Researchers discover why plastic sheds dangerous fragments
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
> If you look at a piece of plastic through a powerful microscope, you'll see alternating layers of hard material and soft material. […]
> [The researchers] discovered that the process [of forming microplastics] begins in the soft layers, which grow weaker over time due to environmental degradation and can break off even when the plastic is not under stress. By themselves, these soft pieces break down quickly in the environment. Problems arise when the failure of a soft layer allows hard layers to break off.
We produce more and more plastic each year, every new law reducing oil consumption is greated with doubling the amount of plastic we produce.
Microplaatic is in our brain now, causing damage that is irreversable.
Freezing grants is just one of many reasons why we need to put stop to that cancer which is oil industry.
Disposable plastic shopping bags are kind of insane if you think about it.
[0] https://rochesterbeacon.com/2024/04/17/new-microplastics-res...
Using ‘plastic’ as a category is about as precise as ‘metal’.
The answer is simply that it continually damages the cells in the lung due to it's needle like structure.
I assume (but critically don't have proof) that if we find a cancer link to plastics it will be due to a similar sort of structural interaction. I don't think the specific type of plastic matters, though I'm sure some will be worse than others.
Many other forms of silicon are both cancer causing, and completely inert.
I suspect plastics will similarly have only small portions that are really nasty. We’re making a huge variety of novel types though every day. Which is part of the concern.
what we call ‘plastic’ has such a huge variety of molecular weights and compositions it’s like trying to find common ground between say nickel, stainless steel, and uranium.
We already know some plastics cause cancer, and some precursors to the same plastics cause cancer.
And a bigger issue IMO is plasticizers which modify the plastics structure to make them more malleable and less brittle.
There is this interesting study from last year that looks at the health effects of chrysotile, in a population exposed to far more of it than possibly anywhere else on earth: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38247448/
There really isn't an animal alive that doesn't have some degree of microplastics in their body.
We could stop the manufacturers from producing more and more of the stuff every year. That would be a pretty important step.
Even if they are less frequently encountered, there are also completely amorphous plastics and completely crystalline plastics, and these appear to not be prone to fragmentation into micro-plastics.
The conclusion is that there should be efforts to develop alternative plastics to the more frequently used semi-crystalline plastics, which have this serious disadvantage of generating persistent micro-plastic fragments.
Therefore this article offers a potential solution to the micro-plastic problem, which might work, like when freons have been replaced with less harmful refrigerating agents, even if those may have a slightly less refrigeration efficiency.
Where? To whom? According to what metric?
More time in nature => this is neutral, not necessarily a positive, depends if you like that.
Less technology => definitely a negative, I know when I'd rather have been born if this is the only change.
Less pollution => Depending on the cutoff, most people today suffer less pollution than then. I'd rather the current global levels of pollution than actually cooking with coal/wood in my kitchen. The latter will probably kill you faster.
In the West, plastic use became widespread in homes and with foods in the 1950s. In most other countries it took until the 1980s.
So is it that people prefer the world they are born into and hate change, or is life for an average person getting worse in some less tangible respects? Is fondly remembering the family bonding over radio broadcasts worth more than being able to afford every member of the family having their own TV, for example? It seems hard to judge.
We often define 'best it's ever been' by the poor being able to afford iPhones and the marginalized having more rights, which are both valid points.
But is it better for the majority common person? Are there people who are constantly in awe of how great things are, or are we doomed to miss what we had as kids and focus on the negative? Because I find myself falling into that trap often.
One thing that sticks in my head is that as a kid, my dad worked for a soda company and my neighbor worked for Lowes. Neither wife worked, both had 3 kids, and could afford a house and 2 cars. That seems like a fairy tale to young people today.
But if you turn off the screens, the physical reality hasn't really changed that much. There is some horrible architecture inflicted on us, but then parks and streets are nice/cleaner than in my youth.
PS I do agree that the social pressures are worse, with both parents encouraged/needing to work.
It sure has. We've lost a significant proportion of the other species on earth in the span of a few decades. For just one example of many, "69% decline in vertebrate populations globally since 1970." (WWF Living Planet Report, 2022 [0])
The current extinction rate is 100 to 1,000 times the natural background rate.
Half of all coral reefs have died since 1950, and entire marine food chains are collapsing.
There's been a 75% decline in flying insect biomass in parts of Europe over 30 years (Krefeld Study, 2017). 1 in 6 bee species have gone regionally extinct.
1.3 million sq km of forest have been destroyed since 1990; the size of South Africa. Now Trump is talking about logging National Parks and cutting down a California sized amount of trees.
96% of all mammal biomass on Earth today is humans and livestock.
I could go on, but, I think the point is made.
0 - https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/69-average-decl...
As I understand it, aluminum cans require a plastic lining. How is that one solved?
And copper compounds will form in a wide variety of acidic and anoxic environments.
It does not prevent people from throwing them, but since you get money from them, homeless people usually gather them to make some money.
Also, for poor people, they need the money that they money back when they return a glass bottle, so they have an incentive to not trash it, certainly not on the street.
Glass containers don't require any lining. As for aluminum without a lining, it is okay for certain dry foods only, nothing wet.
Bottle and can recycling programs in the US were very successful in states that implemented them.
In NYC all refundable glass bottles and aluminum cans thrown away by those that couldn’t be bothered: They would be picked up by homeless (etc), providing a market-driven solution.
I never understood why it wasn’t expanded to more containers, like cans of beans.
The big problem then was that state-level only made recycling inconsistent.
The big problem today is that plastic bottles took over because of their lightweight; meaning only a government policy could discourage plastic food containers.
Unless you're walking a dog. Or wearing sandals or flip-flops in the summer. Or are a 2-year old prone to tripping and falling. Or...
You use glass.
The plastic is primarily used for acidic foods like tomatoes. Non-acidic goods will do just fine with no liner.
So either, you return the bottles for some pocket money or you leave the bottle by a trashcan for someone (usually a homeless person) to collect all the bottles and make a few bucks for food and a shower.
It's actually a bit taboo to smash a bottle because of this.
Beautiful cyclical economy.
Clothing is an interesting problem; silk and wool can provide superior alternatives but are costly and so it’d be a shift into quality.
That in turn requires a mindset shift away from changing trends every year to something perhaps more generational.
Are the wealthy trend setters willing to do this?
Plastic... asshole.
-- George Carlin
Technically speaking, latex and even silk are plastics, as are traditional products made from plant oils, like linoleum. We've been relying on them for millennia.
"Plastics" has taken on a connotation similar to "GMO", intrinsically harmful by implication, in contrast to labels like "natural" or "organic" where the implication is they're harmless or healthy. But it's all just language games. There's often no meaningful distinction that can be made between "synthetic" products and "natural" products, and it's common for "natural" products to have safety profiles no less worrisome, if not more worrisome, then their synthetic counter parts. For example, "natural" neonicotinoid pesticides. There's alot more diversity in synthetic products, of course, though even the term "synthetic" relies on some very fuzzy line drawing.
The substantive aspects of the debate can be reduced to arguments over the pace of progress, risk, etc, which have little to with whether something is "natural" or "synthetic", "organic" or "plastic". These labels are mere rhetorical instruments.
Since hitting the market 75 years ago, plastic has become ubiquitous -- and so, presumably, have nanoplastics
1950? Polyethylene and nylon appeared in the 1930s. Celluloid in the mid-1800s. We have been exposed to "nanoplastics" (including things like petroleum jelly and other hydrocarbon fractions) for more than a century, with very very little evidence it's "dangerous".
We've certainly seen evidence of hormone disruption caused by some plastifiers. I suspect many more negative effects will become more apparent as time goes on and "dosage" increases in various organisms.
Full article is paywalled, but the point remains. Point is that scale matters, obviously.
Almonds contain trace amounts of amygdalin, you can eat a handful of almonds every day of your life, but if I asked you to eat a kg in one sitting, you're not gonna have a good time.
Plastics have gone from niche to absolutely ubiqutous worldwide in ~100 years. Even if it turns out to be totally and completely harmless to humans and every other animal, wouldn't you want to know that for sure?
It seems kind of crazy to look at history and believe that exogenous matter accumulating in tissues and cells doesn't have a negative effect, but I guess we have to wait to see.
So have radio waves. There was a lot of paranoia back then, much like with plastics today, and a similar amount of studies showing that exposure to RF radiation causes cancer, but that has mostly died down as people realised the truth.
As time goes on, the harmlessness only proves itself.
>As time goes on, the harmlessness only proves itself.
I cant find any recently published study that /doesnt/ demonstate a link between microplastics exposure and adverse health effects. Please share if you have any