this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Today I Learned (TIL)
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First sentence, "Tap water nano/microplastics (NMPs) escaping from centralized water treatment systems are of increasing global concern, because they pose potential health risk to humans via water consumption." This article is focused on micro plastics in human consumption not the environment.
Oh, I see now. We only care about the humans now, not the environment we literally depend on?
The entire ecosystem is intertwined...
Who are you inferring only cares about humans?
People can care about two things at once, while focusing on one.
Kind of like how when I have sex with my girlfriend I think about her mother.
What the fuck
OP in a totally healthy marriage 🙃
Let's say it this way:
Microplastics in your body are bad, so if you know how to reduce your intake, you know how to be healthy longer, which allows you to keep fighting the good fight for the environment longer. Would be a shame if you die of cancer due to plastics while some oil baron stays healthy due to only drinking tea.
You should care about this, you don't have to choose between your/human health and the environment when deciding on what to care for. Nobody only cares about humans, but saying "Microplastics can be removed (for human consumption) by boiling" is still good news to most people.
Is there anything saying microplastics are bad? I mean we and everything is full of them. What about food the food we eat is full of it so seems like a waste.
In some studies Mircroplastics seem to be linked to skin cancer. And while no food will truly be 100% free of it, I believe like toxins, they build up each level of the food chain (Bio-accumulation). So eating big carnivorous fish like Tuna may be less healthy than beef which is less healthy than a vegan diet, but most research on Bio accumulation seems to be focused on marine life.
Don't get me wrong, I do find this information interesting. It's still just about as useful as eating a huge bucket of greasy fried chicken and then chasing it down with a Diet Coke, and thinking you're accomplishing something.
The chicken, and any other foods you eat, still have microplastics in it. Unless you treat all the water, not just for yourself, but for the foods we grow to eat too. Not very feasible when you think of the bigger picture.
They also say microplastics are even found in the clouds. Clouds are basically just saturated humidity, aka water in the air. There's pretty much no such thing as air with 0% humidity, so you're literally breathing in trace amounts of microplastics, right this moment, while you're reading my comment.
And where are you gonna store the boiled water anyways? I don't know of anyone that keeps glass bottles around these days. I guess you could put it in a metal thermos, soldered together with lead based solder..
If I spent every day freaking out about every little thing I can do to try to extend my life by 6 months or whatever, I'd end up dying of a heart attack.
If people really wanna put a serious dent in the microplastic problem, they need to focus way more on removing all the macroplastics from the oceans and the environment. Boiling a pot of water every now and then ain't doing much of shit.
A wise man once told me that perfect is the enemy of good.
Boil your water if it's worth the effort for you. Otherwise don't. For many of us, it's a small effort for small gains.
Ugh.
Pretty much, humans only will act if it effects them directly. Though I guess once we get going we can be pretty quick about it. Example the ozone layer.
I would guess we all ingest a quantity of plastic the size of a credit card a year, through our water, food intake, and any products like toothbrushes we may use.
I've been using the same toothbrush for over 3 years. It doesn't seem to be losing any plastic, though the bristles do seem to be curling over.
Now my hairbrush is a slightly different story, I've had that for over 30 years. And yes, it's showing signs of significant wear and tear.
I thought plastic was supposed to last like 400+ years though? 🤔
Plastic does deteriorat or disintegrat, but it only does so into smaller and smaller pieces of its self.
Things like a plastic bottle will break into smaller parts of the bottle and linger around for hundreds or thousands of years but the bottle "shape" will not be recognised in this sense.
Unfortunately plastics like organic materials don't breakdown and get absorbed the same way back into nature. Our streets would look a lot cleaner IMO if all our litter broke down quicker. Ie less plastic rappers flying around and chip bags.
Fun fact, when we freeze a bottle of water it too slowly deteriorates and disintegrates. That plastic is then transferred into the water contained in the bottle. Doing this multiple times can show the wear and tear overtime.
Even at microscopic levels things like toothbrushes brissle do show signs of wear and tear, as all products do.
My example of toothbrushes is more on how interwoven our plastic dependency is in our day to day lives. We may be ingesting plastics without even realistically knowing where from.
For example in our foods. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/22/health/plastics-food-wellness-scn/index.html#:~:text=Apples%20and%20carrots%20were%20the,also%20the%20least%20contaminated%20vegetable.
“People don’t think of plastics as shedding but they do,”
“In almost the same way we’re constantly shedding skin cells, plastics are constantly shedding little bits that break off, such as when you open that plastic container for your store-bought salad or a cheese that’s wrapped in plastic.”
Thank you for your very detailed response. 👍
The way bigger problem is all the plastic waste in the oceans, landfills, out in the streets and beaches and other environments, etc.
It really sucks that people have become so dependent on plastic. It's almost like humans have totally forgotten that there was a time before plastic was even invented, yet somehow humans managed to function just fine without the stuff for hundreds of thousands of years...
It's MICRO plastic, literally too small for you to see. If you look at a new tooth brush under a microscope compared to a used one there are very clear signs of wear.
Electron microscope view: https://www.medicaldaily.com/pulse/after-you-brush-your-teeth-3-months-what-your-toothbrush-looks-why-you-need-replace-361258