Fleece blankets and clothing should go though. How many fleece hoodies do you need with your company logo embroidered on the breast? Why do we hand these things out at every company meeting as gifts when 90% of them sit in a closet or get thrown away.
Stop buying plastic junk. But plastic is not going away.
Seriously though, nearly everything we use today is made with some plastic. Banning short lifecycle plastic would be extremely disruptive to life in general. Like many things, a better product needs to be made to dethrone plastic. It's really hard to beat the combination of cheap, moldable, light, and durable.
1. Ethically you can't really do interventional studies where you're putting pretty well-established toxins into people
2. Practically you can't do observational studies very well because a) observational studies generally are atrocious, especially for understanding intake of a substance and its biological effects and b) there aren't any natural control groups because the entire globe has microplastics
3. We can ignore the fact that in-vivo and animal studies show very similar effects as to what we're seeing at population-scale in humans, because... well there are other variables that are hard to control for (and it'd be super inconvenient to have to refactor these out of our global supply chain)
"These findings highlight the pervasive presence of microplastics in the male reproductive system in both canine and human testes, with potential consequences on male fertility."
This terrifies me. How are we supposed to avoid plastic when it's literally EVERYWHERE and in EVERYTHING?!??!?!
You can always reduce the intake and your microplastic footprint. Avoid buying food in plastic packaging, use glass or steel containers for food at home, drink tap water with a good filter. Do not buy cheap clothes with synthetic fibers, install filter for your washing machine to reduce the release of microplastic. Shift your lifestyle to minimalism, reduce unnecessary consumption, maximize use of things, choose wood, glass or metals over plastic in things you buy. Smaller houses or apartments will also result in less consumption and plastic contamination.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/08/micropla...
there are too many people on this Earth and the population numbers are propped up by our usage of plastics.
Thomas Malthus or Club of Rome much?
And then a higher plastic concentration on average in human testis.
Wild.
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40429247
