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Comment by beeforpork | Hacker News Reader

This article conflates particles of any size, and often does not even mention sizes, e.g., '28 particles' in a serving of beer? That is imprecise (doesn't mention size) and wrong: probably way to little, as nano particles are used in filtering (clarifying) beer.

The articles also doesn't really tell me how to avoid all that plastic. If 40 percent of human diet contains plastic, then there's hope, so which 60 percent do not contain plastic? This would be really helpful to check my own diet for surprises. E.g., I drink only craft beer and make my own ketchup, in order to avoid nano plastics -- but what elephant do I miss?

The problem is really serious, so articles about this should take more care to be helpful.

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Personally, I think that in answer to the question of “how to avoid all that plastic?”, the article is leaning more towards “take action to stop the plastic from being produced and added to food in the first place”.

While it makes the problem larger from an individual perspective, the alternative of simply trying to avoid it in our own foods would mean that our available foods shrink over time as plastics continue to seep in to more and more places.

If consumers know which products have more microplastics and are able to avoid them, it'll produce market forces that encourage businesses to reduce the microplastics in their products. The free market doesn't always move in the right direction, but in this case aligning the incentives could really help -- if we don't even know which products to avoid, there's no chance of market forces helping to push businesses in the right direction.

> the article is leaning more towards “take action to stop the plastic from being produced and added to food in the first place”

Which is kind of nonsense unless someone happens to be CEO of Molson Coors or something. It seems obvious that if you want to avoid ingesting plastic, the clearest path to that is to know what foods are less likely to contain plastic in the first place.

Micro plastics are mostly fibers shed from fabric. So stop buying synthetic or semi-synthetic clothing and only buy cotton or other organic materials.

> but what elephant do I miss?

Probably the plastic that was in those tomatoes to start with.

I doubt there's a practical way to avoid it, it's probably fairly random depending on where the food is from. Especially if I recall right it's often found in the water supply which you then drink directly or is used to water plants which you then eat.

Plants are reasonably good at filtering the water they ingest through their roots, if they weren't your tomatoes would be full of sand and mud (clay).

Plants uptake chemicals and other smaller molecules through their roots. Oftentimes they will store pollutants in their fruit or stems because they don’t know what to do with it.

Here’s an article from Nature that specifically studied plastic uptake by plant roots.[1]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0567-9

Yes, at the um scale and below it does happen, and such concentrating effects can really change it from a non-issue to a serious problem, depending on how chemically active the contaminant is.

TFA: "Yet despite all the new knowledge about microplastics and the even tinier nanoplastics, smaller than a millimeter, that enter the human body through ingestion or inhalation"

Microplastics are apparently taken as being a mm or larger, and 'nanoplastics' are anything smaller than a mm which is still very large. The ones you are talking about would be very much smaller than those by another 3 orders of decimal magnitude.

The article specifically says micrometer so it would be right between millimeter and nano sized plastics. They will only get smaller as they degrade.

> Our results provide evidence in support of submicrometre- and micrometre-sized polystyrene and polymethylmethacrylate particles penetrating the stele of both species using the crack-entry mode at sites of lateral root emergence.

Carbonated beverage cans are lined with plastic. It should not be a surprise that microplastics are found in beer.

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