Tons of microplastic rain onto western US (opens in new tab)

> stop wearing those stupid fucking polyester hoodies

According to this chart, the main sources of pollution are by far wear and tear from car tyres and road surfaces. Synthetic clothing comes last.

https://i.imgur.com/KmbY72h.jpg

That being said, one should never forget secondary effects of reducing consumption which is economic stagnation, which in turn leads to inequality and social unrest. At the same time, it is not really proven microplastics are particularly harmful. Its benefits may outweigh some harm to organisms when it only shortens live expectancy by a few years. That being said, it is of course always worthwhile to remove pollutants where adverse effects are obvious and where alternatives are available.

10mg per year is potentially a much bigger problem due to biological magnification - i.e. everything below us in the food chain is exposed to the same 10mg per year, so we accumulate the sum of whatever our food sources have consumed.

Most consumer plastic ends up in a landfill and typically don't leech microplastics in to the watertable.

Fishing nets on the other hand? Top polluter in the ocean https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacifi...

Recycles fabrics, like fleece made from PET, leeches ridiculously large quantities of microplastics every time you wash them.

Wool, cotton, linen and hemp fibers seem like the way to go to me. Synthetics have their place and their uses, but there is such a thing as "too much of a good thing".

And I'm sure people will start whinging about how much water it takes to grow cotton, but they will conveniently forget to mention all the shit caused by synthetics.

Praying for cotton and wool to become stylish. And I hope we get creative with natural fibers like linen, beech fiber, spider silk, et.

> 1) stop wearing those stupid fucking polyester hoodies (and other artificial fibers; aka your socks, gym shirts and underpants) -that's where most of it comes from. I'm looking at you, SF hacker nerds.

Other benefits of not wearing clothes made out of plastic or primarily plastic (into which I am lumping all human made fibres), particularly anything that touches your skin directly, and particularly in areas prone to perspire, include that you'll smell a lot nicer.

By mass, 8 million tons of plastic garbage is estimated to be entering the oceans every year. The oceans, with their hundreds of thousands of miles of shoreline and reef breaks, are the world's broadest, most powerful erosive force. The oceans grind up our plastic garbage into micro and nanoplastics and clearly that is now being swept up into the hydro cycle and rained back on Earth. This is not that hard to grasp.

Yes, artificial fibers are bad. They cause lots of microplastic problems in local water sources. I agree we should stop wearing them. But this problem is huge and global.

The risk to human health from microplastics seems lower than some other types of pollution. But microplastics are persistent pollutants that don't go away after a year or two or five; they might survive centuries. They sicken and kill aquatic life, over and over. They are poison pills that never stop being poisonous.

It's truly bad shit. We need to think about whether we want to address this problem at a global scale or not. If not, then we are accepting a big loss of biological life due to our utter carelessness.

> I'm looking at you, SF hacker nerds.

I just wear what they hand out.

This is obviously a huge overestimate. But go actually weigh out 10 grams of flour on your kitchen scale. Do you really think you have more diesel exhaust in your lungs than that?

With all this talk about microplastics in the environment, I was a bit surprised to learn that water cleaning facilities use e.g. "moving bed biofilm reactors" such as "Bioportz" which are small, round, hollow plastic things in moving water.

When seeing those move about and bump onto each other, my immediate thought was to wonder if any environmental microplastic comes off from those through abrasion/wear.

>Pretty sure I have more shit in my lungs from being around diesel engines for a few days, or, like being around potheads.

Character of shit in the lungs > quantity. Making assumptions here, but prefer to have cannabis combustion byproducts over plastic.

I imagine you already do not drive car, wear only rawhide sole shoes and use eco packaging - to prevent all the bigger real pollution sources by longtom.

Stop wearing them and landfill them because we don't have much better plastic remediation options?

Don't forget plastic sneakers, which create microplastic every time you take a step.

I read this in Jotaro Kujo’s voice

What’s your point? I’m hoping this is not yet another contrarian remark without an end.

plastic is a slightly larger category than CFCs

> So are the chemicals we place on fields of food. Everything we're doing is toxic. We think the earth can support 7 or 8 billion people but in the current ways of doing things, it can probably only do so for another 100 years maximum.

I gave it more like 300 years back in 2008, whereas Hawking gave it closer to 100 by which time he said if we're not multi-planetary we'll will have destroyed the Earth sue to our collective myopic behaviour; the time frame may differ but sentiment is the ultimately same: Humanity needed this reality check we've had with COVID, what we do from here on out may determine the fate of our entire Species' fate.

And we should act accordingly.

Earth does not really care (:

Watched dark waters last night. Pretty unreal how these companies behaved.

https://imdb.com/title/tt9071322/

Yes. Carbon tax, plastic tax. Basically we're still in the full denial phase. We need more energy, and we need clean energy. (Because ultimately every problem with plastics and pollution is solvable via spending more energy.) And some serious transformation.

* Tyres? Make them out of biodegradable organic materials. Maybe they'll need to be replaced every year, and they'll cost more, that's why the pollution tax has to make the safe/sane/eco/green version competitive. (Also more investment in infrastructure, mass transit, denser cities, more walking, etc.) Urbanization is already ongoing, but somehow instead of building efficient dense cities many countries on Earth are just building sprawling slums and/or suburbs. (Plus we need carbon-efficient concrete and a more carbon-efficient construction industry as a whole.)

* Synthetic fibers. Cotton. Sure, but you'll need non-polluting cotton farms, so closed loop energy intensive [indoor/vertical] farms.

* Plastic packaging. Meh, just use biodegradable alternative packaging. Eg. paper. (Heavier, needs more energy to transport.)

* Plastic bottles. Use aluminum cans. Again, heavier, plus needs more energy to manufacture, but endlessly recyclable.

* Plastic pigments in paint. Meh, find biodegradable alternative or stop using them.

It’s underground because anaerobic decay of organic material with heat and pressure produces oil. Chemicals aren’t inherently good or evil. Some, like oxygen, we’ve evolved to live with, while some we haven’t had the chance.

In millions of years something will probably evolve to eat all this plastic, just like it did with cellulose.

Oil has horrible consequences, but your rational for it being evil by being out of "reach" isn't very enlightening. By your logic we should not tap aquifers for drinking water, but mass desalination is fine. Instead, oil is bad because. It's not renewable, it's refinement/combustion is readily linked to cancer and other deadly/health issues, extraction/transport routinely kills ecosystems/creates toxic waste sites.

Oil was bubbling to the surface of the Earth before we harvested the stuff that was easy to get at.

Not that microplastics are okay -- they're my biggest environmental concern -- but oil itself is "natural".

Things are not evil or good. They do not give birth, because they are things. A chair does not feel pain because it's not a person.

You seem to think nature is a person, with a purpose, and designs things for that purpose. There is a christian unintelligent design subreddit for that. I believe this site is for technical and scientific discussion.

Now, let's start a nice healthy 5-page discussion about appropriate harshness of tone, ending with a shadowban of the IP of this hilton hotel.

That is surprising, especially considering that it's on the continental divide and has mostly headwaters.

I live a bit south of there in the mountains, also close to the divide. A lot of our precip, especially in winter, is moisture carried by the jet stream from the north pacific that gets caught on the mountains. Could be the source, but that's a wild guess.