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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Realistically, the best thing you can do to reduce your microplastics intake seems to be to avoid microwaving in plastic bowls and to avoid using plastic bottles for soft drinks and water. (Though cans actually use a thin film of plastic inside too.. so, maybe just avoid packaged water?)

Beyond your personal intake though there's bigger fish.

Car tyres are the #1 source for microplastics entering rivers, and it's not even close (they're thought to be the source of up to 85% of all environmental microplastics).

Those particulates don't just vanish, they end up in the soil and the waterways and it ends up inside you, no matter what you do.

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  >microwaving in plastic bowls

More generally, never let hot food touch plastics. The high temperature is what damages the plastic surface, not anything special about microwaves.

For instance the same thing happens with plastic tea bags in hot water: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004565352...

Some people use plastic cutting-trays / knives / forks /spoons / cups / jugs, which also are some things to avoid.

I would also avoid all nonstick pans and utensils, as they're lined with PFAS which is worse than plastic, and slowly it will break off into the food. Beware the industry shills on this forum, as they will have you ignore the fact that ingesting PFAS is well known to result in higher blood levels of PFAS.

Fully agree with you, however eating small bits of PFAS from pans seems to be pretty non toxic.

Even in the recent Veritasium video about it they said that unless the chemical was heated to above ~300 degress C if will pass through the human digestive system without causing any harm.

https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY

Non stick pans are perfectly safe to use. But, if you're worried, just avoid very high temperatures and use wooden utensils on them, never metal.

Wait, WHAT?

There are _plastic_ tea bags? Really?

Didnt know that we reached that level of degredation already! :-D

Another example comes to my mind: In lot of European conutries, at "cheese corner/bar" in the supermarket, every time a piece of cheese is cut, they are removing the foil, cutting the cheese, and then re-packing it in new foil after that - and this for every chees bar in every supermarket: How much kilometers does just one branch waste per year?

The kicker? It's only on high-end tea, because it's more expensive than regular tea bags.

Curious: What is "high end tea"? Or is this just another wording for "premium-markup" which makes a product more expensive?

Yes I just mean the more expensive tea on the shelf. On cheaper SKUs they're trying to cut cost so they use normal tea bags. The plastic sachets were a trend for a couple years but hopefully most brands have switched away.

That study is interesting because they used SEM to image the plastic afterward, and you can see how the plastic surface has literally been torn up on a microscopic level simply by touching hot water.

Plastic has a low-energy surface, which means it doesn't take much energy to tear it apart. Even Brownian motion is enough, which is pretty wild.

Thanks for threwing this ball, so let me ask:

Is there any real difference between the more expensive shelf places ("on eye height") than the more cheap one?

Id suspect its just intelligent re-labelling/re-packing for different brands?

Or is there really a difference in the quality/taste of the expensive ones?

In my country, it doesnt matter if i spend 2 bucks or 5 bucks in the supermarket

> Or is there really a difference in the quality/taste of the expensive ones?

If we are still talking about tea, then of course there are huge differences. And the best tea is not packaged in individual tea bags (also it's not sold in supermarkets unless it's a country with a very high tea culture).

So at the low end you would have tea that is grown with lots of chemicals, plucked by machines or by badly paid workers, industrially processed in high quantities, sold as bulk on international markets. While on the highest end you would have artisanal small-batch tea with no chemicals involved, possibly grown in some special way like the tea bushes shaded from the sun or hundred years old tea trees in forested areas, processed by hand so the leaves are not broken etc... And all of this is reflected in the taste.

And to add - tea is graded at source, and buyers purchase based on grade. So a low quality tea bag will have tea that is objectively worse than a high quality one, while the best tea is never near a bag.

all the high end tea bags I've seen are silk

Curious why you say this when the linked article says the best thing you can do is avoid synthetic textiles

The article focuses on the airways. The commenter probably takes more hollistic approach and you are gonna eat way more palstic in yoir life than you breathe in.

the article lists several things including textiles, plastic packaging, and avoiding tyre particles. I led with containers/bottles because that's where the most concentrated single exposures seem to be (microwaving in plastic, bottled water), but you're right that textiles are up there too, especially for airborne microfibres.

The exposure from food packaging is many times more prominent than polyester, which slows down leeching over time.

One action doesn't obviate the need for another.

Also, stop using dishwashing pods and laundry pods with the dissolvable plastic layer encasing them. Use powder or liquid detergent instead. If you can't find it in store, look for it online, because it definitely is in stock.

Where I live it has become almost impossible to find powdered dish detergent. Everything is the pods.

There’s a big difference between nanoplastics/chemical leeching (which is what happens with heated food containers) and microplastics of the sort that break off from clothing other plastic materials (which is what the article is talking about). Both are significant issues though.

> Car tyres are the #1 source for microplastics entering rivers, and it's not even close (they're thought to be the source of up to 85% of all environmental microplastics).

Do EVs create more microplastics than ICE vehicles then?

yes

So I boil my water (hoping it does something to all the mirco plastics, maybe make them lump together). Only just now did I think to check 'is my metal kettle lined with plastics'. And guess what...

The modern world is exhausting sometimes.

The article says this is probably wrong. We breathe in much more.

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