Microplastics are so pervasive that they're even found in human breastmilk now. Maybe it's fatalistic, but what is the point of worrying about this on an individual level beyond limiting use of certain plastic products? And it's not just microplastics - we're seeing other news about "forever chemicals," hormones in our food, the global drop of average male sperm production by 50% (!!!), etc.
At a certain point, apathy sets in. If this is our generation's mesothelioma, so be it.
I do think there's a limit to how much doom and gloom an individual can productively handle and I suppose this also applies to society as a whole.
People seem to accept that it's all downhill from here, and sometimes even cynically applaud it. Like with the male sperm story. It's catastrophic and accelerating, yet got near-zero attention. The few responses to it seem to celebrate it.
Humanity lacks a story for the future. It can't just be "it's going to get so much worse" nor can it be "if we try really hard, we may slow down the decline, but a decline it will be". Those stories just aren't good enough. Nobody invests in a sinking ship.
"People seem to accept that it's all downhill from here"
Strange, I know plenty of people that do see an upside, including myself. It's a choice to believe things can and will get better.
Unless you have a crystal ball, we're both choosing to believe in an unknown future. So choosing to believe it will get worse is no different from believing it will get better. Although one is arguably better for mental health.
You make an excellent point, there's a major oversight in my original post.
The distortion lens of media and social media is a thing. The real world and its people are vastly different from what one might read online. Yet an increasing amount of people barely interact with the real world and real people, hence they internalize the doom and gloom as if it is reality.
The real story is the massive increase in LGBT identification across the youth. I strongly believe that a large component of this is biological due to hormonal changes.
I don't know about the hormonal changes, you'd have to back that one up.
But regardless, we can't ignore some major cultural shifts. LGBT is an example where you have real LGBT and what seems to be a cultural version of it. People honestly probably not belonging to that group in a lasting way, but joining in regardless.
It's fits a larger pattern of creating a persona with as many victim labels as possible. These labels creating the self-fabricated identity, which are then used to excuse yourself from your own flaws and bring down the "privileged", those with less labels.
This may be fun for a while but the obvious danger is that this self-obsession over identity gets you nowhere in the real world. Nobody gives a crap about these labels nor can you hide behind them.
You should not read this stereotyping the wrong way. I have empathy for minorities, I loathe the cultural version of it where it's worn like fashion or weaponized.
And I do worry about social contagion. A teenager chronically online in the most gullible part of their lives are absolutely affected. A teenager will believe anything you tell them and they'll copy anything other teenagers do.
>"about the hormonal changes, you'd have to back that one up."
Endocrine disruptors [0] are widely distributed by humans within our environment, for use directly or indirectly within food & water resource streams, such as:
- Polymers within plastics, used in food, water, and other human-consumed product containers (and other lifestyle commodities, such as clothing, toiletries, etc.). Example: Phthalates [1]
For more examples google "Plastic polymer endocrine disruptors"
- Herbicides. Example: Atrazine [2] (As well as Pesticides and Fungicides)
For more examples google "Herbicide endocrine disruptors", "Pesticide endocrine disruptors", and/or "Fungicide endocrine disruptors" (Many chemicals in each of the three categories are endocrine disruptors)
You can thank the EPA & FDA for being revolving doors for chemical industry lobbyists, for companies such as Bayer (which purchased Monsanto), Syngenta (which produces Atrazine), and Dow Chemical.
[0] "Many chemicals, both natural and man-made, may mimic or interfere with the body’s hormones, known as the endocrine system. Called endocrine disruptors, these chemicals are linked with developmental, reproductive, brain, immune, and other problems."
[1] "Some types of phthalates have affected the reproductive system in animals. Human health effects from exposure to low levels of phthalates are not as clear. More research is needed to assess the human health effects of exposure to phthalates." "CDC researchers found measurable levels of many phthalate metabolites in the general population. This finding indicates that phthalate exposure is widespread in the U.S. population."
[2] "Atrazine induces complete feminization and chemical castration in male African clawed frogs". Tyrone B. Hayes [email protected], Vicky Khoury, Anne Narayan, +7, and Sherrie Gallipeau. University of California, Berkeley, CA, and approved January 15, 201 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0909519107
Or it could be that people are LGBT and can now safely come out and be LGBT? If you look at a chart of handness, as left-hander were no longer forced to be right-handers, the proportion of left-handers shot up till stabilizing at the naturally occuring population level. Why couldn't it be the exact same is occurring with LGBT identification?
There's archeological evidence of transgenders going back almost 3000 years before any hormone was ever isolated. Some Native American tribes had room for as many as 7 genders. There are definitely not more LGBT today than before. Animals probably invented it a few hundred millions of years ago. The good news for you is narcissism can be mitigated. Get help.
I’m honestly surprised why you can’t change your race. Race, like gender, isn’t really a real thing beyond an abstract human concept.
If you want to identify as black why not simply say you are black? Especially if you can pass as black without further modifications?
Most people’s lineages aren’t even so pure that you can say they are a pure example of a certain “race” anyway. We just accept people at face value. You could be 50% black and say you’re black and people accept it wholeheartedly (i.e. Barack Obama) So why not 40%? Or 5%?
people see race as a proxy to lineage when it really isn't appropriate and leads to the doublespeak you are highlighting. nonetheless, the reason its not accepted to change race is because the adopting person would be, in the eyes of many, adopting a lineage which is not theirs. that lineage is one that is likely attached to suffering and there is cultural and potentially financial reparations that are occurring for people from these lineages who identify as black. these reparations, if taken by someone from another lineage, would be theft
Beau of the fifth column did an episode on this sometime within the last year. That is on the number of youth identifying as LBGT... it's amazing how many people that are something will publicly identify as that thing if they are not at risk of being humiliated, beaten, or even killed for it.
Not everything will go downhill. Some things surely, but not everything - some things will go uphill. For example, suppose climate change eliminates half of Earth biosphere, including half of humans. Chances are, their medicine, technology, education, social structure will still be better.
Usually people will treat the deaths of their loved ones as going downhill, even if the death improves society as a whole.
I believe the GPs point was that there needs to be a positive story about the future to inspire people to realize that future. Like if all that the future holds is the death of your loved ones, why would you care about issues facing society?
I am absolutely with you. Total apathy. I can’t do anything. My 100% waste goes to local recycling system. I pick up thrash when I am in the nature and bring home. Even left by others. I avoid synthetic clothing and wear only when I really need it. And still micro plastic in the air everywhere. How is this happening!?
Youre probably already aware but unless you live in a very unique locality with an extremely expensive recycling system, very little of the plastic you put in the system actually gets recycled.
Current consumption and wealth levels are not sustainable but reducing consumption is completely antithetical to the capitalist and consumerist society of present day.
Buying less stuff, going on fewer vacations, driving less, eating less varied food. Unthinkable to almost everyone, including the overwhelming majority of those who actually recognize the problems and what's at stake, let alone those simply claiming that they do for social brownie points.
I really hate low quality objects from plastic. Cheap toys for example… They are made in seconds, transported around globe, used for minutes, then break and get disposed. Think about plastic cars with breaking axles or not working water pistols. Even expensive nerf gun from big brand is gone after few months. While some of these are easy to disassemble, other have electronics inside. I agree, that flying and car driving are bad, but that can’t be really avoided. Importing plastic trash like mentioned toys should be forbidden EU wide.
And don’t get me started about food packaging. Every 100 gram of food comes with at least 5 gram of plastic packaging. Sadly I must eat sometimes and can’t do anything about packaging.
We are doomed. The only conscious choice is not having more children to live on this dying planet. I see this is a fact. All our efforts to "save the climate" or ban some especially dangerous chemicals are lipstick on the pig.
Congratulations on being the first person in human history to call the end times correctly.
Again and again we’ve shown we can make these transitions, including surviving a major ice age. While there’s good reason to worry, as lack of worry denotes foolhardiness, despair is both self-defeating and counterfactual to the whole of human history.
This time it may well be different, but if it is, then your attitude is guaranteed to lead to failure, as we will then not take the necessary steps to secure the future.
My money is on a technological solution overall, but there are many things regular people can meaningfully do, such as driving less, giving up one or more cars, or choosing to build or renovate toward highly insulated, potentially net carbon sequestering house as with the passive house standard, switch to heat pump based a/c and water heating, and voluntarily contributing to carbon sequestration efforts such as through YC alum Wren https://www.wren.co/join/Empact
If you think that’s not enough, and perhaps you’re right, what lever do we need to press to make change? It is our responsibility as the current generation to identify and press that lever to secure the future for our descendants.
Politically, my money is on the Citizen’s Climate Lobby effort to bring about a carbon tax, and the American Conservation Coalition for its effort to raise the prospect of environmental policy in the Republican sphere. If enough people vote on this issue alone[1], as the second amendment and abortion communities have effectively done over the past forty years, then we have a chance to shift policy in the direction of conservation/protection.
For me that means: a carbon tax to reduce demand, unleashing zero-carbon sources like nuclear to further out-compete the fossil fuel plants, while also embracing efficient infrastructure like pipelines to efficiently convey that supply we continue to use. On this last point, remember that the demand is constrained via a carbon tax.
The world needs our earnest efforts. You can keep your despair.[2]
[1] particularly in the primaries, as most house districts are now non-competitive between the parties
[2] Incidentally, I think the hysteria on the left is also counterproductive, as “the sky is falling” only reaches so many people before it discredits the speaker, and the goal should of convincing the middle does not require them to be terrified - IMO the easiest way to do that is to make the behavior high-status and motivate people that way, e.g. see Tesla, solar panels, etc.
>Incidentally, I think the hysteria on the left is also counterproductive
The left is definitely more vocal about it, but it seems like it's a state of mind created by tough personal circumstances which act as a base of projection + poor education which doesn't throttle the projection, and those two things affect many people across the political spectrum. Right-wingers have the steam valves of denial and religion though.
If, instead of climate change, the hysteria were about engineered pandemics escaping labs (not COVID; I mean an actual engineered pandemic sometime in the future), I think it would actually be warranted but equally unhelpful. :p
>engineered pandemics escaping labs (not COVID; I mean an actual engineered pandemic sometime in the future)
This kind of adlib really works against getting people to care. Given the immediate (and intentional) destruction of all evidence that could point either way, such definite claims are ill-advised.
The male sperm issue isn’t from environmental issues, it’s psychological/societal. When you repeatedly tell men that their natural state is “toxic masculinity” you’ll of course drive down sperm counts through depression and self hatred.
Plastics are inert. This is why they don't biodegrade easily. It is the additives in the plastics (to make them softer, or color them, or whatever) that are terrible for you.
By the time these things are 'microplastics' I am having a hard time feeling scared that they are harmful. I'm not saying they aren't, but until someone can tie them to an actual problem, I don't see an issue -- especially since there is nothing we can do about it.
That said, one-time-use plastics are absolutely obscene and need to be removed from society as soon as humanly possible.
It is the additives in the plastics (to make them softer, or color them, or whatever) that are terrible for you.
That said, one-time-use plastics are absolutely obscene and need to be removed from society as soon as humanly possible.
Those seem to be somewhat conflicting viewpoints. The overwhelming majority of single-use plastics are PE or PP, which also don't really have much in the way of additives.
PVC, ABS, and others in those families are what need the really harmful plasticisers, and also cost a lot more; as a result, they aren't going to be chosen for single-use applications unless there are other important reasons to do so.
Then the article goes on to mention PFAS, which is related to fluoropolymers, another very different category. I'm sure FPs are used in some single-use applications, but they are not cheap compared to PP or PE so they'll be massively lower in volume.
I hate how articles like this just promote a "plastics = bad" narrative, and they didn't even mention what type of microplastic they found.
"Stabilizers are the most widely used additives in the PE industry.
Other additives commonly added to polyethylene are stearates (e.g., calcium and zinc stearates to neutralize acidic catalyst residues and to impart lubricity),
pigments (e.g., carbon black, cadmium yellow, and titanium dioxide),
metal deactivators (e.g., oxalyl bishydrazide for PE cable insulation),
processing aids (e.g., Dynamar, Ucarsil, Viton-A, to improve flow of the molten polymer),
optical brightners (e.g., Uvitex OB to enhance appearance).
Additives commonly added to polyethylene include antioxidants (hindered phenolics and phosphites for process stabilization),
antiblock compounds (e.g., silica, talc, and kaolin to reduce sticking of adjacent film layers),
and slip agents (e.g., erucamide and oleamide to reduce friction)."
I have dental floss and tape made out of PFAS. Unfortunately its 25% PFAS content is what makes Oral B floss so good and waxy- I haven't found a non-PFAS floss that works half as well
Without the full article we can only go by the abstract of your link, which doesn't say anything definitive except that the effects on humans are unknown.
I'm not sure how freaking out about it is going to help. I am all for removing plastics as much as possible, so the motivation to do that should help the other. In the meantime there are definite, known bad things that I can freak out about health-wise.
There are no countries with good waste management systems. Waste counts as recycled, if it was exported. What happens after that, nobody knows and nobody cares. Even in Europe, just a tiny amount of plastic gets recycled, most is shipped away, so that others should care about.
Mandate plasma gasification instead of plastics recycling. The result is a syngas that can be burned for energy and an inert slag you can dispose of in asphalt.
Honestly go look outside. Go alongside a well trafficed road in the city or the country and take a close look at the soil. The curb or tree lawn is filled with visible bits of degraded plastic, and that's not even seeing abraded tire dust that will just look like soot or dirt.
Go to pretty much any beach and sift through the sand. Again you will find an abnormal number of plastic mixed in. Even in "clean" places with not a lot of litter plastic bits are visibly everywhere.
Own any synthetic clothes? Look at your lint trap after running a dryer or shaking out your clothes. The dust and lint coming off will quickly become microplastics. The wastewater from your washer will also be filled with them
While we still use hydrocarbons for a while for power, we might as well let some of them hang out as our stuff for a bit before being burned for energy.
I get that argument, but wouldn't it be better to bury it deep so that the carbon is taken away rather than added to the ecosystem?
Sure, small-scale "energy recycling" makes sense, but if everyone did it with all our waste plastic outout then we'd pretty much just be using fossil fuels with extra steps, and the carbon will end up in the atmosphere.
It is fossil fuels with extra steps but see that when you burn garbage for power that’s displacing the equivalent amount of power that would be provided by fossil fuels (almost everywhere around the world today).
Therefore you get to leave some oil or whatever in the ground instead of going to the trouble of burying garbage.
Burning garbage instead of fossil fuels should be carbon neutral with some benefits of not filling landfills etc.
Asbestos is also chemically quite inert. But in small fibers, it can physically interfere with cellular processes. I'm not aware of evidence that microplastics behave in the same way, but a number of other small nonreactive particles do have biological effects, so "chemically inert" doesn't seem like a good heuristic for "harmless".
I don't think that is a helpful comparison. Of course being 'inert' is not a good heuristic for harmless -- a bullet made out of teflon fired into you will harm you quite severely despite teflon's inertness. My implication was that without further evidence there is no reason to assume harm by default, because inert things are non-reactive and there is no known mechanism for microplastics having a mechanically harmful effect on mammals.
Because it takes up space in organs etc. It gets in the way. Stuff blocks up. It could become dislodged and accumulate into a blood clot. Lots of reasons why we shouldn't have foreign objects in our bodies.
I always dream about opening a single use plastic shop in the future, for those who just don‘t care and those who are actively opposed to it being removed everywhere.
For example, drinking delicious Coca-Cola Zero Sugar at McDonalds from a paper straw is disgusting. The straw usually disintegrates before I am done and sticks to the lips at the start.
Why is everyone using straws as an example? First, they are not what I am talking about -- we used to get beverages in re-usable containers and now it is almost impossible to find anything in glass. We don't need plastic to-go containers, we don't need everything in a plastic wrapper or vacuum sealed in a thick plastic container (as evidenced by companies not doing that and having zero problems with their products being damaged). These are just a few things that could be changed with zero inconvenience to the consumer. In fact, the plastic sealed packages that require a chainsaw to open being discontinued would be a convenience for consumers, since I have never met a person who didn't hate them.
I would be so far from shocked if we found out soon that plastic grocery bag / straw bans were a psi-op by big oil/plastic manufacturers to make people hate the idea of reducing single-use plastic. I couldn't have picked a more inconvenient and inconsequential place to start legislating if I had tried.
A ban on plastic soda bottles? Great! There's are existing non-plastic solutions, nobody would be negatively impacted, and we'd see that reducing our plastic use can be easy and not require major sacrifices. Instead we come up against it every time we buy a beverage or go to the grocery store.
I think you are on to something. It isn't unprecedented -- they did the same thing with 'recycling' -- using a political and media campaign to convince people that plastics weren't bad because they could be recycled, then getting legislation passed to require recycling by households. It is absolutely villainous.
The paper straws are pretty inferior but the grocery bag taxes just aren't that annoying. If you live in a place that charges for bags you quickly get used to just bringing bags with you and it's no big deal. Plus it significantly reduces the number of plastic bags blowing around in the wind. Since bags are so light they easily become airborne, sometimes posing a traffic safety hazard and often blowing into waterways.
My city outright banned single-use grocery bags. I was already in the habit of bringing re-usable bags, but every so often I'll have forgotten to grab bags or I'm stopping in on my way home from something else so I don't have them on me. Before the plastic bag ban, I'd just grab a "single-use" bag, and then use it as a trash bag for my kitchen or bathroom. Since the ban I regularly buy kitchen trash bags, I have about a dozen re-usable bags stuffed in the back of a closet, and half the stuff I buy at the grocery store still comes wrapped in a layer or two of excess plastic. For me, net loss. For the city? Probably a minor win in terms of plastic usage and street trash, and a significant loss in terms of people's willingness to ban other forms of single use plastic.
Before the plastic bag ban, I'd just grab a "single-use" bag, and then use it as a trash bag for my kitchen or bathroom. Since the ban I regularly buy kitchen trash bags
I wonder if those who come up with these ideas realise the irony of forcing people to buy bags which are truly going to be single-use instead of reusing what they would've already had.
How many people in your life re-use grocery bags? I'm fairly certain grocery bag bans are a net-win when viewed from the perspective of total plastic usage, because MOST people would have to be using them at least twice for the result to be anything other than a net-win from any perspective but mine. I only managed to use about as many as I was given because I got pretty good at remembering my re-usable bags...
The problem is not the burden of changing my behaviour, or the extra cost of buying exactly as much single-use plastic as I need in the form of a box of trash bags a couple times a year - the problem is why are we starting with this?? I'm dead certain that there are a ton of single-use plastics we could ban that would have close to ZERO impact on 99.9% of people's lives, because it would be handled entirely by industry doing a single re-tooling of their lines, but we're not doing those for some strange reason?
Everyone I know reuses them; not just for trash, but they're handy for whenever you need a bag (or even just a film of plastic) for whatever reason, because they take up almost no room.
Single use grocery bags are problematic in the sense they use almost no resources individually. Anything you're replacing them with uses far more plastic and/or energy to produce. A reusable bag tends to need reused dozens to a hundred times for the material needed to make it. Then add in you need to wash the reusable to avoid spreading food borne contamination and the ratio gets even worse.
My in-group used them extensively. For just about everything.
It doesn't really matter though; the ban on straws and taxes on shopping bags have resulted in a noticably lower amount of said products blowing around main roads. Totally worth it in my opinion.
Now, if we could just get biodegradable coffee and soda lids...
I understand I am the weird one here, but I have the feeling must have missed the great straw usage conditioning everyone else went through. I find straws to be something for small children, not grownups.
I'm not sure I've used a straw in my adult life, yet I see people drinking coffee with a straw. Isn't the taste affected? Lots of what we think of as taste is actually smell and texture.
No wine connoisseur would order a straw with their expensive wine! I fail to see why one would be necessary for coffee or water, except for long distance runners and other situations where one needs to drink while moving.
In case anyone else has no idea what a 'celeriac' is:
> Celeriac (Apium graveolens var. rapaceum), also called celery root, knob celery, and turnip-rooted celery (although it is not a close relative of the turnip), is a variety of celery cultivated for its edible stem or hypocotyl, and shoots. Celeriac is like a root vegetable except it has a bulbous hypocotyl with many small roots attached.
But I want to leave the store with the beaverage and throw away the container afterwards. Another great horror: Thin plastic bottles! Drinks in crinkly plastic bottles that feel like you could just roll them into a ball. Yuck. I want the thick plastic ones you can use to bonk someone on the head. I want back my cheap single use plastic bags that I could just throw away after use, instead of managing storage and availability of reusable ones.
I mean you’ve read the same news as I did, but you still cannot be bothered with not throwing stuff away immediately and managing grocery bags in a drawer at home? Why is it so hard for people like you to contribute a teeny-tiny thing to society once in their lives?
Patagonia's stated mission is to save the earth and microplastics entering the oceans is a major environmental concern. However, it is also true that many of Patagonia's clothes are made from synthetic materials such as plastic. The use of synthetic materials in clothing (and each washing) greatly contribute to the problem of microplastics in the oceans.
I’m I missing something? Is the above wrong? Or is Patagonia lying about their mission driven approach?
Saving the earth is a complex aim with so many different areas to prioritise. Synthetics may produce micro plastics, but then natural fibers like cotton require huge amounts of pesticides and water, viscose or bamboo requires a shit load of chemicals. Carbon footprints for almost all textiles are big. Recycled plastic is a low carbon, no pesticide, low impact material with one downside - micro plastics.
Polyester is one of the few success stories around recycled plastic. It’s not like the alternative is to turn your old plastic bottle into a new plastic bottle, plastic recycling is almost always downcycling the material into a lower grade product.
Like most things around conservation and the environment, it is complicated and there are loads of stakeholders - biodiversity, micro plastics, chemical accumulation, CO2 and greenhouse gases, deforestation, waste management, just to name a few.
One thing we can be sure of is the best thing is to not buying new clothes. In fact this philosophy should be applied to every consumer good. Making things is extremely bad for the environment. Patagonia have been pretty consistent around this point, for example as far back as 2001 they had their “don’t buy this jacket” ad: https://blog.yorksj.ac.uk/jovanalleshi/patagonia-sustainabil...
This is the elephant in the room that most consumer goods companies don’t want to talk about. They can make things out of bamboo or produce paper straws or have recyclable packaging, but fundamentally even environmentally friendly products have a huge environmental impact.
Ultimately Patagonia’s mission statement is at odds with the reason it or any company exists. Saving the earth isn’t profitable.
> This is the elephant in the room that most consumer goods companies don’t want to talk about
If it was just companies not wanting to talk about this, things would be fine. Problem is that neither policymakers, nor common citizens want to talk about this apart from a miniscule minority. This includes the overwhelming majority of those who claim to espouse eco-friendly values and to be willing to make lifestyle changes to stick to them. If you're not buying less new things, including e.g. doing a house renovation using new materials, you're almost certainly far less eco-friendly than the less wealthy who can't afford these things in the first place. One might try to placate their conscience by buying indulgences in the form of donations to climate causes but this doesn't really work.
Even what's commonly thought to be the biggest elephant in the room, "having kids is the worst thing you can do for the environment", is all but a sibling of the "making things is extremely bad" elephant, as the former is bad only because of the latter. If youre raising your kids in the woods living off the land like hunter-gatherers, or if you're raising them at the wealth level of the average Sierra Leonean child, having one isn't bad for the environment all.
Yeah, I did debate not including that part. I think I would elaborate by saying…
Saving the earth isn’t profitable for companies in the business of making consumer products (in most cases).
But for companies that make essential sustainable products/technologies and services like wind farms, or various green technologies, or electric car infrastructure, or waste-to-energy plants, or recycling plants, or any number of things we will need to reach net-0 carbon, there will be a lot of jobs and profit to be made while also advancing humanity and helping solve this big problem.
The flawed premise is that synthetic clothing significantly contributes to microplastic pollution, particularly in the ocean. Plastic pollution in the ocean comes primarily from fishing gear like nets, debris unintentionally released by major storms and wave events, and countries that use rivers leading to the ocean as primary waste disposal. If you want to make a difference to plastic pollution, advocate for sustainable fishing practices, end shipping waste overseas for fake recycling (Patagonia really recycling helps this), and support programs to establish waste collection and disposal in countries that don't have it.
Standard sewage treatment processes also capture most microplastic with the solid waste, if you live somewhere with sewage treatment.
I was stunned to read that, in the UK, after carefully separating out the microplastics with the solid waste, that waste is then... spread on farmland as fertiliser, microplastics and all.
>In the UK, of the sewage sludge screened out by treatment works, 87% is sent to farms. The microplastics so carefully removed from wastewater by the treatment process are then spread across the land in the sewage sludge the water companies sell to farmers as fertiliser.
Patagonia also makes clothing from recyled furs such as wool, what's your point? This is of course way better for the environment than virgin wool because...you know why..
The short of it is that all product manufacturing has an impact on the environment, and they are investing in minimizing their impact over time.
Something they note is that the biggest way to reduce impact is to create longer lasting and high quality products, because the less frequently you need to buy something the less pollution you create.
I don't think Patagonia is lying, why do you think this ?
They make very high quality clothing which lasts a long time, mostly out of recycled polyester, which is of course better than making more sources of microplastics ?
On the other hand, I purchased a "synchilla" top, it was absolutely ridiculous how much polyester fiber it shed, like absolutely crazy, I was vacuuming my house constantly. In the end it did stop, but it was ridiculously bad. I should've sent it back.
I was under the impression that the primary sources of ocean plastics were large usually Asian cities without proper waste management effectively dumping significant portions of their trash in rivers and the ocean as well as ocean fishing waste.
Sure some plastics get into natural water sources from clothes washing, but how much of an issue is this actually compared to other sources?
It feels to me like this ship has sailed even before we were even aware of it. All of a sudden, all the news is that plastic is in everything now, including our blood, placentas, fruit, etc.
And we've never cared much about plastic in our water; everybody knows that water that's spent some time in a plastic bottle tastes different from water from a glass container, but we never had any problem drinking water from plastic bottles.
Is this issue really worth worrying about? And if it is, is there any chance it can be turned back? Because it seems like plastic is in everything already. Though we should probably stop producing more plastic for temporary packaging; that only exists to get thrown away.
The article says so: “ Sewage sludge is the byproduct left behind after municipal wastewater is cleaned. As it is expensive to dispose of and rich in nutrients, sludge is commonly used as organic fertiliser in the US and Europe.”
Also organic farms use “row covers” to solarize soil and kill weeds by smothering them instead of using herbicide. Those are mostly just sheets of plastic. Sometimes they break down. Plastic hates UV.
Im getting really worried about the impact this will have on our kidneys. I had a tap water filtering on very dusty tap water and the filter was supposed to last 1 year it lasted 3 weeks.
I believe it might be a good analogy to how those microplastics are destroying our kidneys
I have no expertise in this area, but before reaching the kidneys wouldn't microplastic particles have to cross one of the "filters" from our gut or lungs into the blood? I guess that's where I'd look for problems first.
I remember earlier it was limited to ocean and fish were seem to be polluted with micro plastics but contaminated soil in large parts of the world is very scary news.
(reposted comment)
I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about “plastic roads”.
Many countries, desperate to make use of the gargantuan flow of waste plastic, and desperate to avoid it going into landfill, are putting the waste plastic into roads.
This is called “recycling”.
Sounds like a great idea until you realize that cars and trucks drive on the roads and grind them into dust - dust containing microplastics.
The microplastic dust will go into air, waterways, rivers, oceans, food, plants animals and people.
All this is because the environmentalists have decided that “keeping plastics out of landfill” is more important than anything.
Plastic roads are an environmental disaster in an epic scale being created in the name of “recycling”.
The worst thing is that for some reason it’s not obvious that this is a disastrous idea, and all around the world people are breathlessly talking up plastic roads like its a solution to the plastic waste problem.
“In 2015, the Indian government made it mandatory for plastic waste to be used in constructing roads near large cities of more than 500,000 people”
Please don't copy-paste comments on HN. It lowers the signal/noise ratio of the site.
If you want to refer to something you wrote elsewhere (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34153694), a link is great. Even better, if possible, would be a link along with new information drawn from the specifics of the new discussion.
Every action has a consequences, these are what we call 'unintended consequences'. It's good that this is making news on BBC, hopefully Governments around the world will take heed and correct this policy.
> Sounds like a great idea until you realize that cars and trucks drive on the roads and grind them into dust - dust containing microplastics.
Car tires themselves wear down and produce microplastics. I would guess the tires wear down more than the road, so the contribution from road would be minuscule, comparing to the contribution from the tires.
The contribution from the road is independent of the contributions from the car.
By your reasoning, if the micro plastics from cars increased, so could the micro plastics from the road, even to astronomical levels, so long as it's less than the cars.
I'm not sure if it's environmentalists pushing for that, or the plastics industry, in response to complaints about the amount of plastics waste. The alternative that environmentalists actually want is reduced production of plastics, and less making of single use and short lived items
At a certain point, apathy sets in. If this is our generation's mesothelioma, so be it.