Microplastics will be the "boomers all have lead poisoning" of millennials

Millennials? More like GenX. We’ve been eating out of microwaved tupperware since the sixties.
- So have the millennials who were breast fed.
  
  And formula fed
  
  The worst part: postpartum women have lower levels of microplastics than other adults.
- It looks like the cumulative total of plastics produced by the 80's was around 2-3 ~~trillion~~ billion tons, whereas now it's probably more like 20-30B.
  https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/global-plastics-production.png

Yeah and also for Gen X, Gen Z, Gen Alpha. We all still alive and everybody gets microplastic in their balls and brains. Its for all ages
- Right? Haha 😂 Oh did we suddenly clean up the entire Earth from free roaming microplastics?
- why the alpabet suddenly changes after Z? it should either be "omega & alpha" or "z & a"
  
  Same reason we started with X, millennials actually got a name, and then went back to Z. Somebody with a head full of lead came up with it.
  
  They're just place holders until the generation gets a shared experience to refer to. Millennials saw the millennium. Boomers were products of the baby boom but they also saw their economy boom. Gen X are missing, their letter was fitting.
  My prediction is one of them will become gen algorithm, as they never knew a time when their media wasn't decided for them. Maybe, gen android, few of them know how to use a file system after Chromebooks became ubiquitous. Or they'll be the second greatest generation due to ww3. This stuff is entirely unpredictable.
  
  Generation Omega sounds like some real dystopian plot

Honestly I don't think we're socially responsible enough to end something like lead poisoning these days.
- Imagine trying to stop the hole in the ozone today. We'd have people spraying CFCs in the air just to spite the effort.
  
  As someone just old enough to remember, we did have that with CFCs. Might not have been super mainstream, and nobody who would have done it out of spite really had the disposable income to actually do it.
  I grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian "cult" and I remember the adults around me "joking" about it all the time. I remember a Missionary to northern Canada visiting our church (in rural America) to try to raise support talking about the temperatures and joking that it's so cold that he wanted to stand outside with an aerosol can in each hand to try to bring on some global warming, and that getting a laugh from the congregation. You might think that maybe it was a "harmless" joke that maybe as a child I didn't pick up on the sarcasm, but there were absolutely adults there who fully believed that there was nothing humans could do to damage the earth, because God takes care of it. "And how dare the government and these evolutionists try to tell us how to live."
- for the past few months ive started to think we're like a couple years away from putting lead back in the gasoline
  
  Trump deregulating gas and paint to put lead back in both would be so unsurprising it won't even garner a reaction from me.
  
  I’m all with you. But it feels like they did already.
  
  Leaded gas is still used in small airplanes with internal combustion engines. If you live near a General Aviation airport you are being showered in lead so some rich guy can play pilot.
- Someone will call not wanting lead poisoning woke and that will be that.
- There's actually a lot of work going into documenting and replacing lead service lines in the US. EPA required every state to make sure every waterworks submitted an inventory by last October, with grant money through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to pay for it.
  
  Is plastic really better? PVC, ABS,polyethylene and the rest get brittle after some time depending on conditions. All the degradation byproducts are in the water
- If it was more in the zeitgeist, kids would be huffing it on tiktok.
- You'd have people saying they like the lead and deliberately putting more of it in. Pussy-ass liberals trying to take their god given lead away...

Nah, because every future generation will have it too.

Bold of you to think that the microplastic is going to go away after one generation...
- Who said that? Lead poisoning is still rampant in some communities.
- I mean most others will skip out on the toothpaste variant, but yeah, it's out there like that kraftwerk song.

The pipes in the US still contain plenty of lead. Also, Covid brain damage. Tons of it.
- Most lead intoxication in boomers comes from leaded gasoline, lead in other presentations is less bio-available

Except that microplastics have been a major problematic thing since basically plastic become a popular thing, we just didn't know it yet back then. It's not like millenials invented plastic or popularized its use.
- The amount of it in our environment has been ever increasing though. There's more of it in the oceans, the soil, the rivers, the plants. The whole food chain and ecosystems are contaminated more than ever before.
  
  At what point does it become macroplastic? kiloplastic for the Europeans.

Microplastics cause neurological damage and anti social violent behavior?
- We don't know about the longer term consequences yet, just like we didn't about lead.
  Not saying it's a definite but I wouldn't be surprised.
  
  No, people knew lead was poisonous even back near Roman days. Though just like how humans constantly do stupid things for some benefit, they kept using it as a sweetener for ages.
  Also mercury in relation to, "as mad as a hatter". It's just mercury was very good for the job.
  
  Plastic has been around for 80 years. Shouldn't we know something by now
  
  But we know plastic is inert and we knew about lead.
- We are just beginning to understand how much the chemical Imbalances that lead to depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders originate in the digestive tract and how microplastics from food may disrupt the processing of these chemicals.
- I don't think the impacts of microplastics are quite as catastrophic, they can't be or we would already know.
  Which isn't to say they aren't bad just damn lead is realllly bad.
  
  The concentration of them is rising exponentially, that's the part that terrifies me.
  It's possible we just haven't crossed a threshold yet.
- My non-professional guess is that microplastics will eventually sterilize us by disrupting our sperm's ability to function properly. Only the wealthy can afford the medical procedures to bypass this.
  
  Maybe kids will need to be carefully sheltered from plastics until they are old enough to freeze their sperm.
  
  It'll end up blocking vital neurotransmitters leaving us zombified and giving us an insatiable craving for brains
  
  'Twould be sweet irony and a blessing for the earth.
  Although the best method for removing it I've found is donating plasma (PFAs down 30% in 6 months of regular donation, the hope is nanoplastics are also removed...) so it might be the poors (in USA) and generous that get to have kids, so that's nice...

I wonder what our neurosises will be.
- Depression, I would say. Same as how boomers are labeled as uncaring and sociopathic because of lead.
  
  The depression is a natural byproduct of civilization. We're not supposed to sit in concrete boxes and do meaningless tasks for survival. It makes us sad.
  
  The sociopath part, I think, is likely because they grew up in the easiest time in history.
- I think it's more physiological. Since microplastics are ingested maybe it's related to the rise in oral and rectal cancers.
  
  Yeah, but the nanoplastics get past the BBB (Blood Brain Barrier), what's it, a plastic spoon in every human brain? Enough for some psych effects I guess. Oh, there's 27 million tonnes of nanoplastics spread across just the top layer of the temperate to subtropical North Atlantic
  Shit's pervasive and in your brain.

Everyone has microplastics, even newborn babies, and we have no sign of decrease in its use.
- We must become one with the plastic. It's the only way.

Don't forget about PFAS!

I'm crazy. Mark My Words. In 20 years, we'll have so many microbes capable of consuming plastic people will be removed about their packages not being able to effectively protect their goods from spoiling. The goldfish has spoken.
- I've run across at least three separate articles now of researchers from across the world discovering plastic eating bacteria in the wild. Short plastic. Its days are numbered.
  
  Based solely on your comment, I'm looking forward to watching a scene where Christian Bale goes around Wall Street collecting mugs in The Big Short 2: Polymer Boogaloo.

Luckily, for the younger generations, we'll probably just get cancer instead of becoming massive malleable assholes

And the person responsible for both issues is the same dude Roy J. Plunkett
- Freon too?! Some people really want to watch the world burn.
  
  and teflon. don't forget about teflon.

OP, you are in for a seriously rough time if you think containing micro plastics is as simple as removing lead from gasoline and paint.
- Nobody said it would be.

Pffft! .... at least microplastics take decades or a lifetime of accumulation to affect your body, mind and health
Social media rots your brain and mental capacity in a matter of years or months

This one's gonna last a few (the final few?) generations.

Once at a Phish show, I consumed a rather copious amount of 🍄’s while hanging w/ mah friends beforehand. For some reason I couldn’t get the image of Plastic Man (Comic cartoon on Saturday mornings in the early 80’s) Out of my head. Every fucking song from that show I processed through the Plastic Man perspective. I was done with that memory before my brain would allow me to forget it. It was a loooonnnggg show b/c 🍄’s.
- I once ate shrooms and went to a club (late 90s in the Netherlands, psytrance). The party experience was complete gone for me, it was just like watching a nature show, where I heard a David Attenborough narator talk about how the female of the species was using various color pigments on her face to attract the male. While the males where using dance moves to show strength and virility.

Every generation alive has microplastics in them
- and probably will for at least a few generations unless we can do some major filtering of all mediums

Eliminating lead products has been a lot more feasible than the impossible task of eliminating microplastics. They are in everything. So unfortunately Gen Z and onward will suffer with us millennials.

Boomers had/have microplastics and lead poisoning. This is not a conspiracy, it is just a fact.
- Did someone say it was a conspiracy?

Boomers also have them, or do you think they intentionally target millennials?

My dad's car ran on 4 star right up until the mid 90s. I was exposed to plenty lead in my formative years as well as micro plastics.
- The ol twofer

but at least people are born now without nuclear explosion isotopes
up until a few years ago every living being had them
so if we can stop lead from being blasted everywhere
and we can stop exploding nukes
maybe we can stop the plastic problem... but probably not for a few generations
- and we can stop exploding nukes
  We might be going backwards on this one
  
  it's chest beating by the worst and desperate
  if a nuke is exploded above ground again, the nation that sent it will be history
  it's a bullshit game of chicken but nobody is going to do it.
- If it is a small amount that make the cut (in relative contrast to all current members of humanity) If a fraction make it, that would be giant W for humankind. The diversity would be enormous and incredibly resilient & unbelievably healthy.

What's replacing plastic. Good luck.
- What kind of generational hazard would you like to have growing up, kids? :D
- Hopefully renewable, compostable/biodegradable plastics.
  It's the getting the old shit out of everything that will be the issue
- What did plastic replace? Good chance we can go back, if we can convince some people the line doesn't need to go up. Good joke, everybody laughs...
- Do you mean what ubiquitous toxin will be next?
  Or do you mean how can we get by without plastic?
  If it's the second one, the answer is easy, fucking aluminum. We've had the answer forever and it still works great. Glass too, good for many applications.
  Now the actual problem isn't plastic bags or beverage containers though, it's clothing and tires. Most clothing is plastic these days and tiny plastic fibers break up into micro plastics and take to the air or end up in the sea. Car tires are also just plastic these days, not rubber (which is arguably better for the environment than leveling rainforests for rubber tree plantations, sigh...), the tires rub off on the road like a pencil eraser on sandpaper. This also ends up in the air and sea.
  So anyway, replacing plastic beverage containers is a great step, a no brainer, but it also doesn't address the real problem at all. I hope that some day soon tires and clothes can start to be made with biodegradable "eco plastics", but if that doesn't turn out to be feasible, we'll be in some serious trouble. And once we have some real, feasible, affordable replacements, then we need to actually outlaw the use of older plastic tires, in every country on the planet, despite heavy lobbying against any new measures from vested interests... I can't even imagine how to make that happen. How did we do it with lead? Has every country outlawed lead in gas?
  
  Even though leaded gasoline and leaded paint have been outlawed for decades in the US, it's still a big problem in poor communities. Lots of old houses still have lead paint. Lead abatement is expensive and many people may not even know it's something you need to do.
  
  Isn't aluminum neurotoxic?

Don't forget the nanoplastics! These are even more hazardous!

Can someone tell me what microplastics do to the body? I’m almost too afraid to ask at this point.
- That's the neat thing: nobody can. It's incredibly hard to devise a study that can show anything about it. There is no way to get a human without microplastics in them to get a control group, and by this point as far as I know there is no plausible theory to get a specific study.
  Everyone kinda suspects that it can't be good for you, simultaneously there is zero actual evidence that something is ever happening. We don't know, and that's very frustrating.
  
  It seems like they'd be fairly inert. Although that's certainly no guarantee that they're not really bad for you. Much like inert gas, the danger could well be them replacing or getting in the way of something else.
- IIRC the one thing we are sure of is that they don't break down, nor do they get out. So you better hope they don't do anything bad on top of that
- Veritasium has a video about it on YouTube.
  It’s very informative and may just give you the fix you’re looking for
- Probably do the same thing most of the junk humans dump into the environment. Reduce average lifespan, cause diseases and reduced fertility.

What's next ? Latent radioactive dust ?
- Probably volcanic ash lungs from all the volcanoes in the world erupting all at once due to climate change.

Nah, vaping will be the Gen z all have lead poisoning of Gen z.
- What makes you say that? I’m not saying vaping is healthy but there’s no source to say that they’re poisoning anyone…unless you mean disposables.
  
  They're starting to get into the science of it, and it ain't looking good. Yes, disposables are a big part of the problem.
- Cannabis.
  It's basically mental health disorders in herbal form.
  Public opinion is finally starting to shift from its a panacea to it's a drug, in the face of decriminalization throughout areas of North America.
  I smoke weed and I also work in the field of addiction recovery, so pls don't start the anti science denialism in reply to me.
  
  anti science denialism
  Wouldn't anti science denialism just be science avocation? 😆
- Go yell at the clouds some more old man, but in this case, those would be vape clouds so you better get out quickly because they disappear like mad

Bah. I dont care about lead, microplastics or even covid.
Chernobyl and mad cow-disease are my jam.

I still licked lead pain in the craddle, ate too many food preservatives and artificial colorants, ate too much red meat, too much fat, got micro plastics poisoning...
And all I have to tell is bad breath, flatulence that could strip paint off the walls and a stupid sense of humour.