production today, the total amount of microplastics will only accumulate
edit: I don't mind that this is getting downvoted, but I would like to know why. What have I overlooked?
For example, consider this comparison: when you take a pill of some drug, say an aspirin tablet, how much of the active ingredient (aspirin in this case) are in that pill? And how many bottles of water would you have to drink to put the same amount of nanoplastics (treating them as an "active ingredient") into your body?
Here's a back of the envelope calculation: suppose the concentration of nanoplastics is 10 nanograms per liter (about what is claimed in the article). A liter is about one (fairly large) bottle of water, so say 10 nanograms per bottle. A standard aspirin tablet has 325,000,000 nanograms (325 milligrams) of aspirin in it, or 32.5 million times as much active ingredient. So you would have to drink 32.5 million 1-liter bottles of water to expect the same general order of magnitude of "active ingredient" effects on your body as one aspirin tablet. If you drank one bottle of water per second, it would take you more than 10 years to drink that much water.
So I don't see any reason to forgo bottled water on these grounds. Certainly not in favor of tap water, which is much more subject to how careful your municipality's water purification process is (not to mention various possible sources of contamination in the water lines between the purification plant and the water tower and you).
A good example in this instance is Lead. Its bad to have lead in your water even in relatively small amounts, because the half-life of lead in your soft tissues is months, and in your bone is 20-30 years. If nanoplastics end up being similar, you could end up with liver damage, or other medical complications if your exposure is high.
I find it hard to assume the plastic should be more than a thousand times more worrisome than lead on a per-gram basis (That said, we have persistently underestimated the negative effects of the element.)
See my response to globular-toast downthread.
Only if aspirin is what the bottle is leeching into the water.
While this is true, it applies with even more force to the comparison with botulinum toxin than to the comparison with aspirin. Nanoplastics are less active than aspirin, not more (there's a reason why nobody takes nanoplastics to cure headaches), so if anything one would expect to require more nanoplastics than aspirin to have a significant effect--which means even much more more, so to speak, than botulinum toxin.
After how many years of consumption? If we suppose that every single nanoplastic molecule that enters your body never leaves it (which is not going to be the case, but will give us an absolute lower bound to the time required), it would still take 32.5 million one-liter bottles to accumulate as much as one aspirin tablet. Say you drink six of those bottles a day, which is more than just about anyone actually drinks. That's about 2200 bottles a year. Meaning it would take you about 16,000 years to accumulate as much as one aspirin tablet.
One tattoo is a larger exposure of particulate contaminants to the skin then anyone will ingest in a lifetime from the environmental contamination.
https://kishucharcoal.com/shop/brita-reuseable-filter-501/
As the sibling says, reverse osmosis is the best.
https://apnews.com/article/plastic-nano-bottled-drinking-wat...
RO membranes are tight enough and should effectively remove all microplastics from the output water. On a consumer RO system the water will still pass through a few final treatment stages and a few feet of plastic tubing before getting to your glass.
Very possible some additional plastic is being introduced in the post membrane stages and delivery but my assumption is that a point of use RO system is going to reasonably effective.
There is some chance the manufacturers are omitting the fact that all membranes are bleeding microplastics during use. At the moment I don't think we have enough evidence to say they are and most testing has shown them to be effective as a removal method.
Other devices you can install with some rudimentary plumbing knowledge are BWT or Pentaire reverse osmosis filters. They do a good enough job at filtering, though they waste a lot of water in the process. I use these at work and I the Pentaire allows you to control ppm, which is suitable for coffee aficionados. You can always remineralize your water once you get the junk out.
ZeroWater uses an ion exchange filter - It's my understanding that many (most?) micro plastics are not dissolved and/or are not charged meaning it won't effectively filter most microplastics.
Similarly they aren't designed to filter bacteria.
> The current system is meant to be used with municipally treated, potable water as the current filter will not remove microbiological contaminants.