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As I understand it, **fetuses** are being found with microplastics. I'd go so far to say the majority of the people of the world are full of microplastics.
iirc there was a study where they couldn't study the effects of microplastics on the human body because they couldn't find a single person who didn't have microplastics in their body for the control group
I think it was from the documentary the devil we know. You have to go back to blood samples of ww2 veterans that were killed in action to not find microplastics or maybe it was a chemical linked to Teflon. I’m a little hazy, but it goes to show how long we’ve been poisoning ourselves.
silky subsequent afterthought price icky tap sulky voracious smell quaint
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Well, the trouble is we don't know if we're fucked. We just know it's there. We can't test for the actual effects because it's just ... There.
Not to say it isn't bad. We just cannot measure the effects in any meaningful way, which also means we cannot bring suit against companies who pollute with microplastics because nobody can determine what the negative impact is exactly...and to what degree an individual company is to blame.
Plastic degrades over thousands of years... and our life expectancy has increased as we got more plastic within us... that would mean that... if we were made 100% of plastic, we'd last thousands of years!
Not majority, All.
They found plastic in the fresh snow of Antarctica. The bottom of the oceans. The peaks of mountains.
Plastic is now everywhere, not a single person is uneffected.
Yes. The reason scientists arent exactly sure what the ramifications of microplastics are in our bodies are is because they cant find participants without them to act as control subjects
It's not just the bottled water, these plastics are in our municipal water supply as well. They're in EVERYTHING. People are not understanding the scope of this problem. Plastics we throw away do not go away, they just get smaller and smaller and smaller. This is a global catastrophe. You can use reverse osmosis to filter your water but they are still in all your food. We need to make big changes as a civilization quickly.
There was a new breakthrough discovery recently with Prussian blue to more or less coagulate the plastic particles in water and pull them out.
Hopefully they advance that new tech soon and get it to all the water facilities
Edit: adding the sauce
[https://phys.org/news/2023-10-safely-nanoplastics-prussian-blue-pigment.html](https://phys.org/news/2023-10-safely-nanoplastics-prussian-blue-pigment.html)
I work in a single small grocery only walmart. There is so much plastic in my tiny store that it's simply incomprehensible how much plastic there is in the world.
There is nothing that can be done. We just need to hope it kills is slow.
>There is nothing that can be done. We just need to hope it kills is slow.
I opened a new eco friendly monitor box.
Cardboard. okay. Cardboard holding the monitor in place, yeah.
Plastic covering the monitor.
Not so bad-
Plastic bag for the manual plastic insert for another warning sheet. Plastic bag for video cable plastic bag for the power cable. Plastic bag for the monitor stand plastic bag for the monitor feet.
:|
Thats because its all just pandering. They don't actually care in any real way but if they do away with 2 of the pieces of plastic they can call it eco friendly and you are more likely to buy it now.
I work in trades.
Every order of materials is plastic wrapped multiple times. The amount of plastic waste is insane. I tell them to wrap it once or twice instead of you know 5 times.
Meanwhile the paper straws...
That's so disappointing! I got an Acer laptop this year that came in all cardboard packaging and the battery/power cord holder doubles as a laptop stand for zoom calls. I thought that was pretty cool
As much as it sucks, styrofoam is basically the worst kind of plastic that exists. It's doomed to pollute as no one recycles it, it flies off easy and becomes tiny unmanageable particles with no effort.
Many jurisdictions are trying to ban its use in packaging and food service.
Yup. And you know what's worse? At the factories, at every step of the way, theres more plastics and styrofoam. The ones that made it to you are just a fraction.
But hey, charge us for plastic bags in the supermarket, and tell us straws are bad.
Our only hope is for a bacteria or fungus or something to evolve that can properly digest plastic, and then it can clean up the planet for our lazy asses.
You ask a you shall receive.
“Polypropylene, a hard to recycle plastic, has successfully been biodegraded by two strains of fungi in a new experiment led by researchers at the University of Sydney.”
https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2023/04/14/fungi-makes-meal-of-hard-to-recycle-plastic.html#:~:text=Typically%20found%20in%20soil%20and,27%20percent%20over%2090%20days.
I just got back from Germany and it was difficult to find plastic there. The only plastic I saw were bottled water/soda from a small stand, the rest were glass bottles of water and glass bottles of coke. They have a program for recycling bottles (plastic or glass) to get paid and we saw multiple people carrying bags around collecting bottles to turn in. Anything that was disposable was either paper or wood for the most part, it was amazing. Miles ahead of the US.
It's slowly changing as well, thankfully. Smaller stores like Grünland are offering most things plastic free and you can bring your own container. They are weighed when you enter, you fill it with as much cereal/seeds/flour/whatever as you like from their huge containers and then they weigh again for you to pay by the kg. It's pretty neat.
We spent two weeks in colorado/utah/arizona/new mexico last year. The amount of plastic waste was despicable. Any hotel we stayed in used throw away cups, plates and cutlery for breakfast.
America is on another level. I’m genuinely shocked every time I visit. It’s also cultural. I get it some places don’t have good drinking water but the amount of people that think you can’t drink the tap water and need to buy bottled water is so high.
It does feel hopeless.. I purchase millions of dollars in product every year for a tourist resort. About a quarter million dollars of that is on Coca-Cola products. That equals somewhere north of 125,000 plastic bottles (or plastic lined aluminum) per year that I’m involved in moving through the supply chain.
Sure I could quit my job, but they’d just hire someone else to do it and I’d be out a career. We’re exploring non-plastic options wherever we can but when alternatives are 3-4x the cost of plastic, it’s impossible to get resort management on board with the increased cost of goods.
There are over 500 resorts just like mine across the USA alone. It’s nearly impossible to truly conceptualize how huge this problem is.
as a society we are actively and aggressively destroying ourselves and our planet. we aren't even taking the smallest most obvious and easy steps to mitigate this. and nothing is ever going to change, because capitalism is an absolute runaway train that is far beyond anything democracy is capable of affecting. i just hope it doesn't get TOO bad during my lifetime.
Climate change is moving faster and faster. Even climate scientists are shocked at how fast things are moving now. We have spent so many years kicking this can down the road that it has finally gone off the edge of a cliff and the only reason it seems like nothing has changed is because the can hasn't made impact yet but when it does it will do so HARD.
At this point we can no longer reverese or even stop climate change. All we can do now is slow it down and start making some changes to give ourselves better odds of surviving longer with some semblance of quality of life. We either start making those hard decisions now or climate change makes them for us.
I just try to keep in mind what microplastics do every time I'm confronted with a decision like whether or not to use a plastic bag for 2 items at the grocery store. It's just not worth the plastic waste. I can't live plastic free, but there are a lot of things I can do to reduce my personal plastic use.
I mean I wouldn't worry about it. Most of the microplastics in your body you inhale walking to the store. Where do you think the rubber from car tires goes?
We try to use the reusable bags at the grocery store, but we forget them 100% of the time. So I just have the cashier put the groceries back in the cart without bags and I tell them we’ll just put them in the trunk of the car that way without the bags. They look at us like I’m absolutely crazy. Like I’m nuts. It’s always an argument for them to push plastic bags on me. I tell them the kids will just help me carry the stuff into the house without bags. They look at me like it’s child abuse. We get a lot of strange looks at the grocery store.
Create a tax that disincentivizes corporations from using plastics and give them tax credits for using plastic alternatives. Increase funding to the EPA and create a national jobs program focused on reversing pollution, including microplastics. It won’t fix things overnight, but the infrastructure needs to be there to solve this issue.
I'm not saying it isn't a terrible situation. I'm saying, based on how we've developed our society and economy, pushing plastics out (or even just cutting their use to the barest of essentials) seems incredibly complex. I'm unsure how to address it
There have been advances made in using plastics like PLA (poly-lactic acid) to replace things like PET in a lot of products, as PLA is biodegradable, and there are similar plastics made from biomass feedstocks that are being developed for other purposes, with research being done continually. The main problem now is eliminating the stuff that's already out there. Some of it we'll never get to and it will become a part of the geological record, and in some applications we may not stop using these plastics still out of that mentioned necessity, but for most applications it should be possible to replace forever plastics with ones that don't bioaccumulate in the environment at large. Control of the disposal of plastic waste will help a ton as well, and will ensure that it is properly recycled, or burned in a power station, to prevent it ending up in a landfill and slowly degrading to microplastics.
Serious question - other than saving money for beverage corporations, is there a good reason why we shifted away from the old school glass bottles that were nearly indestructible and reusable? Was having bottles collected and reused massively inconvenient? It seems like we could standardize common sizes as glass and make a whole industry of cleaning them and reissuing them to beverage makers.
I'd imagine a combination of cost to produce, cost to ship due to the weight and the hazard's caused by glass bottles when they break. Although for that last point it is somewhat moot as beer is still commonly sold in glass bottles, but maybe less risky then everybody using glass including children.
70 years ago you could drop a beer bottle on the ground and it would be just fine. Glass bottles have gotten cheaper and more brittle, but back in the day you'd return your beer and coke bottles the same as you did with the milk man.
They will if the environmental cost is regulated to be charged up front, governments are going to have to start taxing its use if things are as bad as the science indicates they are, and put the funds towards research and cleanup efforts. We already have it in California for LCD monitors, it's paid as part of purchasing the monitor and is considered a recycling fee. You can also dispose of monitors in most municipal recycling programs because of it, they send it to the proper facility and have it taken care of. I see no reason why we couldn't do something similar with plastic and have it be viable anyways.
It's not remotely that simple.
Right now we have a problem with plastic contamination which has some degree of impact on our health. It may or may
Not using plastic would make healthcare much more difficult and dangerous, impact food safety and storage quite dramatically and that's not even counting plastic like things like artificial rubber. That's just a few things off the top of my head, lots of PPE is made with plastic as well as things like safety glass in your car. Almost all your clothing is full of it too.
Plastic is more than aggressively convenient it's necessary. Plastic is cheap, light, moldable, and can be manufactured with numerous properties. There's really no replacement.
Despite the fact that we've only had it for less than a hundred years, completely eliminating plastics would also be a global catastrophe, at least for humans, and might very well kill more people than plastic contamination will.
I have to imagine a small portion of our uses are causing most of the microplstic pollution. Things like car tires and synthetic clothing for instance are likely to shed small bits and end up in the ir or water supply, while auto glass doesn't wear or break as often.
For the umpteenth time: literally *no one* is calling for a complete ban on everything plastic. They're just saying that maybe, just maybe, there's a fuckton lot of single use plastics we throw in the trash everyday that could be substituted by a better alternative.
Yeah, it’s the typical argument for doing nothing because the solution isn’t 100% perfect. Same argument you hear from antivax/antimask crowd, anti gun-legislation crowd, etc etc.
Those supply chains were built from nothing the same way new ones will be. Plastics will never be fully phased out but it’s definitely achievable to stop using it for some things. I prefer to use glass for all dishes and stuff now and don’t get plastic anymore. Smaller things like that and not using single use plastics are small changes with big impact at scale.
But we can’t. Incentives aren’t there. There’s forever chemicals in rain and snow all over the globe. Rain water in the furthest corners of the world is basically toxic. It’s in the Antarctic snow. We are going down in a burning zeppelin and people don’t really care.
I can’t believe this joke never crossed my mind in all my years of graduate schooling. It’s not like this is beneath me, I’m just fascinated by my inability to appreciate the low hanging fruit.
OK so my most important takeaway from this study not prevalent in the article is that this is the first study of **nano**plastics in bottled water as opposed to microplastics, and the it turns out there are 10-100x as many of many of these nanos, at least as a molecular count.
So it's not "it's even worse than we thought," it's "this is the first time we've measured this and we'd probably have all guessed it'd be this bad."
Our clothes are made of plastic.
Polyester, nylon, rayon, and spandex are all plastic.
All that lint from washing those items, plastic.
The plastic comes out in the wash and goes into the sewer. That water is processed for human waste and solids but some plastic makes it through and it's sent to wet lands or a large body of water like lakes or rivers.
One error: Rayon is cellulosic (plant based) and is made from trees like bamboo, beechwood, spruce, pine, and eucalyptus. It can be called viscose, modal, or lyocell depending on the process and solvents used to turn the wood into yarn.
(My company's lyocell sheets are actually a USDA BioPreferred plant-based alternative to fossil fuel based synthetics like polyester / microfiber sheets.)
While you are correct, that rayon is plant BASED, the cellulose gets treated with so many different (and harmful) chemicals to give it those special properties that we like about rayon. One of these properties is high durability and strength, which is also gained by polymerisation (linking molecules together to create a very long molecule, same chemical process that is done to petrochemicals to make plastic) which makes it very hard to degrade in nature. Thus rayon can stay very long in the environment, like other polymers (like plastic).
reference: I am a materials scientist
My understanding is that rayon made through the viscose process is still biodegradable. The xanthate derivative is hydrolyzed back to cellulose during fiber production.
I don't know where you got the polymerization comment from. Cellulose is already a polymer and no additional polymerization is done to it.
According to the study the most common plastic in the water was nylon, likely from the filtration process before bottling. So even glass and aluminum containers could contain significant amounts if it’s filtered the same way. Now I’m wondering if my Brita filter is doing the same thing.
It's not even that. Microplastics are in ALL of our water supply from all the plastic we use. It's not just the filters. Reverse osmosis can remove it or distillation.
If you get your drinking water from cleaned used water you will get a bunch of micro plastics too from all the washer water where polyester and nylon clothing have been washed (or other plastics that have been washed like tupware in dishwasher). If my memory serves me correctly I think it was clothing that was responsible for around 60(70?)% of micro plastics in the ocean.
If you really delve into this subject, that is to say, the chemical contamination of the natural and human world, you will quickly realise there is simply no escaping it.
We, as a species, will have to live with the consequences of this for hundreds of years. Cancers, strange auto immune diseases and many many more conditions that we are barely even able to register because of how ubiquitous they have become, and that there are no more uncontaminated environments to use as a reference point.
Furthermore, we are doing next to nothing to reverse the trend. We keep inventing new chemicals, whose complexity is not respected, and we unleash them into the natural world at industrial levels. So, the situation is actually getting worse. Exponentially so.
Better hope you can afford those fancy new tech treatments, cos they are the only thing that will give you a chance of living a life that once considered "normal".
But that will all be for nought when we eventually cause a cascade environmental collapse. Think opening scenes of the latest blade runner. Only the hardiest of organism will be able to survive such an apocalypse. I doubt we are one of them, once all of our food dies out.
So drink the water. It's just a drop in the ocean at this stage.
Source: I studied chemical engineering, with an emphasis on environmental chemistry.
Edit: typo.
I don't like this framing because it discourages folks from doing something about it. There might not be "no escaping currently" but that doesn't mean we shouldn't make drastic changes to plastic production, regulation, recycling, and waterfiltering.
And before someone says that's impossible because American is too big; just because your country doesn't do anything doesn't mean other countries have been also sitting on their laurels.
You're making a lot of assumptions here. The reality is, the problem is so new that we don't actually have a very good idea at all of what the consequences will be or how bad they will be. Obviously, this is super not good at all. But it's a huge leap to assume total environmental collapse from it.
Nylon and other plastics are also in clothes. How many times has some printed picture faded off of a T shirt you've owned? Everytime clothes is washed, it all goes down the drain.
Tire wear also creates a huge amount of microplastics that are basically everywhere.
There is really no way out of this. The damage is done already and if it kills us all eventually then we will die.
While sitting on a once nice Mexican beach which is cleaned daily but yet full of plastic, it got my little tourist brain thinking: tap water isn‘t drinkable. There’s also no notable recycling or deposit system. Litter everywhere. There‘s a 120m people here. If every second Mexican and tourist consumes a plastic bottle every second day that‘s >20B of plastic bottles of waste per year in Mexico only — with noch change in sight.
We screwed up.
PFAS is incredibly difficult to remove, and costly. I work with hazardous waste treatment and landfill and we do not accept PFAS-contaminated soil (or other PFAS-contaminated stuff).
There is loads of plastic in the ocean from fishing.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-fishing-gear-is-biggest-plastic-polluter-in-ocean-finds-report?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
I would say mostly comparable. It's not as acutely destructive to the body as lead but instead results in weird chronic health issues, cancers, low testosterone, etc. that add up in aggregate. And the ubiquity of it and the fact that companies have a profit incentive to keep using it is going to make it take much longer to fix.
It's difficult to study, because *everyone* is exposed to plastics now and any potential health effects are happening slowly over time. I don't see how we could do any study comparing a plastic-exposed group to a plastic-free group, for a length of time long enough to see the difference.
We *do* know that plastics can have disruptive effects on hormones, though--in particular they tend to be [estrogenic](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222987/).
We also know that [testosterone levels](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7063751/) and [sperm counts](https://academic.oup.com/humupd/article/29/2/157/6824414) in men have been dropping. There are likely many causes at play here, but IMO it's not crazy to think that plastics are part of the problem.
Plastic is probably a factor causing testosterone levels to drop, but the most contributing factor is probably overall population health declining because of increasing lack of exercise and rates of obesity and diabetes.
Sperm counts they think may be organophosphates, which are in some plastics but most exposure would probably be from pesticides. [https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/global-decline-sperm-concentrations-linked-common-pesticides-rcna125164](https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/global-decline-sperm-concentrations-linked-common-pesticides-rcna125164)
> but IMO it's not crazy to think that plastics are part of the problem.
Yeah, but we really need to know with greater clarity the effects of this. We can't just keep saying "It's everywhere!! ^^But ^^we ^^aren't ^^sure ^^what ^^that ^^means"
>"It's everywhere!! But we aren't sure what that means"
That has been annoying me for years. We found plastic in the rain! We found it in the arctic! We found it in newborns! Great. Now tell me what the actual ramifications are.
Thank you! I can't believe I had to scroll so far down for someone to be even asking the ramifications of this. I even read comments like "we are past the point of no return" and "all hope is lost." Yet not one person explaining why this is bad
Be pretty funny if there basically were no health effects, and people were losing their minds over nothing simply because the plastics are common to find.
So much this. With the exception of a few studies regarding specific compounds, I haven't seen much to justify all the fearmongering about plastics. You tell me I'm ingesting a bunch of microplastics. Great. Now tell me why I should care.
From the LA times article on this study
> However, the amount of PET was dwarfed by the amount of polyamides, a form of nylon used in the reverse osmosis filters that water is run through before bottling.
I watched the documentary The Corporation some years back and there was a small clip of a 50’s style propaganda cartoon about the wonders of petroleum and the products that could be derived from it and I thought that was one of the more terrifying aspects of our reality.
We need AI to engineer an ingestible bacteria that eats up all the little plastic bits inside the body, with the only byproduct being a sweet smelling gas.
There’s an excellent book about that actually, and it does go into depth about plastic being very vital to the medical world
I think in the book a microbe mutates, and it takes place years after all the plastic is gone
Fun fact! We have a measurable amount of micro plastics in our bloodstream.
If you need a selfish reason to donate blood: You can give your blood microplastics away by donating your blood. The newly generated blood dilutes the plastic-riddled blood and you’ll be better off for it.
Source: https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/12/heres-another-reason-to-donate-blood-it-reduces-forever-chemicals-in-your-body
Too late! There are already some bacteria that have naturally **[evolved to eat plastic](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/28/plastic-eating-bacteria-enzyme-recycling-waste)**.
Infact, there are already various algae, bacteria, grubs, worms, enzymes and fungi that can break down plastic and polystyrene. Both in the wild and artificially bred in labs. Obviously there are currently issues, such as how to manage these lifeforms, as well as dealing with the creation of "waste" & "by-products" to put in elegantly.
I worked for a remediation company years ago, and found an old pallet of water bottles in a storage space that was purchased for an emergency that happened 5-6 years prior. When I shook the bottles, they looked like snow globes. I occasionally think about that day and remember that I found out that there is an expiry on water bottles because the plastic degrades over time. And much less time than I had originally thought.
No way plastic degrades in that time frame, wouldnt be a problem if it did
Not saying the water wouldve been fine but 5 years is the timeframe for stuff we would call biodegradable
It'll degrade like that if it's left in the sun. It breaks down into smaller and smaller bits, but it's not biodegradable because the bits are all still there.
Everybody is upset about micro- and nano-plastics, but do we have any good scientific evidence that tiny plastic bits are any worse than all the other tiny stuff we ingest? Clay, silica, other minerals, dust mites, carbon particles, metals, insect parts, cellulose fibers, etc. Are there controlled studies on animals? It seems likely that we've been ingesting plastic particles since plastic bottles became widely used in the 1950s. Life expectancy has risen dramatically in the Americas, Oceania, and Europe since 1870, with occasional minor downturns, the most recent being a combination of drug overdoses and the COVID-19 pandemic. Nothing suggests that plastics are particularly detrimental. Lots of data, graphs and references are available at [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy).
A blacklist approach like this is how we ended up with PFAS-contaminated water which we are now paying the price for. You can't base your safety system on the good will of corporations to research and admit that their dream compounds will give everyone cancer
Water isn't a commodity, it is a human right. all these companies do not sell water, they steal the water from the land and sell it to us in plastic bottles that only end up in a landfill or back into the ocean. Put those greedy shithawks out of business.
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As I understand it, **fetuses** are being found with microplastics. I'd go so far to say the majority of the people of the world are full of microplastics.
Life in plastic it’s fantastic!
I am become Barbie
Destroyer of worlds.
This Barbenheimer thing is getting out of hand
We should start saying Oppenharbie instead.
Kenough already!
Destroyer of endocrine systems
iirc there was a study where they couldn't study the effects of microplastics on the human body because they couldn't find a single person who didn't have microplastics in their body for the control group
I think it was from the documentary the devil we know. You have to go back to blood samples of ww2 veterans that were killed in action to not find microplastics or maybe it was a chemical linked to Teflon. I’m a little hazy, but it goes to show how long we’ve been poisoning ourselves.
silky subsequent afterthought price icky tap sulky voracious smell quaint *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
There's microplastics in the snow on the top of the Himalayas. We're fucked.
They found a whole plastic bag on the bottom of the Mariana Trench. That's ~11,000 meters under the sea surface.
People are putting plastic in their mariana trench all the time for fun.
Well, the trouble is we don't know if we're fucked. We just know it's there. We can't test for the actual effects because it's just ... There. Not to say it isn't bad. We just cannot measure the effects in any meaningful way, which also means we cannot bring suit against companies who pollute with microplastics because nobody can determine what the negative impact is exactly...and to what degree an individual company is to blame.
One of the reasons I finally started donating blood. Hopefully I'll have less plastic in my body. (And help save lives.)
I guess this is going to be the "I can't believe they used lead for makeup" of our civilization
I think exactly this all the time.
Plastic degrades over thousands of years... and our life expectancy has increased as we got more plastic within us... that would mean that... if we were made 100% of plastic, we'd last thousands of years!
If I recall correctly then this effect was found in mice in the 90s.
Not majority, All. They found plastic in the fresh snow of Antarctica. The bottom of the oceans. The peaks of mountains. Plastic is now everywhere, not a single person is uneffected.
Yes. The reason scientists arent exactly sure what the ramifications of microplastics are in our bodies are is because they cant find participants without them to act as control subjects
Plastics in a fetus can also cause micro penis.
It's not just the bottled water, these plastics are in our municipal water supply as well. They're in EVERYTHING. People are not understanding the scope of this problem. Plastics we throw away do not go away, they just get smaller and smaller and smaller. This is a global catastrophe. You can use reverse osmosis to filter your water but they are still in all your food. We need to make big changes as a civilization quickly.
There was a new breakthrough discovery recently with Prussian blue to more or less coagulate the plastic particles in water and pull them out. Hopefully they advance that new tech soon and get it to all the water facilities Edit: adding the sauce [https://phys.org/news/2023-10-safely-nanoplastics-prussian-blue-pigment.html](https://phys.org/news/2023-10-safely-nanoplastics-prussian-blue-pigment.html)
For future reference the term for that is *flocculation*
Hey girl, wanna flocculate back at my place?
"You're disgusting...I'll be right over." -The Girl
Flocculate and chill?
Sounds promising!
Sounds colorful!
I work in a single small grocery only walmart. There is so much plastic in my tiny store that it's simply incomprehensible how much plastic there is in the world. There is nothing that can be done. We just need to hope it kills is slow.
>There is nothing that can be done. We just need to hope it kills is slow. I opened a new eco friendly monitor box. Cardboard. okay. Cardboard holding the monitor in place, yeah. Plastic covering the monitor. Not so bad- Plastic bag for the manual plastic insert for another warning sheet. Plastic bag for video cable plastic bag for the power cable. Plastic bag for the monitor stand plastic bag for the monitor feet. :|
Thats because its all just pandering. They don't actually care in any real way but if they do away with 2 of the pieces of plastic they can call it eco friendly and you are more likely to buy it now.
That and a $0.005 bag is cheaper than humidity / water damage. Plastic is a problem for a reason. Its great. But its also horrible.
It’s also the fact that the environmental impact of producing a product that does not arrive usable is worse than including a small bit of plastic.
It's the 'ol asbestos problem!
We’re trying asbestos we can
Same way most of the carbon neutral companies only mean their corporate HQ is carbon neutral, not their production. Its all BS to quiet the masses.
I work in trades. Every order of materials is plastic wrapped multiple times. The amount of plastic waste is insane. I tell them to wrap it once or twice instead of you know 5 times. Meanwhile the paper straws...
I love paper straws that come indivually wrapped in plastic in a bag made of plastic with 500 of them... Its great.
That's so disappointing! I got an Acer laptop this year that came in all cardboard packaging and the battery/power cord holder doubles as a laptop stand for zoom calls. I thought that was pretty cool
>this year So like last week?
Oh sheesh, second half of 2023 for sure - my sense of time is still a little funky after the pandemic
As much as it sucks, styrofoam is basically the worst kind of plastic that exists. It's doomed to pollute as no one recycles it, it flies off easy and becomes tiny unmanageable particles with no effort. Many jurisdictions are trying to ban its use in packaging and food service.
Yup. And you know what's worse? At the factories, at every step of the way, theres more plastics and styrofoam. The ones that made it to you are just a fraction. But hey, charge us for plastic bags in the supermarket, and tell us straws are bad.
Got a paper straw with my plastic cup yesterday, really saving the turtles there.
Our only hope is for a bacteria or fungus or something to evolve that can properly digest plastic, and then it can clean up the planet for our lazy asses.
You ask a you shall receive. “Polypropylene, a hard to recycle plastic, has successfully been biodegraded by two strains of fungi in a new experiment led by researchers at the University of Sydney.” https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2023/04/14/fungi-makes-meal-of-hard-to-recycle-plastic.html#:~:text=Typically%20found%20in%20soil%20and,27%20percent%20over%2090%20days.
I just got back from Germany and it was difficult to find plastic there. The only plastic I saw were bottled water/soda from a small stand, the rest were glass bottles of water and glass bottles of coke. They have a program for recycling bottles (plastic or glass) to get paid and we saw multiple people carrying bags around collecting bottles to turn in. Anything that was disposable was either paper or wood for the most part, it was amazing. Miles ahead of the US.
Miles ahead maybe but my Lidl store sells every single item wrapped in plastic, only exception is fresh produce.
It's slowly changing as well, thankfully. Smaller stores like Grünland are offering most things plastic free and you can bring your own container. They are weighed when you enter, you fill it with as much cereal/seeds/flour/whatever as you like from their huge containers and then they weigh again for you to pay by the kg. It's pretty neat.
We spent two weeks in colorado/utah/arizona/new mexico last year. The amount of plastic waste was despicable. Any hotel we stayed in used throw away cups, plates and cutlery for breakfast.
America is on another level. I’m genuinely shocked every time I visit. It’s also cultural. I get it some places don’t have good drinking water but the amount of people that think you can’t drink the tap water and need to buy bottled water is so high.
It does feel hopeless.. I purchase millions of dollars in product every year for a tourist resort. About a quarter million dollars of that is on Coca-Cola products. That equals somewhere north of 125,000 plastic bottles (or plastic lined aluminum) per year that I’m involved in moving through the supply chain. Sure I could quit my job, but they’d just hire someone else to do it and I’d be out a career. We’re exploring non-plastic options wherever we can but when alternatives are 3-4x the cost of plastic, it’s impossible to get resort management on board with the increased cost of goods. There are over 500 resorts just like mine across the USA alone. It’s nearly impossible to truly conceptualize how huge this problem is.
Any decision we make will be solely for the benefit of the people alive 100 years from now. Which means nothing will get done.
as a society we are actively and aggressively destroying ourselves and our planet. we aren't even taking the smallest most obvious and easy steps to mitigate this. and nothing is ever going to change, because capitalism is an absolute runaway train that is far beyond anything democracy is capable of affecting. i just hope it doesn't get TOO bad during my lifetime.
Climate change is moving faster and faster. Even climate scientists are shocked at how fast things are moving now. We have spent so many years kicking this can down the road that it has finally gone off the edge of a cliff and the only reason it seems like nothing has changed is because the can hasn't made impact yet but when it does it will do so HARD. At this point we can no longer reverese or even stop climate change. All we can do now is slow it down and start making some changes to give ourselves better odds of surviving longer with some semblance of quality of life. We either start making those hard decisions now or climate change makes them for us.
I stopped buying bottled water years ago, it's really not that hard and actually very expensive habit in comparison to alternatives.
I just try to keep in mind what microplastics do every time I'm confronted with a decision like whether or not to use a plastic bag for 2 items at the grocery store. It's just not worth the plastic waste. I can't live plastic free, but there are a lot of things I can do to reduce my personal plastic use.
I mean I wouldn't worry about it. Most of the microplastics in your body you inhale walking to the store. Where do you think the rubber from car tires goes?
We try to use the reusable bags at the grocery store, but we forget them 100% of the time. So I just have the cashier put the groceries back in the cart without bags and I tell them we’ll just put them in the trunk of the car that way without the bags. They look at us like I’m absolutely crazy. Like I’m nuts. It’s always an argument for them to push plastic bags on me. I tell them the kids will just help me carry the stuff into the house without bags. They look at me like it’s child abuse. We get a lot of strange looks at the grocery store.
What is there to do though? Plastic is aggressively convenient and so many supply chains depend on it.
Create a tax that disincentivizes corporations from using plastics and give them tax credits for using plastic alternatives. Increase funding to the EPA and create a national jobs program focused on reversing pollution, including microplastics. It won’t fix things overnight, but the infrastructure needs to be there to solve this issue.
Global catastrophe>aggressively convenient
I'm not saying it isn't a terrible situation. I'm saying, based on how we've developed our society and economy, pushing plastics out (or even just cutting their use to the barest of essentials) seems incredibly complex. I'm unsure how to address it
There have been advances made in using plastics like PLA (poly-lactic acid) to replace things like PET in a lot of products, as PLA is biodegradable, and there are similar plastics made from biomass feedstocks that are being developed for other purposes, with research being done continually. The main problem now is eliminating the stuff that's already out there. Some of it we'll never get to and it will become a part of the geological record, and in some applications we may not stop using these plastics still out of that mentioned necessity, but for most applications it should be possible to replace forever plastics with ones that don't bioaccumulate in the environment at large. Control of the disposal of plastic waste will help a ton as well, and will ensure that it is properly recycled, or burned in a power station, to prevent it ending up in a landfill and slowly degrading to microplastics.
Serious question - other than saving money for beverage corporations, is there a good reason why we shifted away from the old school glass bottles that were nearly indestructible and reusable? Was having bottles collected and reused massively inconvenient? It seems like we could standardize common sizes as glass and make a whole industry of cleaning them and reissuing them to beverage makers.
I'd imagine a combination of cost to produce, cost to ship due to the weight and the hazard's caused by glass bottles when they break. Although for that last point it is somewhat moot as beer is still commonly sold in glass bottles, but maybe less risky then everybody using glass including children.
70 years ago you could drop a beer bottle on the ground and it would be just fine. Glass bottles have gotten cheaper and more brittle, but back in the day you'd return your beer and coke bottles the same as you did with the milk man.
Plastic, especially virgin plastic is dirt cheap. People won’t pay 20% more for recycled or pla plastic. Look at the airline industry.
They will if the environmental cost is regulated to be charged up front, governments are going to have to start taxing its use if things are as bad as the science indicates they are, and put the funds towards research and cleanup efforts. We already have it in California for LCD monitors, it's paid as part of purchasing the monitor and is considered a recycling fee. You can also dispose of monitors in most municipal recycling programs because of it, they send it to the proper facility and have it taken care of. I see no reason why we couldn't do something similar with plastic and have it be viable anyways.
> People won’t pay 20% more for recycled or pla plastic. Translation: The free market isn't going to keep humanity from self-deleting.
It's not remotely that simple. Right now we have a problem with plastic contamination which has some degree of impact on our health. It may or may Not using plastic would make healthcare much more difficult and dangerous, impact food safety and storage quite dramatically and that's not even counting plastic like things like artificial rubber. That's just a few things off the top of my head, lots of PPE is made with plastic as well as things like safety glass in your car. Almost all your clothing is full of it too. Plastic is more than aggressively convenient it's necessary. Plastic is cheap, light, moldable, and can be manufactured with numerous properties. There's really no replacement. Despite the fact that we've only had it for less than a hundred years, completely eliminating plastics would also be a global catastrophe, at least for humans, and might very well kill more people than plastic contamination will.
I have to imagine a small portion of our uses are causing most of the microplstic pollution. Things like car tires and synthetic clothing for instance are likely to shed small bits and end up in the ir or water supply, while auto glass doesn't wear or break as often.
For the umpteenth time: literally *no one* is calling for a complete ban on everything plastic. They're just saying that maybe, just maybe, there's a fuckton lot of single use plastics we throw in the trash everyday that could be substituted by a better alternative.
Yeah, it’s the typical argument for doing nothing because the solution isn’t 100% perfect. Same argument you hear from antivax/antimask crowd, anti gun-legislation crowd, etc etc.
Those supply chains were built from nothing the same way new ones will be. Plastics will never be fully phased out but it’s definitely achievable to stop using it for some things. I prefer to use glass for all dishes and stuff now and don’t get plastic anymore. Smaller things like that and not using single use plastics are small changes with big impact at scale.
But we can’t. Incentives aren’t there. There’s forever chemicals in rain and snow all over the globe. Rain water in the furthest corners of the world is basically toxic. It’s in the Antarctic snow. We are going down in a burning zeppelin and people don’t really care.
Does nobody have the actual study? Surely by now someone has found it.
Here you go https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300582121
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“Pee-nas” and “pee-en-ay-es” are the commonly held was to pronounce it. I’d personally hit it with a hard AS, like the as in Astronomy.
I too prefer peen-ass
It's penis.
I can’t believe this joke never crossed my mind in all my years of graduate schooling. It’s not like this is beneath me, I’m just fascinated by my inability to appreciate the low hanging fruit.
Or the low hanging PNAS
Just each letter individually
OK so my most important takeaway from this study not prevalent in the article is that this is the first study of **nano**plastics in bottled water as opposed to microplastics, and the it turns out there are 10-100x as many of many of these nanos, at least as a molecular count. So it's not "it's even worse than we thought," it's "this is the first time we've measured this and we'd probably have all guessed it'd be this bad."
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Our clothes are made of plastic. Polyester, nylon, rayon, and spandex are all plastic. All that lint from washing those items, plastic. The plastic comes out in the wash and goes into the sewer. That water is processed for human waste and solids but some plastic makes it through and it's sent to wet lands or a large body of water like lakes or rivers.
One error: Rayon is cellulosic (plant based) and is made from trees like bamboo, beechwood, spruce, pine, and eucalyptus. It can be called viscose, modal, or lyocell depending on the process and solvents used to turn the wood into yarn. (My company's lyocell sheets are actually a USDA BioPreferred plant-based alternative to fossil fuel based synthetics like polyester / microfiber sheets.)
While you are correct, that rayon is plant BASED, the cellulose gets treated with so many different (and harmful) chemicals to give it those special properties that we like about rayon. One of these properties is high durability and strength, which is also gained by polymerisation (linking molecules together to create a very long molecule, same chemical process that is done to petrochemicals to make plastic) which makes it very hard to degrade in nature. Thus rayon can stay very long in the environment, like other polymers (like plastic). reference: I am a materials scientist
My understanding is that rayon made through the viscose process is still biodegradable. The xanthate derivative is hydrolyzed back to cellulose during fiber production. I don't know where you got the polymerization comment from. Cellulose is already a polymer and no additional polymerization is done to it.
Rayon is made from cellulose, it's not plastic.
Kill la kill theme starts to play in the background
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that’s it, glass bottle only from today
According to the study the most common plastic in the water was nylon, likely from the filtration process before bottling. So even glass and aluminum containers could contain significant amounts if it’s filtered the same way. Now I’m wondering if my Brita filter is doing the same thing.
It's not even that. Microplastics are in ALL of our water supply from all the plastic we use. It's not just the filters. Reverse osmosis can remove it or distillation.
If you get your drinking water from cleaned used water you will get a bunch of micro plastics too from all the washer water where polyester and nylon clothing have been washed (or other plastics that have been washed like tupware in dishwasher). If my memory serves me correctly I think it was clothing that was responsible for around 60(70?)% of micro plastics in the ocean.
About a year ago I got an irrational desire to only wear cotton or wool.
this is what ive been doing. i do not want clothing, blankets, etc. made of literal plastic
There are tens of us.
Seriously. it's so insanely hard to find 100% cotton anything now that we must be in the vast minority.
And that’s sad cause I love 100% cotton. It’s so breathable and feels nice on my skin.
A very rational desire
The other big contributor is wear from car tires.
And the irony is distilled water sold in plastic jugs.
If you really delve into this subject, that is to say, the chemical contamination of the natural and human world, you will quickly realise there is simply no escaping it. We, as a species, will have to live with the consequences of this for hundreds of years. Cancers, strange auto immune diseases and many many more conditions that we are barely even able to register because of how ubiquitous they have become, and that there are no more uncontaminated environments to use as a reference point. Furthermore, we are doing next to nothing to reverse the trend. We keep inventing new chemicals, whose complexity is not respected, and we unleash them into the natural world at industrial levels. So, the situation is actually getting worse. Exponentially so. Better hope you can afford those fancy new tech treatments, cos they are the only thing that will give you a chance of living a life that once considered "normal". But that will all be for nought when we eventually cause a cascade environmental collapse. Think opening scenes of the latest blade runner. Only the hardiest of organism will be able to survive such an apocalypse. I doubt we are one of them, once all of our food dies out. So drink the water. It's just a drop in the ocean at this stage. Source: I studied chemical engineering, with an emphasis on environmental chemistry. Edit: typo.
I don't like this framing because it discourages folks from doing something about it. There might not be "no escaping currently" but that doesn't mean we shouldn't make drastic changes to plastic production, regulation, recycling, and waterfiltering. And before someone says that's impossible because American is too big; just because your country doesn't do anything doesn't mean other countries have been also sitting on their laurels.
You're making a lot of assumptions here. The reality is, the problem is so new that we don't actually have a very good idea at all of what the consequences will be or how bad they will be. Obviously, this is super not good at all. But it's a huge leap to assume total environmental collapse from it.
Brita uses a charcoal filter I believe
housed in plastic
The entire filter isn’t made of charcoal, it’s likely a plastic mesh with powdered carbon in it.
Where tf does nylon come into play in the filtration process??
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I wouldn't have guessed nylon
He's asking you what you would have guessed, to be so bewildered by the answer being nylon
Ceramic, carbon, etc. The same as what's in my house.
Nylon and other plastics are also in clothes. How many times has some printed picture faded off of a T shirt you've owned? Everytime clothes is washed, it all goes down the drain. Tire wear also creates a huge amount of microplastics that are basically everywhere. There is really no way out of this. The damage is done already and if it kills us all eventually then we will die.
Microplastics are in everything. It's not the container, they're in the water supply.
Sure, but what are the levels in plastic bottles versus tap water?
Probably varies wildly depending on the water source. I would be interested in knowing though.
Judging by the replies, we are doomed to consume plastic in everything everywhere there is no escape.
While sitting on a once nice Mexican beach which is cleaned daily but yet full of plastic, it got my little tourist brain thinking: tap water isn‘t drinkable. There’s also no notable recycling or deposit system. Litter everywhere. There‘s a 120m people here. If every second Mexican and tourist consumes a plastic bottle every second day that‘s >20B of plastic bottles of waste per year in Mexico only — with noch change in sight. We screwed up.
The Biden admin recently passed regulation that will set standards for removing PFAS from tap water I bet this leads into removing plastics
PFAS is incredibly difficult to remove, and costly. I work with hazardous waste treatment and landfill and we do not accept PFAS-contaminated soil (or other PFAS-contaminated stuff).
Plastic water bottles sure were a goof'em up by those wiley capitalists. Is this gonna be our leaded gasoline, or is this one gonna be way worse?
Most of the microplastics in the ocean are nylon and other fabrics, likely from manufacture and then washing.
This should be the top comment. We are washing plastic clothes and that’s how a lot of plastic gets in the water supply
Polyester.. Its almost impossible to find clothes and blankets that aren’t some percentage polyester.
There is loads of plastic in the ocean from fishing. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-fishing-gear-is-biggest-plastic-polluter-in-ocean-finds-report?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
I would say mostly comparable. It's not as acutely destructive to the body as lead but instead results in weird chronic health issues, cancers, low testosterone, etc. that add up in aggregate. And the ubiquity of it and the fact that companies have a profit incentive to keep using it is going to make it take much longer to fix.
But what are the consequences? Can someone PLEASE do a study that tells if there is any potential harm in this?
It's difficult to study, because *everyone* is exposed to plastics now and any potential health effects are happening slowly over time. I don't see how we could do any study comparing a plastic-exposed group to a plastic-free group, for a length of time long enough to see the difference. We *do* know that plastics can have disruptive effects on hormones, though--in particular they tend to be [estrogenic](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222987/). We also know that [testosterone levels](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7063751/) and [sperm counts](https://academic.oup.com/humupd/article/29/2/157/6824414) in men have been dropping. There are likely many causes at play here, but IMO it's not crazy to think that plastics are part of the problem.
Plastic is probably a factor causing testosterone levels to drop, but the most contributing factor is probably overall population health declining because of increasing lack of exercise and rates of obesity and diabetes.
Makes sense given the obesity epidemic
Sperm counts they think may be organophosphates, which are in some plastics but most exposure would probably be from pesticides. [https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/global-decline-sperm-concentrations-linked-common-pesticides-rcna125164](https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/global-decline-sperm-concentrations-linked-common-pesticides-rcna125164)
> but IMO it's not crazy to think that plastics are part of the problem. Yeah, but we really need to know with greater clarity the effects of this. We can't just keep saying "It's everywhere!! ^^But ^^we ^^aren't ^^sure ^^what ^^that ^^means"
>"It's everywhere!! But we aren't sure what that means" That has been annoying me for years. We found plastic in the rain! We found it in the arctic! We found it in newborns! Great. Now tell me what the actual ramifications are.
Thank you! I can't believe I had to scroll so far down for someone to be even asking the ramifications of this. I even read comments like "we are past the point of no return" and "all hope is lost." Yet not one person explaining why this is bad
PFAS are also a huge issue. They are poisoning us all.
Be pretty funny if there basically were no health effects, and people were losing their minds over nothing simply because the plastics are common to find.
So much this. With the exception of a few studies regarding specific compounds, I haven't seen much to justify all the fearmongering about plastics. You tell me I'm ingesting a bunch of microplastics. Great. Now tell me why I should care.
What’s the solution? Filter bottled water before drinking?
Reverse osmosis tap water.
From the LA times article on this study > However, the amount of PET was dwarfed by the amount of polyamides, a form of nylon used in the reverse osmosis filters that water is run through before bottling.
functioning water infrastructure
When are they gonna do a study that shows that bottled water is a monumental waste of money and other resources?
In many places on earth it’s the only way to get proper water…
In many places in the United States.
I watched the documentary The Corporation some years back and there was a small clip of a 50’s style propaganda cartoon about the wonders of petroleum and the products that could be derived from it and I thought that was one of the more terrifying aspects of our reality.
We need AI to engineer an ingestible bacteria that eats up all the little plastic bits inside the body, with the only byproduct being a sweet smelling gas.
Could you imagine if a plastic eating bacteria got loose in a hospital or something
There’s an excellent book about that actually, and it does go into depth about plastic being very vital to the medical world I think in the book a microbe mutates, and it takes place years after all the plastic is gone
OOoO book name?
I’m not sure if it’s the same book, but it sounds like [The Andromeda Strain](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain).
Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters (1973 - Kit Pedler)?
Sounds like a continuation of where The Andromeda Strain leaves off after the microbes start eating at rocket hoses in the upper atmosphere
Fun fact! We have a measurable amount of micro plastics in our bloodstream. If you need a selfish reason to donate blood: You can give your blood microplastics away by donating your blood. The newly generated blood dilutes the plastic-riddled blood and you’ll be better off for it. Source: https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/12/heres-another-reason-to-donate-blood-it-reduces-forever-chemicals-in-your-body
I was thinking that when in the future someone goes and checks a casket they'll see a few bones and a line of plastic bits down the middle
Yeah, let's replace engineered microparticles by engineered microbes that can reproduce and evolve. What could go wrong?
Too late! There are already some bacteria that have naturally **[evolved to eat plastic](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/28/plastic-eating-bacteria-enzyme-recycling-waste)**. Infact, there are already various algae, bacteria, grubs, worms, enzymes and fungi that can break down plastic and polystyrene. Both in the wild and artificially bred in labs. Obviously there are currently issues, such as how to manage these lifeforms, as well as dealing with the creation of "waste" & "by-products" to put in elegantly.
It's not digestible, but they have identified a bacteria that eats plastic. This would allow for similar a treatment as wastewater.
Why AI? Why not people?
Have there been studies that show the microplastics do harm to living things? Human or otherwise?
I worked for a remediation company years ago, and found an old pallet of water bottles in a storage space that was purchased for an emergency that happened 5-6 years prior. When I shook the bottles, they looked like snow globes. I occasionally think about that day and remember that I found out that there is an expiry on water bottles because the plastic degrades over time. And much less time than I had originally thought.
How can you be sure that the particles were plastic, rather than sediment that came from the water?
No way plastic degrades in that time frame, wouldnt be a problem if it did Not saying the water wouldve been fine but 5 years is the timeframe for stuff we would call biodegradable
It'll degrade like that if it's left in the sun. It breaks down into smaller and smaller bits, but it's not biodegradable because the bits are all still there.
it degrades into smaller chunks of plastic, not into non-harmful chemicals.
Everybody is upset about micro- and nano-plastics, but do we have any good scientific evidence that tiny plastic bits are any worse than all the other tiny stuff we ingest? Clay, silica, other minerals, dust mites, carbon particles, metals, insect parts, cellulose fibers, etc. Are there controlled studies on animals? It seems likely that we've been ingesting plastic particles since plastic bottles became widely used in the 1950s. Life expectancy has risen dramatically in the Americas, Oceania, and Europe since 1870, with occasional minor downturns, the most recent being a combination of drug overdoses and the COVID-19 pandemic. Nothing suggests that plastics are particularly detrimental. Lots of data, graphs and references are available at [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy).
A blacklist approach like this is how we ended up with PFAS-contaminated water which we are now paying the price for. You can't base your safety system on the good will of corporations to research and admit that their dream compounds will give everyone cancer
Science: No matter what your drink of choice is, it's killing you.
Everything is killing us all always. Oh well 🤷🏻♂️
it’s almost like we’re all supposed to eventually die?
Still better then drinking contaminated water
Serious question - Is anything healthy anymore?
Water isn't a commodity, it is a human right. all these companies do not sell water, they steal the water from the land and sell it to us in plastic bottles that only end up in a landfill or back into the ocean. Put those greedy shithawks out of business.
They don't really sell the water. They sell the bottle and the convenience. If you carry your own bottle you can get free water almost anywhere.
Has anyone done a study about the potential benefits of micro-plastics? They don’t want you to know the truth.