Remember those stupid people in the past, drinking lead-poisoned water? At least we could just stop using lead in pipes when we found out it’s bad for us. Good luck finding anything to ingest without microplastics.
My thought exactly: it’s essentially impossible to avoid micro plastic ingestion. I have no idea how one would go about removing plastic packaging from their food supply as it’s used to package basically everything.
Small steps. I replaced my mixing bowls with stainless steel, my food storage containers that take anything warm with glass, and my drinking cup with an SS one as well. At the very least, everything looks cooler now ;)
You can interpret it that way, if you want. However, that wasn’t really what I had in mind. Just pointing out that Americans seem to love acronyms so much that it gets completely ridiculous at times. In highly technical contexts it makes sense when you’re writing documentation or articles for a very small audience.
For instance, you can shorten Green House Gasses to GHGs if you’re audience consists of climate scientists, but don’t expect the general public to know that acronym. Go ahead and shorten Volatile Organic Compounds to VOCs if you’re writing to chemists. You can talk about CMB when talking to geologists and FFPs when talking to cosmologists, but people outside those fiels probably have never heard of these things let alone the acronyms.
In normal every day situations it just doesn’t make sense, because you can’t realistically expect everyone to know all of these thousands of accornyms for thousands of more or less common items, situations and things in life.
Generally speaking, it’s a good practice to do it exactly the way you just did. It’s just that certain acronyms have already been taken. Well, technically all of them have already been taken, but some are obscure while others are familiar to the general public.
If your new acronym collides with something obscure like CMB, then who cares (apart from geologists). If you end up using somethign more familiar ones such as USB, BMW or HTC, you’re going to run into some issues. However, it migh be fun to write an article and really mess with the reader by forcing as many acronym collisions as possible.
Yeah, I’m pessimistic about the huge shift we’d need to make, especially in America. But so much of that packaging is completely unnecessary. Glass jars instead of plastic tubs or bottles. If you visit some places in the UK, they don’t give you single use plastics in hotels and restaurants, though you can still buy that stuff in stores. Water is bottled in glass. Continental breakfast jams are in tiny glass jars. Some snack packages come in waxed paper bags, like what some tortilla chip brands are packaged in here in the US. Paperboard, cardboard, tins and foil. For toiletries, come countries have stores focused on sustainability where you bring your own reusable containers and they have dispensers for things like shampoo and liquid soap. Like a…soda fountain, but for cleaning products.
People are just so opposed to it here. Like aggressively opposed it it. Like eating yogurt in a glass jar instead of plastic is offensive to them. I don’t get it.
It’s actually not used everywhere: Cellophane is quite common as its permeable to water vapour but pretty much only that. Bio-sourced (cellulose) and compostable and you’re free to throw it in paper recycling as they’re used to fishing it out of the sludge (it’s what transparent letter windows are made of). And compostable here means in your own backyard, no industrial high-temperature composting needed.
Many plastics can’t readily be replaced but cellulose and lignin based stuff is at a stage where it can fill many many roles.
Also don’t forget metal, especially stainless steel. Glass if you want to look inside. All that will need regulation as currently producers are happily externalising costs.
Now if someone would produce stailness containers that are on the same performance and general engineering level as lock&lock.
Do water filters filter out microplastics? Although if they did i’m not too sure of the effectiveness, aside from removing maybe unsafe quantities… mainly because most filter jugs are usually made out of plastic
Fun fact, when romans introduced lead pipes through aqueducts across the empire, the lead didn’t affect all populations equally because of this. Hard water regions were mostly spared. Turns out the layer of limescale that forms on pipes is also good at stopping the lead leaching.
That’s true. I meant we stopped actively using them when building new houses. Though now that I think about it, even that is maybe not true everywhere. But at least it’s something you could change once you identify the problem. Microplastics have permeated everything, they can be found in the depths of the Mariana Trench. There is no getting rid of them (as far as we know).
Blend it up nicely and put it in a high speed centrifuge?
But seriously, replacing the organism tissue by tissue with clean replacements is about the most survivable option we’ve got right now.
We’ve found some DNA that codes enzymes that break down certain types, and we’re starting to crack protein folding. So maybe we could adapt them to play nice in humans and come up with a regiment, but we’re not nearly there yet
All atoms in the biosphere cycle regularly aside from some very longstanding ones.
If you identify the chemical makeup of the monomer (corroded plastic, micro plastic, whatever you want to call it), there’s nothing stopping you from hypothetically finding or creating enzymes which can digest it. The only reason it hasn’t happened naturally yet is due to a lack of evolutionary pressure to digest the weird compounds we’ve been making up until now.
Set up farms of modified mycelium or bacteria to scrub the plastics, and stop using many or set up required end of life treatment for plastic manufacturers, and you’ll very rapidly make a dent in plastic spread.
Further, modify wild biota, such as mushrooms, bacteria, etc to have the ability to produce the same enzymes for assisting in cleanup.
Big project, yes, but technically feasible. We’ve done more extreme things.
I’d just point out that these microorganisms will definitely escape into the wild at some point and then durabilty for plastics will be similar (maybe?) to that for wood (there was also a period in time when trees evolved when microorganisms had to catch up to degrade it, presumably it was full of wood everywhere that just wasn’t rotting).
Imagine a future where your PC screen or mobile phone has an expiry date and it’s not due to planned obsolescence. Maybe that’s not so bad after all, now that I think about it.
Honestly, my mind went first to the transport industry. Cars, busses, trucks, hell even trains and bikes (ebikes would have more plastic than the classic sort though). There’s plastic in everything. For things like wiring insulation, seats, circuit boards. Maintanance on big transport rigs is sometimes spotty as it is, would love to see what happens when there’s more things that can degrade them.
I honestly like the idea, but I wonder how many things that we take for granted because of plastic would go away?
I really dislike the fact that every single thing from the food isle comes packaged in at least one layer of plastic.
But I like that I can take a vinyl pressed 40 years ago and play it.
I agree with wood, it’s a very nice material, but indoors where you have a nice controlled environment or outdoors if treated. Coming to a hardware store near you - treated plastic?
Nice yeah. Not surprising, different mushrooms have different capacities to digest plastics as well, since mushrooms just kind if have all sorts of crazy stuff going on to let them do that.
I don’t know. Can the lead levels in plants and meat even be high enough to be dangerous for humans?
I assumed removing the lead pipes would be enough for lead while you had to remove the microplastics from every plant and animal you want to eat. But I realise I may be completely wrong.
Lead is still everywhere. Many electrical cords, Christmas decorations, paint remaining in homes from the 60s and before, even the 70s and possibly 80s. Many tools still sold today, screwdrivers, drill bits, etc. Many fresh produce foods have the potential and often do contain unsafe levels of lead, yes, stuff you buy at the grocery store. Some spices. Stained glass windows. Paints on cheap Chinese or elsewhere toys and other goods. People get lead poisoning today just from living their life not realizing normal stuff around them is dangerous. For real.
You know what also has it? Cheap silverware. You can literally rub it off with a terry cloth if you rub the utensil for like a minute straight… a friend of mine showed me one day. It leaves a shimmering powder on the cloth…
Never ever skimp out on silverware…
Most of the lead-filled silverware comes from China, too…
Remember those stupid people in the past, drinking lead-poisoned water? At least we could just stop using lead in pipes when we found out it’s bad for us. Good luck finding anything to ingest without microplastics.
My thought exactly: it’s essentially impossible to avoid micro plastic ingestion. I have no idea how one would go about removing plastic packaging from their food supply as it’s used to package basically everything.
Small steps. I replaced my mixing bowls with stainless steel, my food storage containers that take anything warm with glass, and my drinking cup with an SS one as well. At the very least, everything looks cooler now ;)
deleted by creator
I’ll never stop using SS for stainless steel or screenshots. At least as long as I’m not writing German ;)
Americans are so funny, because literally everything has to have an abbreviation.
Woah there, did you just call me American?
You can interpret it that way, if you want. However, that wasn’t really what I had in mind. Just pointing out that Americans seem to love acronyms so much that it gets completely ridiculous at times. In highly technical contexts it makes sense when you’re writing documentation or articles for a very small audience.
For instance, you can shorten Green House Gasses to GHGs if you’re audience consists of climate scientists, but don’t expect the general public to know that acronym. Go ahead and shorten Volatile Organic Compounds to VOCs if you’re writing to chemists. You can talk about CMB when talking to geologists and FFPs when talking to cosmologists, but people outside those fiels probably have never heard of these things let alone the acronyms.
In normal every day situations it just doesn’t make sense, because you can’t realistically expect everyone to know all of these thousands of accornyms for thousands of more or less common items, situations and things in life.
So, like using SS only after having used stainless steel directly and still being in the same context?
Generally speaking, it’s a good practice to do it exactly the way you just did. It’s just that certain acronyms have already been taken. Well, technically all of them have already been taken, but some are obscure while others are familiar to the general public.
If your new acronym collides with something obscure like CMB, then who cares (apart from geologists). If you end up using somethign more familiar ones such as USB, BMW or HTC, you’re going to run into some issues. However, it migh be fun to write an article and really mess with the reader by forcing as many acronym collisions as possible.
! What’s wrong with Solidus Snake?
CQC your local Nazi
Why? We must eradicate the microplastics! Who knows, maybe we can put all those neo-Nazis coming to prominence to good use.
These guys are getting more and more open about it.
As a person with a medical condition that makes it hard for me to lift things, moving away from plastic really sucks. ☹️
Yeah, I’m pessimistic about the huge shift we’d need to make, especially in America. But so much of that packaging is completely unnecessary. Glass jars instead of plastic tubs or bottles. If you visit some places in the UK, they don’t give you single use plastics in hotels and restaurants, though you can still buy that stuff in stores. Water is bottled in glass. Continental breakfast jams are in tiny glass jars. Some snack packages come in waxed paper bags, like what some tortilla chip brands are packaged in here in the US. Paperboard, cardboard, tins and foil. For toiletries, come countries have stores focused on sustainability where you bring your own reusable containers and they have dispensers for things like shampoo and liquid soap. Like a…soda fountain, but for cleaning products.
People are just so opposed to it here. Like aggressively opposed it it. Like eating yogurt in a glass jar instead of plastic is offensive to them. I don’t get it.
There’s actually a global shortage of the sand they use to make glass and concrete…
It’s actually not used everywhere: Cellophane is quite common as its permeable to water vapour but pretty much only that. Bio-sourced (cellulose) and compostable and you’re free to throw it in paper recycling as they’re used to fishing it out of the sludge (it’s what transparent letter windows are made of). And compostable here means in your own backyard, no industrial high-temperature composting needed.
Many plastics can’t readily be replaced but cellulose and lignin based stuff is at a stage where it can fill many many roles.
Also don’t forget metal, especially stainless steel. Glass if you want to look inside. All that will need regulation as currently producers are happily externalising costs.
Now if someone would produce stailness containers that are on the same performance and general engineering level as lock&lock.
We still have lead pipes in a number of places… its not like we snapped our fingers and all the lead pipes were magically gone.
What I heard is that we have such hard¹ water where I live (ancient city center), to protect against lead. No idea if that’s an urban legend or not.
¹17 dH, 3.036 mmol/l, 6.071 mval/l,21.303 °e
This is true. Hard water reduces the amount of lead that can leach into water. I don’t know the specific concentrations etc, but it is true.
I know it’s true, I just don’t know if it’s true that that’s why we have such hard water (that I need to filter with Brita plastic filters …)
Do water filters filter out microplastics? Although if they did i’m not too sure of the effectiveness, aside from removing maybe unsafe quantities… mainly because most filter jugs are usually made out of plastic
I doubt it, I was more referring to me using plastic boxes to filter my water.
Fun fact, when romans introduced lead pipes through aqueducts across the empire, the lead didn’t affect all populations equally because of this. Hard water regions were mostly spared. Turns out the layer of limescale that forms on pipes is also good at stopping the lead leaching.
That’s true. I meant we stopped actively using them when building new houses. Though now that I think about it, even that is maybe not true everywhere. But at least it’s something you could change once you identify the problem. Microplastics have permeated everything, they can be found in the depths of the Mariana Trench. There is no getting rid of them (as far as we know).
Sure there is.
Its just not economically viable (meaning it won’t make anyone more money than not doing it), so its not going to happen anytime soon.
Not trying to be combative, but genuinely curious: What ways are there to remove microplastics from organisms?
Blend it up nicely and put it in a high speed centrifuge?
But seriously, replacing the organism tissue by tissue with clean replacements is about the most survivable option we’ve got right now.
We’ve found some DNA that codes enzymes that break down certain types, and we’re starting to crack protein folding. So maybe we could adapt them to play nice in humans and come up with a regiment, but we’re not nearly there yet
Thank you!
All atoms in the biosphere cycle regularly aside from some very longstanding ones.
If you identify the chemical makeup of the monomer (corroded plastic, micro plastic, whatever you want to call it), there’s nothing stopping you from hypothetically finding or creating enzymes which can digest it. The only reason it hasn’t happened naturally yet is due to a lack of evolutionary pressure to digest the weird compounds we’ve been making up until now.
Set up farms of modified mycelium or bacteria to scrub the plastics, and stop using many or set up required end of life treatment for plastic manufacturers, and you’ll very rapidly make a dent in plastic spread.
Further, modify wild biota, such as mushrooms, bacteria, etc to have the ability to produce the same enzymes for assisting in cleanup.
Big project, yes, but technically feasible. We’ve done more extreme things.
I’d just point out that these microorganisms will definitely escape into the wild at some point and then durabilty for plastics will be similar (maybe?) to that for wood (there was also a period in time when trees evolved when microorganisms had to catch up to degrade it, presumably it was full of wood everywhere that just wasn’t rotting).
Imagine a future where your PC screen or mobile phone has an expiry date and it’s not due to planned obsolescence. Maybe that’s not so bad after all, now that I think about it.
Well I recommended modification of wild biota anyway so yeah, that’s the idea.
I live in a 70 year old wood framed house with a 20 year old wooden desk, walk on 30 year old wooden floors, have 15 year old wooden doors…
Meanwhile I’d easily wager 80% or more of plastics have a dwell time once deployed of a few days.
In reality, without being in relatively harsh conditions, it’s unlikely for plastics to degrade very quickly even with highly effective digestion.
Honestly, my mind went first to the transport industry. Cars, busses, trucks, hell even trains and bikes (ebikes would have more plastic than the classic sort though). There’s plastic in everything. For things like wiring insulation, seats, circuit boards. Maintanance on big transport rigs is sometimes spotty as it is, would love to see what happens when there’s more things that can degrade them.
I honestly like the idea, but I wonder how many things that we take for granted because of plastic would go away?
I really dislike the fact that every single thing from the food isle comes packaged in at least one layer of plastic.
But I like that I can take a vinyl pressed 40 years ago and play it.
I agree with wood, it’s a very nice material, but indoors where you have a nice controlled environment or outdoors if treated. Coming to a hardware store near you - treated plastic?
Thanks! So at least there is some hope.
I think there are some naturally evolved bacteria, that digest plastics. Pretty sure I’ve read an article mentioning something like that.
Here it is: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230123083443.htm
Nice yeah. Not surprising, different mushrooms have different capacities to digest plastics as well, since mushrooms just kind if have all sorts of crazy stuff going on to let them do that.
What ways are there to remove lead or damage caused lead from organisms?
I don’t know. Can the lead levels in plants and meat even be high enough to be dangerous for humans?
I assumed removing the lead pipes would be enough for lead while you had to remove the microplastics from every plant and animal you want to eat. But I realise I may be completely wrong.
In fact, the US government is giving out grants to states right now to help them remove lead pipes.
Lead is still everywhere. Many electrical cords, Christmas decorations, paint remaining in homes from the 60s and before, even the 70s and possibly 80s. Many tools still sold today, screwdrivers, drill bits, etc. Many fresh produce foods have the potential and often do contain unsafe levels of lead, yes, stuff you buy at the grocery store. Some spices. Stained glass windows. Paints on cheap Chinese or elsewhere toys and other goods. People get lead poisoning today just from living their life not realizing normal stuff around them is dangerous. For real.
You know what also has it? Cheap silverware. You can literally rub it off with a terry cloth if you rub the utensil for like a minute straight… a friend of mine showed me one day. It leaves a shimmering powder on the cloth…
Never ever skimp out on silverware…
Most of the lead-filled silverware comes from China, too…
How scary…
We literally replaced lead pipes with plastic pipes
Not exclusively plastic.
Yeah, mine are copper