> which are too small to be seen with the naked eye
Though likely a given, I wonder what the difference in outcome would be if consumers could see the issue with their own eyes. Maybe we'll need microplastic detectors at some point. It feels like a problem too easy to ignore while the effects pile up globally.
Nothing. Look at the deathscape polluted smoggy skies in India as people walk around without masks coughing.
You can see smog, but it still requires government intervention to effect change.
Governments respond to populist pressure. I think most people just aren't aware of how bad air pollution can be or that it even exists.
I was recently in a small Asian village where the pollution gets very bad for a couple months when farmers burn the sugar cane and rice fields. I mentioned it to some locals, and they thought the thick haze was just harmless "mist" from the winter weather patterns.
If it presents a threat to comfort, lifestyle or wealth, people can fiercely resist becoming aware even when presented with overwhelming evidence.
In the Netherlands, millions of people burn wood in stoves or fireplaces, just for coziness, or use it for heating where alternatives are readily available. The evidence for its massive detrimental health effects is overwhelmingly clear. When you dare to even present this evidence, you will get flamed and ridiculed as if you are an evil luddite out to take away their small pleasures in life.
We are slowly getting rational about the effects of smoking, but choking out your neighbors (and children) by burning wood is still something people feel is their human right.
Cheap, rudimentary, microscopes exist which can be used at home, automate the following?
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/mi9bw...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016599361...
I wonder how the amount compares to other fine particulate pollution.. would it move the needle on a pm2.5 sensor? And would a standard air filter remove most of it?
Not that I believe any of this BS in the first place, but I've always found it quite amusing that traditional blown-film plastic bags are being replaced with "reusable" ones... which are also made of the same plastics, except in textile form and thus easily shed fibers everywhere.
You can buy microscopes for pretty cheap if you’d like to look for microplastics yourself. But regardless I’m curious what you think happens to the plastic you use. Where does the little bit you scrape away go when you cut on a plastic cutting board? What happened to the fluffy fleece jacket that’s no longer fluffy? This stuff doesn’t biodegrade so it’s gotta go somewhere.
It's going back where it came from. I really don't give a shit about this new hysterical idiocy.
So it turns itself back into oil and seeps into the well where it originated from? You know this sounds like putting your hands on your ears shouting 'lalala I can't hear you'?
The thing I'm wondering is, if you don't care, why make the effort to comment at all? Clearly you care enough to do so. What are you afraid will happen by merely acknowledging what is the case? Whenever someone presents the finding of facts as hysterical, I'm left wondering who is actually the hysterical one.
The microplastic particles in our air aren't hysterical. They are just there. Research revealing they are present isn't hysterical either, nor is research about the consequences. At most, such research is more or less accurate, or distorted. I'm starting to think you are the one who is hysterical in this matter.
But for what reason? I can only think of only three:
you agree with the dangers but find it so overwhelming that you want to shut it down
you fear losing the benefits of plastic and want to undermine any action on the subject
you just can't take any kind of panic, regardless of the reasons and to maintain your sanity, you vehemently push away anything that might otherwise makes you feel alarmed
Where do you think it came from and how does it get back there?
Due to the inevitable march of entropy, sadly nothing really goes back where it came from. Living things are a beautiful and noteable exception.
> Detection of microplastics in human tissues and organs: A scoping review
> Conclusions
> Microplastics are commonly detected in human tissues and organs, with distinct characteristics and entry routes, and variable analytical techniques exist.
> In addition, we found that atmospheric inhalation and ingestion through food and water were the likely primary routes of entry of microplastics into human body.
This seems obvious to me why the heavier bags are better. They don't immediately blow away to the ocean or wherever else. We're also charged $1.50 for them where I am or you get a paper bag so people who want to save $4.50+ on a grocery run (which is a ton of people) will bring their own.
The problem with that is, in places where delivery is ubiquitous, people use the reusable bags the same as they used the single-use bags, and there's no way to return them, so now people are disposing of much more resource-intensive bags the same way they did the single-use ones.
Those same people who will save $4.50 by using the reusable bags also wouldn't think of paying for delivery. And the reusable bags are much more likely to be recycled or used for other purposes.
But also where I am people deliver 100% in boxes. That's an easy enough way to solve it. Also makes the delivery of a heavy load easier because you just drop the box on a dolly or similar.
Cloth bags exist.
Okay, feel free to ignore everything about PFAS, etc.
A century of progress is getting destroyed thanks to radical misguided "environmentalism".
Asbestos and lead in petrol and CFCs were also progress. But we decided to progress further to reduce the chance of dying of cancer. And we did!
Asbestos is harmless if not inhaled, and the most dangerous forms of it were banned long ago. White asbestos (chrysotile) is relatively safe especially if used as an encapsulated filler. Here's an interesting study of chrysotile miners, exposed to very high levels of it daily: https://asbest-study.iarc.who.int/
The effects of CFCs are still disputed, but they replaced far more dangerous refrigerants... but somehow people are being convinced into using propane and butane again.
On the other hand, I'll say that leaded petrol was bad, but that's because it was designed to be dispersed into the atmosphere and the effects of lead poisoning quite clear.
This microplastics bullshit has not passed the test of time or (real) science. It's not "progress", it's become radical ideology. Here's something which may enlighten you: a ton of articles which claim to have discovered "microplastics" are really implying to have done so by detecting the decomposition products of long hydrocarbon chains, which are of course present in polymers like polyethylene, the world's most common plastic; but guess what else has long hydrocarbon chains? Fats and oils. As in biological matter.
not in China, progress there is picking up pace, powered by solar. China is also prempting the loss of labour as people get older, and are building out fully robotic factories ,"dark factories" for the fact that the lights are turned off, not on, when they are running, as there are no humans on the floor. On the plastic's side China is by far the largest manufacurer of all things plastic, and buys load after load of US natural gas that gets pumped strait into cracking plants to be converted into polymers, but you can be sure that they, and others are working along sytematicaly to find a ploymer with the right properties for use, but that then iether breaks down comlpletly, or is inhearantly benign, and inert. My main point is that China, and nowhere else will decide how the whole plastic thing goes, and what we are loosing here in the west, is agency and credibility.
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