Every time I see an article about a new place where microplastics have been found (blood, brains, babies), I feel like this is a battle we already lost before we even knew it was a battle.
Although this article seems to be more about particles from wear and tear on tires and clothes, which I always felt was a separate issue from plastic packaging that ends up in sea. But maybe I'm wrong about that.
I agree that the news is depressing, I go for two things: First, yes, there’s microplastics everywhere, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop putting more out there. As the saying goes, the best time to stop polluting the environment was twenty years ago, the second best time is now.
More directly and less, uh, platitudinally - we’ve found microbes capable of digesting and breaking down things we didn’t think were possible and we’re getting better at engineering/encouraging them to do so - I think there’s a legitimate possibility that we can actually solve this problem within our lifetimes.
Time for a SF novel: those engineered/encouraged microbes became so efficient over time at adapting to new materials that some mutations began to attack cellulose... Fast forward a few years, and everywhere in the world our forests started turning into stinky and bubbling yellow mud...
Well we already have those sorts of microbes. They're all over. It's why things rot.
It's actually kinda bad enough if they start breaking down plastics. We use plastics in a lot of places specifically because they're resistant to microbial breakdown. This includes electrical insulation, medical equipment, food containers, and so forth. A world where plastics start to rot at the pace of wood is a world in which we have big problems.
Unfortunately, the way we've gone about things it seems like an inevitability that a successful plastic-eating microbe would evolve. Plastics are goddamn everywhere, and they're chock full of yummy hydrocarbons. Any organism that specializes in this food source has very good prospects for thriving.
> Unfortunately, the way we've gone about things it seems like an inevitability that a successful plastic-eating microbe would evolve. Plastics are goddamn everywhere, and they're chock full of yummy hydrocarbons. Any organism that specializes in this food source has very good prospects for thriving.
Plastics are a terrible food source for microbes. The two most common plastics polyethylene and polypropylene are just chains of C2H4 and C3H6 respectively. No nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, potassium, or any other elements necessary for life.
In a world full of carbon dioxide in the air and photosynthetic life forms, having access to yet another carbon and energy source isn’t much of an advantage except in extreme environments like hydrothermal vents.
Plastic eating microbes have been identified pretty much everywhere including soil and fresh and salt water. However, most everything has access to the nutrients in those environments and the plastic eating microbes just aren’t competitive with autotrophs and their predators.
As some other posters have said changing some of your habits might not make a meaningful change, but it is a change non the less.
Nature is also stepping up and bacteria is evolving in several places which eats plastic.
I agree that it is incredibly depressing once you realise how wide spread and poisonous to our environment the pollution is. As a society we need to find a way to bake the externalities into the price of every day items, else we will always suffer from the tragedy of the commons.
No need to be defeatist. If there's microplastics found somewhere it shouldn't make you want to deal with the problem less, right?
Until a few years back I was also unaware about microplastics in things like tires and clothes. Started buying clothes that are strictly cotton/linen/wool.
I don't drive so that part is irrelevant.
TBF it probably does not matter what you do as an individual. All the news indicates it could be a civilization-scale problem. Collectively, the human race would need to deal with it together. I believe this has never happened before.
One individual's actions won't solve the entire problem, sure, but you will be at least limiting the more acute exposure to yourself, and your family, by avoiding clothing made of plastic, for example. Cotton, linen, wool are better for you than plastic anyhow, putting to one side microplastics.
"Never happened before" is funny because the example is literally in front of you. Want an example of many humans together making global change happen? See how we got here.
Individuals is how it started, individuals is how it's gonna improve.
That is true, thanks for reminding me. I am a bit discouraged by the response to climate change, which I think will end disastrously. I would be overjoyed to be proved wrong on all counts.
> Every time I see an article about a new place where microplastics have been found (blood, brains, babies), I feel like this is a battle we already lost before we even knew it was a battle.
Now imagine all the other battles we started or lost already and aren't aware of at all
So, uh, is this bad? I mean, it doesn't sound good on the face of it and we should probably try to avoid, but have microplastics been implicated as responsible for any specific environmental harms we know of yet?
Your comment is on a completely different value ranking than my own. I’m over here thinking that this permanent pollution is an effing tragedy, and hoping we can prevent it from worsening further. I’m not even thinking about the possible consequences, which would only make the situation worse.
filtering them from your blood causes organ damage to your liver and kidneys. here's just two, but have fun exploring more. seems like a pretty obvious pathway when you think about it. probably can affect a lot of organs, especially those containing small blood vessels (ie, all of them)
People are shutting down the discussion in a somewhat dishonest way. "Can't get rid of all plastics so let's do nothing!"
The societal need we have is to get rid of single use-plastic and frail plastic based textiles which are the two main contributors for this microplastic degradation into our water cycle and food (and all wildlife ecosystems).
Even purely from an engineering standpoint it is absolutely ridiculous to design a part that will last 450 years to then use it to carry soda around for 45 min.
Apart from single-use plastic usage in laboratory work and medical applications all other uses only have a purely economic benefit and should be banned (and the companies that transition should fork the costs). They have externalized the environmental cost of packaging for decades, a market correction is overdue.
The issue is not about getting ready of plastic. The ABS plastic part inside a mechanical assembly will likely do it's job for decades undisturbed. The issue really is banning single-use plastic.
Single-use plastic would be much less of a problem if the material would be (at least somewhat) biodegradeable.
Why make candy wrappers from material that lasts centuries when buried? Before plastics, a paper wrapper, or loose candy in a tin, did the job.
Use biodegradeable materials for such applications, and candy wrappers, cigarette packs etc will still wind up in the environment, but not stay there forever. Easy problem application-wise, big win for the environment.
I just want to give an anecdote here, because I love your comment and share your views.
So I live semi-rural and it's hard to fathom how much plastic comes off disintegrated blue tarpaulins. Occasionally I've tried to dispose of them if I find them abandoned, I have a technique now where I cover them with a thick polyester bag before disturbing them because oh my god, the amount of fiber that comes of them is absolutely disgusting.
They should be banned and anyone selling them receives heavy fines.
What's more annoying is they're often used for the most useless, superficial tasks, like covering machinery (very easy to build a small shed instead), covering firewood, covering a shed before it's knocked down etc. There are just other ways to achieve the same result, hell even using tin to cover things is pretty cheap and easy way to keep rain off wood.
One of my neighbor had one covering some firewood and it was absolutely insane how polluted our field was with the shredded pieces. I hated it so I removed it with his permission and excavated the top layer of soil and had it incinerated at a proper facility so it didnt end up in nearby waterways.
Most humans to ever have lived have lived or currently live during the age of plastics.
The population growth and demand for plastics has been massive.
Last 15 years saw as much plastics being manufactured as all the years before it.
And we are not yet even at peak plastic use, it is still increasing.
In Japan, after the Fukushima nuclear accident, the government had to do something with all the contaminated soil, do you know what they did? They got tens of thousands of huge black heavy duty nylon weave bags, filled them up with soil and incentivized or asked prefectures to take them and do things with them, so you know what many prefectures did? They created a new disaster by burying it in embankments next to rivers, build strange retaining walls from it near highways, and often, just having the plastic bags disintegrating out in the sun. It's really, really freaking bad what happened there, but no one cares or questions it, it's just there, polluting everything.
Did you miss the little detail that elephants, buffalo, and whales were hunted to the brink of extinction to a degree that the populations probably will never fully recover, and same happened with logging of ebonies and other valuable tree-species, both exotic and domestic.
Even back then the demand far surpassed sustainable extraxtion levels, and human population has since grown by almost an order of magnitude.
The GP wrote about replacing plastics because they are ubiquitous in our daily life. They are everywhere in manufacturing and transportation, and technology/electronics. So indeed we have survived for a long term as humankind. Most of that time we were simple hunter/gatherers.
Do you want to go back to that age? Can you imagine the popularity of going back to such austerity?
> Do you want to go back to that age? Can you imagine the popularity of going back to such austerity?
Ridiculously dramatic.
The main source of microplastics is single-use plastic in packaging and plastic textile both of which could be dramatically reduced and in many cases outright banned.
The main barrier is not technological, the main barrier is purely economical, no company would want to foot that bill and no regulatory has the courage to enforce it.
I'm not the person you're responding to, but it is a very interesting question. "Modern" life isn't even ubiquitous, and being in my 30s living in a large US city on the upper side of middle class definitely alters my own perspective of "modern", but I cannot imagine life without cellphones, internet, all food being grown/hunted/processed by others (unless for fun) as modern. Living in a city that has plumbing is probably not something most of the world has even now, but to think that "up until the middle of the 19th century, people were still doing their business in pits, outhouses, and, of course, chamber pots" seems crazy to me, and I would not consider it "modern" whatsoever.
They didn't have plastics, but 19th century western life was already massive trainwreck ecologically and in no way sustainable.
Also mid 19th century is poor example because the modernity was extremely unevenly distributed. Sure, upper class Londoner might have lived very modern life, but that is hardly representative of the era in general
We weren't 8 billion people, didn't rely on transportation, agriculture, computers, communication, etc etc. I'd personally love to have a wooden keyboard.
Everything about them from the emissions they produce during manufacturing, the wasted space for parking, through to the tire dust, the noise, even electric cars are noisy enough, I'm currently living near a main road which is concrete and it's just insane how disruptive one car can be to our sleep.
I don't think self-driving cars will improve much, lost of the problems are still going to exist, traffic, noise, reduced walk ability, lost of space for roads and parking...
I will admit we own a car, but I really, really think before I turn the ignition. 9/10 I can use my bike and get some exercise or order online and just wait a day or two for something to arrive.
I applaude to the use of the bicycle, but does the stuff you order online arrive to your place via Star Trek transporter like or is there a truck delivering it to your doorstep?
The truck probably creates the same or more tire dust than your car.
Now, if you had someone delivering your goods on foot or bicycle ...
If you ignore the entire way people live and how the world works, sure. But if you comprehend context and respect the complex relations of dependence that exist in the real world, you would aim for something more realistic, like pushing for some kind of alternative tire material and phasing out the old stuff once it becomes available.
The Netherlands shed its car dependence. A taller order for some places yes, but definitely both a possible and potentially a necessary one (for a variety of reasons, not just this one).
Except it sort of seems like the reason the materials we chose were so cheap in the first place is because we didn’t factor in all of the costs, such as the costs of removing them from the environment and the bodies of every living thing in every corner of the planet, so maybe they just Looked cheap?
This is the asymmetric nature of modern western people. This has not always been the way of people - many people at many places over many times had cultures whose decision making time horizons extended beyond their noses. It’s all we’ve known, and our grandparents and great grandparents pushed it on everyone else at the barrel of a gun so we think it’s all anyone’s ever known, but an awful lot of people lived in cultures that were aware the future existed and they were going to live there some day.
That's not true. There are many natural and biodegradable alternatives for plastics that could be used, but aren't, and get blocked by oil companies and those they are paying off. Just like when action or laws against climate change are mentioned, there is a wave of opposition that traces back to oil money as well.
Basically, oil companies are being allowed to wreck havoc on the planet and our health, for the sake of maintaining their profits. The problem is the clock is ticking, and one can keep their head in the sand and pretend to ignore the danger for only so long, before inevitable reality happens.
Granted that I've not been following the microplastics saga that closely, but I wouldn't go that far. Has there been any research that demonstrates the dangers of microplastics to be on such a terrifying level?
If anything, we are starting to cross the threshold age of "plastics are everywhere" that I'd definitely expect some population-level effects starting to manifest in earnest.
Every year moves the microplastic scare towards the same slot that Electromagnetic hypersensitivity occupies in my mind. (Mind you that I'm not conflating the two yet, but every year we go without microplastic catastrophe moves the needle slowly into that direction.)
It's probably more likely that it'll turn out to be the same as the old scares about microwave ovens and cellphone radiation causing cancer, except there are now a lot more $$$ to be made in various industries from exploiting anti-science paranoia.
> On 31 May 2011, the World Health Organization stated that mobile phone use may possibly represent a long-term health risk, classifying mobile phone radiation as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" after a team of scientists reviewed studies on mobile phone safety. The mobile phone is in category 2B, which ranks it alongside coffee and other possibly carcinogenic substances.
> Some recent studies have found an association between mobile phone use and certain kinds of brain and salivary gland tumors. Lennart Hardell and other authors of a 2009 meta-analysis of 11 studies from peer-reviewed journals concluded that cell phone usage for at least ten years "approximately doubles the risk of being diagnosed with a brain tumor on the same ('ipsilateral') side of the head as that preferred for cell phone use".
And they just declared aspartame, the most widely studied food additive in the last 40 years, as possibly carcinogenic. When you declare essentially everything to be carcinogenic, then you lose credibility, as WHO has done several times now.
This comment and the one above it glossed right past the second quote where 11 peer reviewed studies were examined and it was concluded that 10 years of cell phone use results in you being twice as likely to develop brain tumors on whichever side you hold the phone against. That doesn’t seem “possibly carcinogenic” to me but maybe I have brain cancer and don’t understand what those words meant.
The impact and use of lead by romans has has been debated, but there is indication that they used lead cookware, although admittedly more for wine than food.
They also used it for their water piping which wasn’t too good. Then again, looking at what’s going on, it is an interesting question if we can rule out some similar effect for the weird decline of previously sane people like the former Mayor of New York. They may have been assholes all along, but it’s also clear that so thing changed.
I carry a bag, don't use straws(drink water from coconuts without one), use public transportation or walk, use gadges i buy for decades, plant trees and what not to protect th environment around me. The toughest task is convincing people around me to become eco friendly. It got be gov that could put an end to this madness
> The toughest task is convincing people around me to become eco friendly
It seems to me that is a losing strategy. Personally being environmentally concious is a way to keep back to the guilt, but not to change anything.
> It got be gov that could put an end to this madness
Right, which is why if enough people cared, and were willing to throw down their lives for the issue, we would have a generation of politically adept professionals. Yet, we are still waiting.
Measured concentrations reached up to 37.5 nanograms (that’s a billionth of a gram!) per cubic meter of air.
Nearly nothing, in other words... not that it matters anyway, because it's all practically inert. Perhaps they will serve as evidence to future historians of an era of progress before radical misguided environmentalism took over and plunged civilisation into another dark age.
The metaphor hardly makes sense as more progress occurred outside Europe in the Dark Ages. Now the world is way more interconnected. What would a global dark age be? Unprecedented since humans developed agriculture.
To think environmentalism will cause it. I mean if it happens, environmentalism will be a small factor.
Of all the things to cause global dark age, cmon. You’re reaching.
Cool, so what concentration of microplastics would you accept in your food? Your drinking water? Your mother's breast milk (yes, microplastics are present there)?
A carbon-carbon bond is 0.154nm, and the polymer chain lengths of common plastics are in the few hundred to tens of thousands.
If those are a "serious threat", then I wonder what they think of petroleum jelly... which is basically the same structure with much shorter chains, and is even more reactive!
How much chemistry knowledge some of these fearmongers have is highly dubious.
According to the FDA such containers are not permitted for food use, only for chemical storage, such as pesticides.
Additionally they are very very rare (only used where the chemical can't be contained in simpler plastics), and are not really where your attention should be on the hazards of plastics.
It checks out that a single unchecked self-reproducing cell could rapidly create a lot of them. I just thought there'd be control mechanisms to cause other cells to attack them.
Of course there are control mechanisms. The question is whether plastics are more or less carcinogenic than everything else we deliberately consume. All signs so far suggest less, far less.
Sure, sure. I was only interested in the no-minimum-threshold model and what were the causative things there. As always, I should have asked ChatGPT since it had a pretty good explanation.
Although this article seems to be more about particles from wear and tear on tires and clothes, which I always felt was a separate issue from plastic packaging that ends up in sea. But maybe I'm wrong about that.