I'm pretty sure most of the plastic I use doesn't get recycled for various reasons, although I can estimate 90% of it by weight I do put in the proper recycling can.
I also care enough to avoid plastic if given a reasonable alternative.
However for a bunch of consumer goods there is no reasonably priced alternative.
I wish I could vote with my wallet and spend a significant (but not prohibitive) percentage more for detergent or shampoo or whatever in another container.
I can't help but feel like policy could help here.
For detergents, we've recently switched to Dropps for both laundry and dish detergent, and I've been quite happy. It's mail order, so not zero packaging, but about as low as you can get, and they put some thought into designing a box that's easy to re-use.
For dry foods, if there's a grocery store that sells in bulk in your area, that can make a big difference. We made some cheap muslin bags that we take to the store when we're stocking up; most food co-ops and Whole Foods will let you provide a tare weight so you don't have to pay an extra $0.10 for the weight of the bag. People like to malign Whole Foods for being expensive, but their bulk section tends to be priced comparably to packaged options at traditional grocery stores.
For razors, double-edge safety razors are an option, but a bit tricky to learn to shave with. I've found I can also keep a standard Gillette Mach3 cartridge going for a good 3 months by drying it after each use (and keeping it dry - no storing in the shower), and "stropping" it on a tea towel before shaves. My hypothesis is that it's corrosion, not use, that is the main limiter of a blade's life span.
They're not hard to find at all. They're called "soap". It's as easy to find as Dove Unscented soap or any boutique brand; just look for a soap with the fewest ingredients. Or better yet: if you have time, just make your own. We've been conditioned by shampoo manufacturers to believe that cleaning our hair is different than cleaning our skin and I just don't buy it.
Aside from the convenience and the low cost, the fact that soap isn't an oil-attacking detergent like shampoo means that conditioner is probably unnecessary as well. Also, don't wash your hair every day. It may take time for your hair and scalp to adjust to not having to produce as much oil as it's used to, but my long hair has been absolutely fine for years using just soap.
Beyond reducing your plastic footprint, this method of shaving is substantially cheaper - albeit with some upfront costs. I switched years ago, and paid about $150 for a nice weighted blade handle, brush, and soap dish and now I spend maybe $60 a year on new razors and soap. The one draw back I can think of, aside from the fact that you have to learn how to shave like your grandfather (which isn't really a drawback, if you ask me) is that you can't bring these razors through airport security in your carry-on.
However my main issue is that there are so many hoops to jump through, and most consumers won't even get to the point of considering things like this unless these are presented as equally valid alternatives to the plastic packaged goods on their local convenience store.
Maybe something like this exists in other cities? If not it should, and really it should just be an aisle in the grocery store.
However, we don't need to use most of the products we use anyway, but we do, so we should try to make things have as little impact as possible.
It's true there aren't many alternatives at the moment for certain things like berries. I've never seen a bulk barrel at the grocery store for raspberries (for obvious reasons), and the clear, thin plastic they come in is not usually recycled. At farmers markets you can find them in biodegradable paper cups, but farmers market berries aren't available to most people most of the year.
As you note, the only way to fix this is legislation. Plastic is near free because it's a byproduct of something else we already use too much of (crude oil). If its production were taxed in alignment with its environmental cost (e.g. at the same rate it costs to collect it out of the oceans) we'd see far more alternatives.
I wouldn't go that far. For things like ethylene, if there were no other demand for it, it would just get burnt in power plants like natural gas.
At farmers' markets, most berry vendors sell raspberries and blackberries in egg carton-like paper baskets to absorb any juice. Strawberries are in plastic baskets.
We only started using plastic in large quantities 50 years ago.
We have a Tragedy of the Commons with plastic.
The only major thing I can't avoid plastic for right now is meat. Always comes in packaging. I am hoping to find a butcher where I can show up with my own glass containers in which they dump the meat.
And, given the language "people could be ingesting...", "suggests people are consuming...", I'm a bit suspicious of the numbers given. The study itself is said to be under review for publication and has been for over six months now. Anyone know if that's a long time, normal or short?
Not sure if this matters, but the naive math doesn't really work... they say "about 2000 pieces a week" and that they were "fibers", and "about 5 grams". The pieces are stated to be < 1mm in size. Assuming an average of 1mm x 0.1mm x 0.1mm "fibers" (rather large IMO), that's 20 cu mm or 0.02cc. Given plastic's density that's 0.03g, not 5g. I wonder if someone misplaced a decimal point or confused mg with g.
Run a faucet with a filter system attached, and in minutes there should be multiple grams of plastic trapped in the filter. You'd expect clogging by plastic to be the lifetime-limiting factor of a faucet filter and of circulating filtered water fountains for pets.
In reality, I have never seen visible plastic residue in evaporation residue or trapped in household water filters.
They took all of it to a laboratory and the laboratory found nothing at all. The presenter told the audience that it was surprising for him, and that they thought that the results were a letdown for the purpose of the documentary but that it was "good news" that we can still enjoy food without microplastics...
I would say that the results will vary vastly depending on the place you obtain the samples, but anyway, we should change our relationship with plastic...
In fact, we've waited longer than that for a single set of reviews (ugh) and it's rare for anything to be accepted straightaway. Most papers go through the review-revise cycle at least once, even at the journal where they're ultimately accepted. This also doesn't indicate much about the quality of the research. Reviewers can flag serious problems, but they may also just want improvements to the writing (more details/discussion) or complementary experiments.
It's hard to check the numbers from the press release stuff. I swear I saw at <5mm somewhere too. I would bet the underlying studies are a morass of different definitions and methods, and I'd expect that a major contribution of the paper is to find some clever way to combine them.
Else you could be the unscientific outlier, thinking you've shot a study down with a sample of one -- whereas you could e.g. be on one fortunate district with really clean water supply.
Zero harm, so far. That's phrased like they're racking up lists of harm it causes. But so far, zero. So 'scratching the surface' means 'haven't found anything'?
They've found an awful lot. They've determined that plastics containing endocrine-disrupting chemicals for which there's no determined safe dosage are floating around in our water and food in concentrations that were previously unsuspected. Determining how much harm that is causing is, necessarily, the last and most difficult step.
Hopefully scientists are feeding mice diets with 1% plastic content to see if anything interesting pops up.
The microplastic has been in the environment for a long time - reacting with the ecosystem and potentially passing through quite a lot of digestive systems before it gets to us.
The question is whether environmental micro plastic is any more harmful than the micro quartz crystals we've been digesting and expelling since the dawn of time.
Trying to trigger the yuck factor with visualisations isn't science. What's the actual risk here?
[1] https://cen.acs.org/articles/90/web/2012/08/Ocean-Plastics-S...
[2] https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/seabirds/laysan-albatrosses-...
That's nonsense, it's understood that microplastics contain and secrete endocrine-disrupting chemicals that are damaging to human health. It's a question of quantifying the problem and how much damage it's doing.
To be clear, if you eat something containing a bit of quartz you'll poop it out shortly, barring some specific digestive problem like diverticulitis that traps it. Your body won't do anything with it. This is not true of the chemicals in plastics.
If you read my note again, you'll find what you reactively typed out is the question I'm asking.
This is why Hacker News is degrading. You can no longer question anything.
Plastic can be toxic...see BPA a building block for certain plastics.
BPA is a known endocrine disruptor, and numerous studies have found that laboratory animals exposed to low levels of it have elevated rates of diabetes, mammary and prostate cancers, decreased sperm count, reproductive problems, early puberty, obesity, and neurological problems.
BPA is a xenoestrogen, not the only one to be found in plastic manufacturing, not the worst one (many BPA alternatives have higher estrogenic activity), and is also not the only type of chemical to look out for; phthalates, for example, fuck with testosterone metabolism, and are often found in plastics, too.
So, yeah, there is definitive proof of it being a problem, and studies have been published in depth for quite some time. You kinda missed the boat on this by about a decade.
the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has said that BPA is safe at the very low levels that occur in some foods. This assessment is based on review of hundreds of studies...
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
Which types of diet contain more plastic than others?
I'm a vegan for example. Does this mean more or less plastic than average?
Which materials do not end up as microplastic? I assume natural fibres don't but besides them?
Like, I'm pretty strictly Paleo, which means heavy on the whole foods, heavy on the real ingredients from organic and safe sources, local if possible, the only major difference between us should be just that I eat meat and you don't.
Reason I say this is, I know vegans out there who eat fake food because its vegan... but its still fake food. If you are one of the vegans that eats like me, people like us should be avoiding most of the plastic in the diet just by our choices in where the food comes from.
You can't escape it due to the whole "biodegradable/recyclable plastic will save the world" bullshit movement (which is where most of the microplastic is coming from, sadly), but we should be avoiding most of it.
As far as I understand organic fruits and vegetables growing exposed to air and rain would end up polluted a lot more than indoor farming products for example.
Eating local also depends on where you live. Apparently most of the microplastic that is around stems from car tires so that produce farmed near highways or cities will be more polluted with microplastic than the one they transport by plane from New Zealand.
We used to put microplastics into cosmetic products. Microbeads are caught in sewage treatment plants, and the sludge is used as fertilizer which is how these microbeads end up in food.
https://echa.europa.eu/-/echa-proposes-to-restrict-intention...
> ECHA’s assessment found that intentionally added microplastics are most likely to accumulate in terrestrial environments, as the particles concentrate in sewage sludge that is frequently applied as fertiliser. A much smaller proportion of these microplastics is released directly to the aquatic environment.
Some microplastic (mostly fibres from clothing) is so fine it's blown into the sky by wind, and brought down by rain.
This is effectively not a thing in the United States. The war on styrofoam is nearly complete here.
I was imagining things like plastic molecules wearing off the inside of an overused water bottle and consumed with the water
Obviously, my grandma isn't 40% plastic.
Yeah and you can be pretty sure that kind of quantity does not stay in the human body over 50 years+. So there is a factor of how much is in, and how much gets out. This, and not all plastics are equal, and some (most?) of hydrocarbons are fundamentally inert and unreactive and whether or not they cause harm is a big question mark.
The problem about microplastics seem to be more about its effects on marine microorganisms than the fact that we are eating them.
Also, some of it is pretty small. It can be small enough to enter the bloodstream when eaten, and we don't know what that will do.
So far we don't know if it's a problem or not.
One thing I do know is that not all sand is alike. There's the normal sand that has been ground & rounded over millennia and 'sharp sand' used in construction. Getting normal sand on your skin is a minor annoyance, and I'm not aware of any real damage if some are inhaled. Sharp-sand is much more irritating to the skin/ eyes, it feels more like fibreglass than the beach variety, and I believe the sharp particles are the reason for silicosis as they are not easily removed by mucus.
It would be interesting to know which category microplastics fall into. You would think (hope) micro-plastic would be more like the natural 'soft' sand variety than the more troublesome sharp sand.
That said, while I'm glad that they're doing these studies, I'd like to here something more conclusive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film) [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...
