7,000 Microplastics Studies Show We Have One Really Big Problem
7,000 Microplastics Studies Show We Have One Really Big Problem
7,000 Microplastics Studies Show We Have One Really Big Problem
Or several trillion very small problems.
We're all trillionaires! 🎉
Diamond Plastic Hands 🙌 To the moon ocean our bodies! 🚀
Found the crab 🦀
Studies have identified some of the main sources of microplastics as:
- plastic-coated fertilisers
- plastic film used as mulch in agriculture
WTF?
- plastics recycling.
Uuuuh…
- plastic film used as mulch in agriculture
Wtf. Where and why?!
It's the black plastic bag material that people used to cover their soil and poke holes through for their crops.
I never thought it was called plastic mulch though.
Like, everywhere?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=plastic+film+used+as+mulch+in+agriculture
Plastic was never meant to be recycled.
So, what you're telling us is, they've been lying for decades?
Yep
Other great source of plastics are synthetic fabrics. It releases a lot of micro particles in the water during washing and drying cycles.
Have you seen the process used in plastic recycling? The plastic is literally triturated into tiny bits before being heated up for the next stages.
Edit: why the downvotes? I'm just trying to give some context on why plastic recycling is a great source of microplastics
Maybe global warming will melt all the microplastics into one big macroplastic and that problem will be 100% solved.
Do our testicles all melt together?
Biggest sources:
10-40 Mt released into environment/year, and increasing.
I'm kinda surprised that more comes from paint than tires.
I think it depends on measure, if im not mistaken, by weight arohnd 50% of microplastics are tire dust.
Still both from automobile infrastructure. /c/fuckcars bleeding into every Lemmy...
You only think that way because the material for a tire is all in one place and easy to see.
Paint on the other hand is effectively invisible when we 'inventory' a space mentally.
So a tire in the middle of your living room seems like a lot of rubber but all the paint over every inch of the wall in the same room doesnt, even if the room is big enough for the paint to fill the volume of the tire.
Over 80% of microolastic production coming from macro plastic breakdown feels pretty bleak.
Plastics industry: "See?! We told you plastic decomposes and doesn't just stay in landfills forever. Happy now?"
I am not happy now.
The UN's Global Plastics Treaty is certainly a step in the right direction. I'm not sure what can actually be done about the problem, especially with how pervasive synthetic materials are throughout the world. And what is medicine supposed to do? Plastics revolutionized sanitation, particularly in the medical field. Very complicated issue to resolve.
There are certain industries, like medical, that would probably be one of the last, if ever, to do away with plastic, simply due to the upsides. The only option we have as a species is to create a truly biodegradable, non-toxic, easily obtainable and cheap to produce alternative.
Haha who am I kidding, we are fucked, plastic manufacturers go brrrrrrrrr.
Medical and electrical insulation. Two places where plastics are better than the alternatives.
Plastics are also used extensively in the electricity sector as insulation for conductors, support structures, etc.
We need our vendors of these products to start addressing this issue, and unfortunately I don't think this is going to come from the consumer end. Maybe for alternative insulating liquids for transformers and whatnot like with Cargill FR3 or Shell MIDEL products, but clearly more needs to be done. Schneider Electric is a good example of a company leading the way
A race to see what will kill the most of us first. The plastic or anthropogenic climate change.
Plastic will probably only make us infertile while climate change will kill us AND already stop us from reproducing (or do you feel a kid born today has a good perspective on it's future?).
Don't forget Antimicrobial resistance (AMR)!
Plastic-coated fertilisers?
Rally?
WTF do we need plastic-coated fertilisers for?
to grow plastic infused plants, of course
Now sit down and eat your plasti-corn. There are children in other countries that have to eat normal corn.
Controlled Release Fertilizers (CRF) are coated with a tiny layer of polymer which allow to release nutrients in a very timely and targeted way to various crops (trees, flowers, some cash crops) and used in closed environments such as potting plants or greenhouses.
So it has its use. Guess we'll need to find an alternative to using polymers now (among a ton of other work).
The article was very well written. Unfortunately, 90% of the people I’d forward it to would be TLDR…
The 7000 papers were really well written. Unfortunately, 90% of the people I’d forward them to would be article…
There are many reasons we are screwed as a species. There's pretty much nothing I can do about it, unfortunately.
I'll go jerk off for a bit, maybe it'll be better by the time I m done
Not much is going to get better in 12 seconds.
Now you're speaking my language, come and shake my hand... actually, nevermind.
take your time with it. make that shit special.
And if you use your imagination, it's more eco-friendly.
Come to think of it, unless you're doing something that requires fewer calories, other activities would likely have a bigger carbon footprint.
brb, taking a break from the internet to help the environment.
Rather than take a defeatist veiw from this line if thinking, it will do well for your mental health to first spend more time, energy and thoughts on things you can control. Not just things related to environmentalism, but broadly reduce energy, engagement and focus from the things you don't have significant control over and direct them to those things you do have control. It's good to get a broad picture and observe the world around you outside of your control in small doses, but it's easy to over indulge in an unfocused survey of problems in the world, especially on social media. (I include Lemmy communities in the social media category).
Furthermore, when you do engage with these problems, do so with more narrow focus and in more depth with an eye towards understanding the level of impact the problem has and what organizations or policy positions you can support to amplify your limited influence over the issues that causee the problem. In this way you can mitigate the feelings of helplessness and sense of there being many existential and imminent problems you need to contend with but cannot remedy. You can turn seemingly untouchable solutions into real possibilities without overwhelming your emotional capacity by working with others.
I appreciate this, it's really good advice and what I try to do, but I can always be better.
At the moment I volunteer for a food bank that focuses on redistributing surplus food stocks from businesses instead of having them go to the bin. This is because I abhor waste.
I also volunteer for the Scouts because it upsets me to see young people glued to screens all the time, never leaving their home, and not knowing what the real world and real social situations are. Also, I missed out on a lot of these things as a child because I shied away from them and nobody encouraged me. I enjoyed hiking with my older brother and my uncle, but the premise of joining the Scouts was never even given to me as an option.
It's amazing to see kids say "what's this plant, what's that tree, what is that mushroom, can I eat that berry?" and sometimes being able to answer them, or at least tell them how they can find themselves an answer. "Take a picture of it, do some research, tell me what you find out next week"
So what does it do? Cancer?
In regards to humans, progress is being made. In coming years, expect greater clarity about effects on our bodies such as:
- inflammation
- oxidative stress (an imbalance of free radicals and antioxidants that damages cells)
- immune responses
- genotoxicity – damage to the genetic information in a cell that causes mutations, which can lead to cancer.
TL;DR yes, cancer. It also fucks with wildlife (blocking intestines, giving off poison)
Good chance it probably is, possibly increase chance for asthma, chance for heart attack, another is it probably makes us infertile probably a good thing depending how you think of it.
Is this stuff you know or are you guessing?
It’s making men infertile. theres even a shortage of viable sperm today around the world
Ok, that's one positive at least.
Can't we just inject ourselves with plastic eating bacteria or something?
We just need to turn up the UV lights voltage and melt the plastic out. Is that something we could look into?
We are the plastic eating bacteria.
If we knew of bacteria that cleanly ate plastic, we probably wouldn't be riddled with micro plastics 😉
I find little shards of plastic in the vegetables from the supplier at work quite often. Sometimes I plate a dish and spot a bit of blue where it shouldn't be.
And yet doctors insist I'm not getting enough fiber!
Yummm, fruity pebbles
Out of curiosotiy where would something like 3D printing be placed?
While a problem yes, miniscule compared to industrial waste
I think they meant personally, not global.
Not significantly contributing to the global problem, but you might inhale some. Don’t sand your prints for sure.
Or wear a respirator while you sand...
PLA I think just breaks down into lactic acid eventually, but the ABS probably isnt so good
It only breaks down under industrial environments. It's not as "biodegradable" as claimed. I use PETG because I can recycle it with normal plastics recycling.
Thanks this makese.feel.better about pla printing
Pretty bad, especially with people sanding down productions and stuff.
Obligatory: The Planet is Fine - George Carlin
Peertube - https://kolektiva.media/w/37198b73-f7f9-4036-aa30-bb2da4763eda
googletube - Kmo8sh77G6Y
I like how we've gone from looking at the huge garbage patches in our oceans to the amount of microplastic in a drop of water. I don't see it as a material issue, you pick a material and with enough quantity it will pollute. It is a consumer society issue. But maybe it will be easier to change consumer society by dangling the microplastic threat effect so the actual cause can be treated - wait, the psychopaths in CEO positions would lose money then, never mind.
for anyone working with acrylic paint, this stuff is plastic so it’s best not to just chuck it down your sink.
There is a way to filter the plastics https://www.jacksonsart.com/blog/2023/09/28/acrylic-painting-rinse-water-microplastics/
Trying out the golden crash system (though you can just buy buckets and elements yourself to do it cheaper) and it got some very good results.
I fucking hate lemmy now, you are just reddit with a sense of undeserved elitism.
This is a serious as fuck problem and all that anyone replies with are jokes and shitposts.
This is fucking /c/science, not /c/sciencememes
But none of you care especially the mods, so I'm just blocking every one of you.
edit: There's an entire subthread here that is nothing but masturbation jokes, which of course the mods ignore.
Fuck lemmy and its shitstain mod team same as the reddit mods but with worse hygiene. At least on reddit they keep /r/science clean
scrolling in the comment section of this news article, i've only seen people either being concerner/shocked, and some sarcastically talking about recycling or something. Nothing about masturbation.
And if your criticism of lemmy is that it's being reddit with elitism, then why try to gatekeep the way people are going to react to an article on c/science? Are we all supposed to have degrees in chemistry or biology before making a comment?
Believe it or not people take heavy news a million different ways and react differently. People ending up making a masturbation joke after discussing microplastics in testicles (i assume this is what happened) harm nothing and no one.
I've already blocked them so I can't link though I reported it too so maybe some mod woke their lazy ass up and deleted it as they should have.
People having a laugh isn’t the problem.
There is a real problem with the thread format of social media however.
My proof is I can’t find the “in this discussion relevant” thread of masturbation jokes because time has moved on and so did the discussion. [Edit: your comment is only 1h old, so not sure whats up]
We need a much better way to organize our speech and discussions because a single scroll page sorted by time, or contextless votes ain’t doing it.
I actually noticed that some of my comments are reacted very different towards depending on the time of day, what side of planet earth is awake at the time.
There is an argument to be had that certain troll farms love to drown discussions in shitposts and maybe we should be more mindful of the patterns.
But to say we should crack down on any form of jokes, which are an important part of our human expression that goes too far, thats what i disliked about r/science
I'm so glad blocks are free.
Doors over there. Feel free to leave.
Forbidden fruity pebbles