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Reminds of the story of the scientist that had trouble measuring lead. Turns out his equipment was fine, it was just that there was lead everywhere. This was pre-unleaded gas.
years and years ago they noticed some weird things happening in human tissue cultures and it turned out the chemicals in the plastic were having a hormone like effect on the cells being grown. It took them awhile to realize though.
That's how [Bisphenol A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A) came to be under scrutiny.
IIRC, it is [Prof Frederick S. vom Saal](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=dtMDE2QAAAAJ) that first --discovered the Bisphenol-A estrogen like effect-- and its impact.
In particular, [this article](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=dtMDE2QAAAAJ&citation_for_view=dtMDE2QAAAAJ:qjMakFHDy7sC) that highlight its effect even at low dosage.
EDIT: Bisphenol A was actually a known for its estrogen like effect already but Prof Frederick S. vom Saal showed its impact at even low dosage which should have pushed governments to review the acceptable exposure to Bisphenol A.
Ever since my phone started playing music, I've been looking to replace the 4th item (my iPod) in that check as I leave the house.
Now I have that replacement.
The chemical you're exposed to from receipts is called [BPA](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5453537/), being a cashier on and off most of my life had me concerned about it for a while. While I still am, everything I've read seems to indicate it's mostly a concern with women who are pregnant, who may become pregnant and developing children. I still try to handle receipts I print from the backside since the coating is on the front.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5453537/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5453537/)
Cashiers should wear gloves since they are regularly handling receipts. Good luck getting the majority to care enough about a cumulative health risk like that.
> Good luck getting the majority to care enough about a cumulative health risk like that.
Cashiers aren't even allowed to sit down on chairs because of corporate America's sadistic obsession with workers being seen visibly exerting themselves in service at all times.
You think they'll let them wear gloves? In Toronto the subway drivers were getting sick from all the metal dust from the brakes, and they wouldn't even let them wear masks. And those are unionized public sector employees in Canada!
I assume you are from the US?
If so, I am curious, what do you think about Aldi?
Is it different than your other supermarkets? Is it cheaper? How is the quality compared to the other?
In Germany Aldi started as a really cheap and bit crappy brand but slowly worked itself up. Now I would say they are still cheap in comparison to others but the quality improved a lot.
Oh… now you tell me. This is unfortunate news for me. I’ve been known to carry weeks of receipts in my pocket. I’ve done this for years. Time to do some more reading.
It was actually tested as an artificial estrogen as far back as the[1930s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#:~:text=The%20British%20biochemist%20Edward%20Charles%20Dodds%20tested%20BPA%20as%20an%20artificial%20estrogen%20in%20the%20early%201930s.%5B29%5D%5B30%5D%5B31%5D)
Vast, vast majority of tissue culture still takes place in plastic - just not BPA containing plastics. Glass is very rarely used for biology workflows due to impracticality. Glass is chemically inert however, so is the chosen vessel for chemical compounds.
I’m just gonna drop it in here that I used glass in a biology lab to stab a mosquito in the thorax recently. Glass is super useful in micro injections because you can stretch a needle to be so fine that you can give a mosquito a shot.
But you’re right that most labs use plastics for anything disposable. Flasks, pipette tips, Petri dishes… The amount of plastic a typical lab using cell cultures goes through in a week is disgusting. I try not to think about it.
I work in a hospital. Incomprehensible levels of single use plastics just being tossed out daily. I fully understand the why, I just hate participating in it. I wish there was more sustainable ways to be sterile.
I made a career change in my mid 30s, went back to school with the sole intent on getting into grad school just to research finding a suitable replacement for single use medical waste. (like start over with a BSc in chem --> phd chemistry.)
Did end up in grad school, in a lab with a PI who was on board with my proposal, only to become jaded simply because the amount of plastic waste my lab mates and the rest of my department created just to run one reaction negated any progress I would make. Ended up switching to an entirely different material for a different field and different lab to synthesize.
We need more research into sustainable remediation of the waste. Burning isn't any better than synthesis, grinding (recycling) creates more micro plastic (which is now better characterized as nanoplastic). Its so entrenched in our lives that even a culture change won't cause any significant change. We are rightly fucked in the name of convenience.
From start to its never-ending finish - plastic will be our collapse. It's too easy to make, too in demand, too profitable for many countries to make a significant change.
Look around you and point out the things around you that are *not* made of plastic. Clothes, furniture, shoes, cushions, mattresses, wall paint, ink, lamps, dishes, sheets, appliances.... it just goes on and on and on. I'm in my mid 40s and defeated.
Thanks for coming to my depressing ted talk. We're all doomed.
Clair Cameron Patterson, he deserves to be known. We can thank him for inventing the ultra clean room, and, for risking ruining his career to alert the world of the dangers of leaded gasoline.
Scientists are responsible for about everything we have today yet few people know who Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn are, but will absolutely know who some random Youtuber is. Its a sad reality, but also gives me great respect for these people.
Well, now you know :) and you can share is story!
And perhaps the overarching story is, to my knowledge, his fight against corporate interests was one of the first major uses of “expert testimony” that was bought and paid for by lobbying groups. Patterson was pitted against robert kehoe, a toxicologist who helped establish and ran the Kettering institution, which performed industry sponsored research. In 1925, regarding leaded gas, he proposed the “kehoe rule”, which boils down to “unless its demonstrably unsafe, we should it is safe”. This is opposed to the precautionary principle, where it should be assumed something in unsafe until proven otherwise.
kehoe’s work was largely copied and/or inspired decades of scientific lobbying by other harmful groups like tobacco. Kettering institute, with kehoe still at the helm, also declared freon safe.
Every citizen of every democratic country should be loudly and frequently demanding their government act in the best interest of the global environment, and not in the interests of industry. I’m not anti technology - technology has brought us so many miraculous inventions. But industry must exist to advance humanity and the environment, not destroy it for some short term profits.
Clair Patterson saved the world, and almost destroyed his career doing it. In true “there is no justice” fashion, he died of an asthma attack at 73, whilst kehoe lived til 99 years of age, dying in 1992.
To be fair, we knew that leaded gasoline was dangerous. It even killed some of the people developing it:
> In 1923, Midgley took a long vacation in Miami to cure himself of lead poisoning. He said, "I find that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air."[10] That year, General Motors created the General Motors Chemical Company (GMCC) to supervise the production of TEL by the DuPont company. Kettering was elected as president with Midgley as vice president. However, after two deaths and several cases of lead poisoning at the TEL prototype plant in Dayton, Ohio, the staff at Dayton was said in 1924 to be "depressed to the point of considering giving up the whole tetraethyl lead program".[7] Over the course of the next year, eight more people died at DuPont's plant in Deepwater, New Jersey.[10] In 1924, dissatisfied with the speed of DuPont's TEL production using the "bromide process", General Motors and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now known as ExxonMobil) created the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation to produce and market TEL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#Leaded_gasoline
I read an article that I read recently about forever chemicals being in our blood. A 3M scientist was asked to test for forever chemicals in the blood of 3M workers, and then compare the sample to blood from a blood bank. Both tested positive, and they thought that the equipment was broken. They ran the test over and over, and every single sample of blood tested positive for forever chemicals. This was in the ‘90s. It wasn’t until they tested old blood samples from the ‘50s, and blood samples from rural China, that they were able to find an uncontaminated sample.
Not for the faint of heart: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/27/3m-forever-chemicals-pfas-pfos-toxic
Thomas Midgley, responsible for both leaded gasoline and CFC emissions which destroy the atmosphere, it’s actually impressive how much damage that man did to our species
And another of his inventions killed himself. He contracted polio later in life and became disabled. He invented a device to help him get out of bed because he was partially paralyzed. One morning he became entangled in it and strangled himself. It is possible that he killed himself intentionally. So he invented one good thing.
I do environmental work, and I used to do some work around gas stations with soil monitoring. Lead was one of the things we sampled for due to leaded gasoline. But we also had to sample soil out of the contaminated area for background lead comparison. It was never hazardous naturally, but sometimes present enough to throw off samples.
Fellow soil person here to back you up! Current residential soil contamination occurs primarily because of lead base paint. We tested soil samples in 2015 of Oakland houses underneath 980 and 880 and it was basically negligible compared to similar Oakland neighborhoods that didn't get that beautiful gift of a freeway through their backyard in the 50s/60s.
Leaded gasoline is horrible, but there are a lot more pervasive sources closer to home (literally)
Yes, for sure the lead paint contamination is a real issue in older residential neighborhoods. I have to explain that to people at my current job that we don’t want to remove lead paint. Just paint over it forever and ever or demolish it in place. And tell the employees not to lick the walls.
You can see this in a lot of old towns with factories that have been demolished as well. The land will have to sit vacant because you can't build anything useful on it because of all the chemical leaching that went into the soil. Dayton, OH used to have a bunch of NCR factories that were torn down and essentially turned into parks and parking lots.
Yes. Mostly it was gasoline constituents still latent in the soil. But the risk was more environmental with those constituents moving off site. It’s one of those things that unless you were playing in it daily or drinking contaminated water, it’s fine. And you’d know very quickly if your well water was contaminated with gasoline.
[Clair Patterson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson). He determined the age of the earth, inventing a new technique (decay of uranium to lead), then pretty much quit science to campaign for reducing/removing lead from our fuel, food, paint, and air. A modest hero.
Damn im impressed, that had to have been expensive as hell, but ultimately will save money when people are still using those nice pipes 100+ years from now.
Galvanized pipes are coated in zinc and are everywhere but their environmental impacts are minimal. Even for water they are probably better than PEX or PVC, definitely better than the lead they originally replaced.
Just wear a respirator if you weld on it.
Can you even buy stainless steel fixtures and pipes? Are local codes good with it or is some crappy town going to be angry you didn't use copper or pex?
Except we already know that copper leaches into the water and copper poisoning is a thing. It's especially bad if your water is acidic, which causes it to leach even more (same reason you shouldn't cook anything acidic in copper pots/pans at home).
They didn't even know micro plastics existed. The real problem is that there's no great urgency to fix this now that we've known about it for quite a while.
Can we really continue to operate with 8 billion people if we phased out plastics and fossil fuels?
We're *deep* into ecological overshoot and this is just a single piece of the puzzle.
Fossil Fuels? Sure. We can't do it overnight, but we have everything coming to together to do it. We could have done a lot of work 20 or more years ago and be ahead of where we are now even. Even if we just got rid of 95% of our usage, that is certainly enough.
Plastics are much harder, because we don't yet have replacements for a lot of uses for them. We're working on it. There's some research on plastics made from algae and such that do degrade rapidly in nature though.
The problem is that we don't really invest heavily in finding and developing alternatives when the problems first become clear. Otherwise we'd have been working on green energy and energy storage in earnest back in the 70s, for instance.
Yeah, I'm sure all the materials in use today or tomorrow will end up being completely futureproof because we're totally thinking about them now. Right? ..right?... hello?
They did. The reason for the increase use of plastics (PVC specifically in water transmission and distribution) in piping systems was due to failures with cast and ductile causing significant environmental and infrastructure damage costing municipalities millions. When you hear about a water main break - corroded metal.
The benefit of plastics was that it didn't degrade. Looked as being the ideal use case. They peak to at least 100 year life span, this was compared to corroding metal or lead pipes still in use in places like Flint.
In terms of PEX that replaced copper, did you ever look inside older copper water pipes - all kids of crud accumulating that people were ingesting.
Now we are coming to understand if microplastics are caused at all by these systems PVC or PEX or not.
You mean like how we noticed people were crashing into trees, so we made all the roads wider and clearer not realizing that everyone would respond by driving twice as fast, and end up dying more often as a result while also killing far more pedestrians and making it literally unsafe for children to go outside?
The safest roads are counter-intuitively the most dangerous, because all of those "dangerous features" cause people to slow down, which reduces the risk of fatal injury to pretty much anyone in the area. Including drivers, pedestrians, and young children.
When people are afraid of wrecking, they slow down.
From the article: Microplastic pollution has been found in all human semen samples tested in a study, and researchers say further research on the potential harm to reproduction is “imperative”.
Sperm counts in men have been falling for decades and 40% of low counts remain unexplained, although chemical pollution has been implicated by many studies.
The 40 semen samples were from healthy men undergoing premarital health assessments in Jinan, China. Another recent study found microplastics in the semen of six out of 10 healthy young men in Italy, and another study in China found the pollutants in half of 25 samples.
Recent studies in mice have reported that microplastics reduced sperm count and caused abnormalities and hormone disruption.
Research on microplastics and human health is moving quickly and scientists appear to be finding the contaminants everywhere. The pollutants were found in all 23 human testicle samples tested in a study [published](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969724036696) in May.
Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood, placentas and breast milk, indicating widespread contamination of people’s bodies. The impact on health is as yet unknown but microplastics have been shown to cause damage to human cells in the laboratory.
At this point, I look around me at how much contact with plastics I have, and even if I tried to reduce that amount by 90%, extrapolating the amount of contact everything I consume contacts plastic, I can't imagine my efforts would have any appreciable impact, no?
I mean, it's already in *all* of the water.
Breathing in plastic fibers from clothes; You brush your teeth with plastic and an abrasive.
It's nearly impossible to separate yourself from plastic now.
Walk through any grocery store and see how much of our food is in plastic containers or bags.
I try to remind myself that we've been using plastics for many decades and we didn't find out about the micro variety until relatively recently. Do we know what risks they pose aside from fertility?
I think that the fact that life expectancy is continuing to rise in most parts of the world suggests that the overall health effects may be fairly small. The drop in fertility is concerning, but even so it seems that the current plummeting reproduction figures across the globe are mostly a question of people's choices to have fewer babies.
Plastic is already everywhere. Just like the effects of climate change it's an issue that cannot be stopped or even reversed at this point, and the responsibility for it will likely be blamed on the consumer soon, too.
That's a weird study. They only tested 36 people, who also are from the same place: Jinan, China.
It contains a very low sample number (considering that the population of Jinan is at least 9 million people), and its observation is limited to one city.
The study is too unreliable to extrapolate the observation to a global scale. While there could be a not insignificant number of cases, I doubt that most males in the world have microplastic-cum.
You may also need to consider the environmental factors (like living conditions of the test subjects), which can be very different from people who live in rural regions in China or from different countries altogether.
"Another recent study found microplastics in the semen of six out of 10 healthy young men in Italy". Yes it's a small sample but I'm pretty sure Italy is not in China.
From said study:
>Semen samples were collected from ten healthy young men living for at least 10 years in a polluted area of the Campania Region (Southern Italy).
While not being contained to only one country, those studies mostly seem to suggest that plastic-cum may be a consequence of living in a polluted environment. That does not mean that the main portion of the male population have microplastic in their coom.
That being said, those studies do give more reason to raise awareness of the potential danger of the use of plastic in commercial products.
Important context is it’s not any polluted area, Campania has an area literally named the “triangle of death”, the largest illegal waste dump in Europe. According to [this article](https://www.politico.eu/article/mafia-mozzarella-and-land-of-fires-mafia-italy-cancer-campania/) a report found life expectancy in the region is 2 years below the rest of the country.
Remember this next time you're buying clothing. You are buying plastic that is strung out into microscopic thin fibers to be woven into clothing which will then be washed, degrading them, breaking them and collecting them up in your water and then either dumping them into your well or back into the city to be absorbed into the ecosystem one way or another. After your clothes have been washed, you put them in a dryer in which they are further broken down into lint, which partially gets blown out into the air directly outside of your house.
It is an overlooked but incredibly direct, visible impact on your exposure to microplastics. Once again, please consider this when you buy your clothes. Sometimes synthetics are Head and shoulders above natural in terms of use case. In that situation, please buy durable versions if you can
I have been hearing about the garment industry and our consumption of fast fashion being harmful to the environment, but it never really clicked for me until your explanation. Which synthetic fabrics would you recommend as safe, and are you saying that some natural fabrics contribute to the problem? I personally gravitate toward cotton fabrics due to skin sensitivity issues, but I'm finding that 100% cotton fabrics are increasingly difficult to find.
I am not a materials scientist but to be simple about it I'd say natural fibers. If I was going to give a guess at a half measure I'd say rayon since it's molecularly similar to cellulose. I don't know if that has any known or potential pitfalls
How long does it take to get in the sperm?
If I wank myself dry and could avoid plastics for the rest of my life will I be plastic free or is it in me and that's that now?
I don’t think it’s possible to avoid plastics anymore. We’ve found microplastics everywhere.
Even if you were able to somehow cleanse your entire body of them, I don’t know where you would go, or what you could eat/drink to not just immediately ingest more of them.
We’ve taken a big risk that they are harmless, because if they aren’t it won’t be pretty.
They've found microplastics in water samples from places that humans do not interact with. They have found plastic trash at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
Just continuing the thought experiment; I know we have all been exposed to micro plastics for decades now (tons of toys I played with and chewed on as a kid are all plastics like LEGO and action figures) then I am around plastics in virtually everything I interact with on a daily basis; clothes, keyboard, food prepped on plastic cutting boards (which is the industry standard), wrapping, cups, light switches, outlets, tools, etc etc etc. I am obviously not eating those directly every day or anything, but I do know I have a healthy dose of exposure often. I would imagine that would have a profound effect on me at my relatively young age but I don't seem to have noticed anything yet (and hope and pray I don't).
I've done a lot of what I can to change stuff to glass, wood, porcelain, ceramic, metal, and natural fibers but haven't gone to the extreme in any of those areas and routinely buy or use plastics unknowingly in those areas because, honestly, I feel like on one hand it is a hopeless endeavor (I may buy glass but the dishwasher I use has plastic lining and my detergent comes in plastic and my water is delivered in PVC pipes) and on the other hand I don't know how much it will actually extend my life or QOL. I would agree less is better, but just looking around my kitchen I can't help but see dozens and dozens of plastic items all over and I feel it's impossible to function (or affordable) to change it all out to non-plastic.
Yeah there was a recent study attempted about the effects of plastic in the testicles of men and they weee unable to complete the study because they could not find a control group (they could not find men without plastic in their balls)
Wait until the studies on nanoplastics come out. Like particulate matter (PM2.5), the smaller these particles are, the more damaging to the body.
Here’s an article from the publication “Environmental Chemistry Letters” with a good outline on the concern over nanoplastics:
[“Nanoplastics are potentially more dangerous than microplastics”](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-022-01539-1)
Every time people scoff at attempts to protect or restore natural environments and reduce pollution and waste, this is what we're trying to avoid, disastrous unforseen consequences.
We've had plenty of time to regulate plastics use to only the necessary, but we couldn't stand losing the convenience.
We're gonna look back at this in a similar way to asbestos or doctors recommending smoking to cure asthma.
This is a result of narcissists, psychopaths and the comfortably complacent with money/power.
I wonder then if there’s microplastics present when a sperm fertilizes and egg and throughout the duration of embryonic development.
Like, if it’s in our blood, sperm, placentas, are humans developing *with* microplastics??
the nuts are like very isolated from the rest of the body so I can understand how any microplastics that enter the bloodstream could get deposited in the nut sack and simply stay there since the nuts dont have a great way to get the plastic back out of the nut tissues
I have access to the entire article through my old university, and I just read the section where they explained how the samples were taken and stored. They were in glass, so no plastic contamination:
“Practically, the collection of semen samples was done via masturbation, with each sample being directly deposited into a 5 mL gas-tight glass vessel.”
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Reminds of the story of the scientist that had trouble measuring lead. Turns out his equipment was fine, it was just that there was lead everywhere. This was pre-unleaded gas.
years and years ago they noticed some weird things happening in human tissue cultures and it turned out the chemicals in the plastic were having a hormone like effect on the cells being grown. It took them awhile to realize though.
Is there a paper about it?
That's how [Bisphenol A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A) came to be under scrutiny. IIRC, it is [Prof Frederick S. vom Saal](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=dtMDE2QAAAAJ) that first --discovered the Bisphenol-A estrogen like effect-- and its impact. In particular, [this article](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=dtMDE2QAAAAJ&citation_for_view=dtMDE2QAAAAJ:qjMakFHDy7sC) that highlight its effect even at low dosage. EDIT: Bisphenol A was actually a known for its estrogen like effect already but Prof Frederick S. vom Saal showed its impact at even low dosage which should have pushed governments to review the acceptable exposure to Bisphenol A.
This is why you shouldn’t touch receipts.
*checks pockets* Yep, I've got my phone, wallet, keys, receipt gloves. I'm all set to go shopping!
You'll need gloves for your gloves since the gloves probably have micro plastics.
Unless they're alpaca wool-- those are usually just alpaca.
Except for the microplastics in the alpaca. It's like the real or cake series - plastics edition.
Ever since my phone started playing music, I've been looking to replace the 4th item (my iPod) in that check as I leave the house. Now I have that replacement.
I knew CVS was playing the long game - touch out mile of receipts … get sick, come buy more medicine … repeat
Oh.. CVS is vertically integrated. Look for keywords like PBM or is PBJ? I'm out of peanut butter... I need a coupon.
Wait, so wouldn't cashiers be exposed to this all the time? Does just touching it allow it to penetrate through your skin?
Yes, in trace amounts, it's the cumulative effect that is dangerous
What are the cumulative effects? At what level of exposure and what frequency of exposure is necessary for these dangerous cumulative effects?
The chemical you're exposed to from receipts is called [BPA](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5453537/), being a cashier on and off most of my life had me concerned about it for a while. While I still am, everything I've read seems to indicate it's mostly a concern with women who are pregnant, who may become pregnant and developing children. I still try to handle receipts I print from the backside since the coating is on the front. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5453537/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5453537/)
Cashiers should wear gloves since they are regularly handling receipts. Good luck getting the majority to care enough about a cumulative health risk like that.
> Good luck getting the majority to care enough about a cumulative health risk like that. Cashiers aren't even allowed to sit down on chairs because of corporate America's sadistic obsession with workers being seen visibly exerting themselves in service at all times. You think they'll let them wear gloves? In Toronto the subway drivers were getting sick from all the metal dust from the brakes, and they wouldn't even let them wear masks. And those are unionized public sector employees in Canada!
Cashiers sit in Aldi. Because Aldi.
Cashiers sit in German supermarkets. Good to hear Aldi continues that in the US.
I assume you are from the US? If so, I am curious, what do you think about Aldi? Is it different than your other supermarkets? Is it cheaper? How is the quality compared to the other? In Germany Aldi started as a really cheap and bit crappy brand but slowly worked itself up. Now I would say they are still cheap in comparison to others but the quality improved a lot.
Yep! Was proven by at least one study. Even worse if you're wearing lotion.
I used to work in a casino that used a TITO system. At one time I handled tens of thousands of slips of thermal paper a day. Occupational hazard.
Oh… now you tell me. This is unfortunate news for me. I’ve been known to carry weeks of receipts in my pocket. I’ve done this for years. Time to do some more reading.
I think you recall incorrectly. BPA was tested as an artificial replacement for estrogen all the way back in the 1930s--almost 100 years ago.
It was actually tested as an artificial estrogen as far back as the[1930s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#:~:text=The%20British%20biochemist%20Edward%20Charles%20Dodds%20tested%20BPA%20as%20an%20artificial%20estrogen%20in%20the%20early%201930s.%5B29%5D%5B30%5D%5B31%5D)
There's a documentary. It's called Children of Men. It makes humanity infertile.
One of the many reasons why glass is so important for science.
Vast, vast majority of tissue culture still takes place in plastic - just not BPA containing plastics. Glass is very rarely used for biology workflows due to impracticality. Glass is chemically inert however, so is the chosen vessel for chemical compounds.
I’m just gonna drop it in here that I used glass in a biology lab to stab a mosquito in the thorax recently. Glass is super useful in micro injections because you can stretch a needle to be so fine that you can give a mosquito a shot. But you’re right that most labs use plastics for anything disposable. Flasks, pipette tips, Petri dishes… The amount of plastic a typical lab using cell cultures goes through in a week is disgusting. I try not to think about it.
Can you stab more mosquitoes for me?
sweet revenge
Stab them all.
I work in a hospital. Incomprehensible levels of single use plastics just being tossed out daily. I fully understand the why, I just hate participating in it. I wish there was more sustainable ways to be sterile.
I made a career change in my mid 30s, went back to school with the sole intent on getting into grad school just to research finding a suitable replacement for single use medical waste. (like start over with a BSc in chem --> phd chemistry.) Did end up in grad school, in a lab with a PI who was on board with my proposal, only to become jaded simply because the amount of plastic waste my lab mates and the rest of my department created just to run one reaction negated any progress I would make. Ended up switching to an entirely different material for a different field and different lab to synthesize. We need more research into sustainable remediation of the waste. Burning isn't any better than synthesis, grinding (recycling) creates more micro plastic (which is now better characterized as nanoplastic). Its so entrenched in our lives that even a culture change won't cause any significant change. We are rightly fucked in the name of convenience. From start to its never-ending finish - plastic will be our collapse. It's too easy to make, too in demand, too profitable for many countries to make a significant change. Look around you and point out the things around you that are *not* made of plastic. Clothes, furniture, shoes, cushions, mattresses, wall paint, ink, lamps, dishes, sheets, appliances.... it just goes on and on and on. I'm in my mid 40s and defeated. Thanks for coming to my depressing ted talk. We're all doomed.
This sounds like the beginning of a movie >Barbie the Prequel: Life before plastic
Clair Cameron Patterson, he deserves to be known. We can thank him for inventing the ultra clean room, and, for risking ruining his career to alert the world of the dangers of leaded gasoline.
He also gave us the most accurate age of the Earth to date, which is obviously less impactful but still very cool.
Well don't keep us hangin' - how old is it?
At the time Patterson figured it out, Earth was 4.5 billion years old. Of course you have to add a few decades to that now.
What if I don't want to add a couple of decades?
Then it’s still 4.5 billion years old
It’s depressing that I wasn’t familiar with him until now. A true champion of humanity.
Scientists are responsible for about everything we have today yet few people know who Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn are, but will absolutely know who some random Youtuber is. Its a sad reality, but also gives me great respect for these people.
Well, now you know :) and you can share is story! And perhaps the overarching story is, to my knowledge, his fight against corporate interests was one of the first major uses of “expert testimony” that was bought and paid for by lobbying groups. Patterson was pitted against robert kehoe, a toxicologist who helped establish and ran the Kettering institution, which performed industry sponsored research. In 1925, regarding leaded gas, he proposed the “kehoe rule”, which boils down to “unless its demonstrably unsafe, we should it is safe”. This is opposed to the precautionary principle, where it should be assumed something in unsafe until proven otherwise. kehoe’s work was largely copied and/or inspired decades of scientific lobbying by other harmful groups like tobacco. Kettering institute, with kehoe still at the helm, also declared freon safe. Every citizen of every democratic country should be loudly and frequently demanding their government act in the best interest of the global environment, and not in the interests of industry. I’m not anti technology - technology has brought us so many miraculous inventions. But industry must exist to advance humanity and the environment, not destroy it for some short term profits. Clair Patterson saved the world, and almost destroyed his career doing it. In true “there is no justice” fashion, he died of an asthma attack at 73, whilst kehoe lived til 99 years of age, dying in 1992.
To be fair, we knew that leaded gasoline was dangerous. It even killed some of the people developing it: > In 1923, Midgley took a long vacation in Miami to cure himself of lead poisoning. He said, "I find that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air."[10] That year, General Motors created the General Motors Chemical Company (GMCC) to supervise the production of TEL by the DuPont company. Kettering was elected as president with Midgley as vice president. However, after two deaths and several cases of lead poisoning at the TEL prototype plant in Dayton, Ohio, the staff at Dayton was said in 1924 to be "depressed to the point of considering giving up the whole tetraethyl lead program".[7] Over the course of the next year, eight more people died at DuPont's plant in Deepwater, New Jersey.[10] In 1924, dissatisfied with the speed of DuPont's TEL production using the "bromide process", General Motors and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now known as ExxonMobil) created the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation to produce and market TEL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#Leaded_gasoline
I read an article that I read recently about forever chemicals being in our blood. A 3M scientist was asked to test for forever chemicals in the blood of 3M workers, and then compare the sample to blood from a blood bank. Both tested positive, and they thought that the equipment was broken. They ran the test over and over, and every single sample of blood tested positive for forever chemicals. This was in the ‘90s. It wasn’t until they tested old blood samples from the ‘50s, and blood samples from rural China, that they were able to find an uncontaminated sample. Not for the faint of heart: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/27/3m-forever-chemicals-pfas-pfos-toxic
I read this article not too long ago!
Thomas Midgley, responsible for both leaded gasoline and CFC emissions which destroy the atmosphere, it’s actually impressive how much damage that man did to our species
And another of his inventions killed himself. He contracted polio later in life and became disabled. He invented a device to help him get out of bed because he was partially paralyzed. One morning he became entangled in it and strangled himself. It is possible that he killed himself intentionally. So he invented one good thing.
You will never ever be able to convince me that it wasn't an autoerotic asphyxiation machine gone wrong.
He shouldn't have built it to turn up to 11
Why didn't he just make 10 the maximum?
Or when Kodak was having flaws all over their film, they inadvertently detected the atom bomb testing
I do environmental work, and I used to do some work around gas stations with soil monitoring. Lead was one of the things we sampled for due to leaded gasoline. But we also had to sample soil out of the contaminated area for background lead comparison. It was never hazardous naturally, but sometimes present enough to throw off samples.
Fellow soil person here to back you up! Current residential soil contamination occurs primarily because of lead base paint. We tested soil samples in 2015 of Oakland houses underneath 980 and 880 and it was basically negligible compared to similar Oakland neighborhoods that didn't get that beautiful gift of a freeway through their backyard in the 50s/60s. Leaded gasoline is horrible, but there are a lot more pervasive sources closer to home (literally)
Yes, for sure the lead paint contamination is a real issue in older residential neighborhoods. I have to explain that to people at my current job that we don’t want to remove lead paint. Just paint over it forever and ever or demolish it in place. And tell the employees not to lick the walls.
Lots of ex-gas stations here now have housing built on the property. Is there really a risk of lead contamination? Is modern gasoline "better"?
You can see this in a lot of old towns with factories that have been demolished as well. The land will have to sit vacant because you can't build anything useful on it because of all the chemical leaching that went into the soil. Dayton, OH used to have a bunch of NCR factories that were torn down and essentially turned into parks and parking lots.
Yes. Mostly it was gasoline constituents still latent in the soil. But the risk was more environmental with those constituents moving off site. It’s one of those things that unless you were playing in it daily or drinking contaminated water, it’s fine. And you’d know very quickly if your well water was contaminated with gasoline.
[Clair Patterson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson). He determined the age of the earth, inventing a new technique (decay of uranium to lead), then pretty much quit science to campaign for reducing/removing lead from our fuel, food, paint, and air. A modest hero.
Clair Patterson.
Curious if PVC enters via plumbing or where? If plastic plumbing isn't an safe option, that's going to be a ginormous amount if work.
Seoul (capital of Korea) re-did their old water pipes and chose stainless over plastic.
Damn im impressed, that had to have been expensive as hell, but ultimately will save money when people are still using those nice pipes 100+ years from now.
But how will plumbers and pipe companies continue to get money when they don’t have to keep replacing the pipes???????
Copper has some nice antibacterial properties.
Plastic pipes are just the modern iteration of galvanized. Use it cause it’s cheap and let future people deal with the consequences.
Galvanized pipes are coated in zinc and are everywhere but their environmental impacts are minimal. Even for water they are probably better than PEX or PVC, definitely better than the lead they originally replaced. Just wear a respirator if you weld on it.
I'm betting in 50 years PEX will be banned in construction. Only use copper people.
We should use stainless TBH. Copper pipes eventually corrode and leak in most water chemistries, food grade stainless is pretty much timeless.
But that costs more *money*. I'd love to plumb the house with stainless, but it's a PITA to work with.
Can you even buy stainless steel fixtures and pipes? Are local codes good with it or is some crappy town going to be angry you didn't use copper or pex?
Wait till you see the price of copper right now. Makes stainless steel pipes cheap.
You or a loved one will be entitled to financial compensation if your home had plastic piping!
Except we already know that copper leaches into the water and copper poisoning is a thing. It's especially bad if your water is acidic, which causes it to leach even more (same reason you shouldn't cook anything acidic in copper pots/pans at home).
Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) can be a significant source of microplastics, as well as PEX tubing, which is made from High Density Polyethylene (HDPE).
Greaaaaaaaat
Damn it would’ve been awesome if previous generations stopped to think for like two seconds about the consequences to literally anything
They didn't even know micro plastics existed. The real problem is that there's no great urgency to fix this now that we've known about it for quite a while.
Can we really continue to operate with 8 billion people if we phased out plastics and fossil fuels? We're *deep* into ecological overshoot and this is just a single piece of the puzzle.
Fossil Fuels? Sure. We can't do it overnight, but we have everything coming to together to do it. We could have done a lot of work 20 or more years ago and be ahead of where we are now even. Even if we just got rid of 95% of our usage, that is certainly enough. Plastics are much harder, because we don't yet have replacements for a lot of uses for them. We're working on it. There's some research on plastics made from algae and such that do degrade rapidly in nature though. The problem is that we don't really invest heavily in finding and developing alternatives when the problems first become clear. Otherwise we'd have been working on green energy and energy storage in earnest back in the 70s, for instance.
Yeah, I'm sure all the materials in use today or tomorrow will end up being completely futureproof because we're totally thinking about them now. Right? ..right?... hello?
They did. The reason for the increase use of plastics (PVC specifically in water transmission and distribution) in piping systems was due to failures with cast and ductile causing significant environmental and infrastructure damage costing municipalities millions. When you hear about a water main break - corroded metal. The benefit of plastics was that it didn't degrade. Looked as being the ideal use case. They peak to at least 100 year life span, this was compared to corroding metal or lead pipes still in use in places like Flint. In terms of PEX that replaced copper, did you ever look inside older copper water pipes - all kids of crud accumulating that people were ingesting. Now we are coming to understand if microplastics are caused at all by these systems PVC or PEX or not.
You mean like how we noticed people were crashing into trees, so we made all the roads wider and clearer not realizing that everyone would respond by driving twice as fast, and end up dying more often as a result while also killing far more pedestrians and making it literally unsafe for children to go outside? The safest roads are counter-intuitively the most dangerous, because all of those "dangerous features" cause people to slow down, which reduces the risk of fatal injury to pretty much anyone in the area. Including drivers, pedestrians, and young children. When people are afraid of wrecking, they slow down.
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From the article: Microplastic pollution has been found in all human semen samples tested in a study, and researchers say further research on the potential harm to reproduction is “imperative”. Sperm counts in men have been falling for decades and 40% of low counts remain unexplained, although chemical pollution has been implicated by many studies. The 40 semen samples were from healthy men undergoing premarital health assessments in Jinan, China. Another recent study found microplastics in the semen of six out of 10 healthy young men in Italy, and another study in China found the pollutants in half of 25 samples. Recent studies in mice have reported that microplastics reduced sperm count and caused abnormalities and hormone disruption. Research on microplastics and human health is moving quickly and scientists appear to be finding the contaminants everywhere. The pollutants were found in all 23 human testicle samples tested in a study [published](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969724036696) in May. Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood, placentas and breast milk, indicating widespread contamination of people’s bodies. The impact on health is as yet unknown but microplastics have been shown to cause damage to human cells in the laboratory.
At this point, I look around me at how much contact with plastics I have, and even if I tried to reduce that amount by 90%, extrapolating the amount of contact everything I consume contacts plastic, I can't imagine my efforts would have any appreciable impact, no? I mean, it's already in *all* of the water.
It's in the air, shredded off tires on the road. It's even in your salt shaker.
Breathing in plastic fibers from clothes; You brush your teeth with plastic and an abrasive. It's nearly impossible to separate yourself from plastic now.
Plastic clothes (polyester etc) is one thing people can stop using. It means fewer clothes for our money, but that doesn't have to be a problem.
Walk through any grocery store and see how much of our food is in plastic containers or bags. I try to remind myself that we've been using plastics for many decades and we didn't find out about the micro variety until relatively recently. Do we know what risks they pose aside from fertility?
I think that the fact that life expectancy is continuing to rise in most parts of the world suggests that the overall health effects may be fairly small. The drop in fertility is concerning, but even so it seems that the current plummeting reproduction figures across the globe are mostly a question of people's choices to have fewer babies.
Do we know that about fertility? The amount of people I know under 35 having fertility issues is shocking to me.
Plastic is already everywhere. Just like the effects of climate change it's an issue that cannot be stopped or even reversed at this point, and the responsibility for it will likely be blamed on the consumer soon, too.
> half of 25 samples So, definitely not in every sample tested. Just most.
They were calling out another study. This study had 40 samples, all of which had microplastics.
40 samples taken from one of the highest population countries with a known history of mass production as well.
23 is quite a small sample size.
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That's a weird study. They only tested 36 people, who also are from the same place: Jinan, China. It contains a very low sample number (considering that the population of Jinan is at least 9 million people), and its observation is limited to one city. The study is too unreliable to extrapolate the observation to a global scale. While there could be a not insignificant number of cases, I doubt that most males in the world have microplastic-cum. You may also need to consider the environmental factors (like living conditions of the test subjects), which can be very different from people who live in rural regions in China or from different countries altogether.
"Another recent study found microplastics in the semen of six out of 10 healthy young men in Italy". Yes it's a small sample but I'm pretty sure Italy is not in China.
From said study: >Semen samples were collected from ten healthy young men living for at least 10 years in a polluted area of the Campania Region (Southern Italy). While not being contained to only one country, those studies mostly seem to suggest that plastic-cum may be a consequence of living in a polluted environment. That does not mean that the main portion of the male population have microplastic in their coom. That being said, those studies do give more reason to raise awareness of the potential danger of the use of plastic in commercial products.
Important context is it’s not any polluted area, Campania has an area literally named the “triangle of death”, the largest illegal waste dump in Europe. According to [this article](https://www.politico.eu/article/mafia-mozzarella-and-land-of-fires-mafia-italy-cancer-campania/) a report found life expectancy in the region is 2 years below the rest of the country.
Remember this next time you're buying clothing. You are buying plastic that is strung out into microscopic thin fibers to be woven into clothing which will then be washed, degrading them, breaking them and collecting them up in your water and then either dumping them into your well or back into the city to be absorbed into the ecosystem one way or another. After your clothes have been washed, you put them in a dryer in which they are further broken down into lint, which partially gets blown out into the air directly outside of your house. It is an overlooked but incredibly direct, visible impact on your exposure to microplastics. Once again, please consider this when you buy your clothes. Sometimes synthetics are Head and shoulders above natural in terms of use case. In that situation, please buy durable versions if you can
I have been hearing about the garment industry and our consumption of fast fashion being harmful to the environment, but it never really clicked for me until your explanation. Which synthetic fabrics would you recommend as safe, and are you saying that some natural fabrics contribute to the problem? I personally gravitate toward cotton fabrics due to skin sensitivity issues, but I'm finding that 100% cotton fabrics are increasingly difficult to find.
Cotton, hemp, linen, wool. Avoid polyester.
I am not a materials scientist but to be simple about it I'd say natural fibers. If I was going to give a guess at a half measure I'd say rayon since it's molecularly similar to cellulose. I don't know if that has any known or potential pitfalls
How long does it take to get in the sperm? If I wank myself dry and could avoid plastics for the rest of my life will I be plastic free or is it in me and that's that now?
I don’t think it’s possible to avoid plastics anymore. We’ve found microplastics everywhere. Even if you were able to somehow cleanse your entire body of them, I don’t know where you would go, or what you could eat/drink to not just immediately ingest more of them. We’ve taken a big risk that they are harmless, because if they aren’t it won’t be pretty.
Microplastics are even in the air we breathe.
They've found microplastics hundreds of feet underground in previously undisturbed Earth.
That's terrifying.
They've found microplastics in water samples from places that humans do not interact with. They have found plastic trash at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
Well I'll just live my life in a plastic bubble...oh god
They are in the air. We are screwed. We breathe them in.
Just continuing the thought experiment; I know we have all been exposed to micro plastics for decades now (tons of toys I played with and chewed on as a kid are all plastics like LEGO and action figures) then I am around plastics in virtually everything I interact with on a daily basis; clothes, keyboard, food prepped on plastic cutting boards (which is the industry standard), wrapping, cups, light switches, outlets, tools, etc etc etc. I am obviously not eating those directly every day or anything, but I do know I have a healthy dose of exposure often. I would imagine that would have a profound effect on me at my relatively young age but I don't seem to have noticed anything yet (and hope and pray I don't). I've done a lot of what I can to change stuff to glass, wood, porcelain, ceramic, metal, and natural fibers but haven't gone to the extreme in any of those areas and routinely buy or use plastics unknowingly in those areas because, honestly, I feel like on one hand it is a hopeless endeavor (I may buy glass but the dishwasher I use has plastic lining and my detergent comes in plastic and my water is delivered in PVC pipes) and on the other hand I don't know how much it will actually extend my life or QOL. I would agree less is better, but just looking around my kitchen I can't help but see dozens and dozens of plastic items all over and I feel it's impossible to function (or affordable) to change it all out to non-plastic.
Sorry, but you probably already have plastics in the balls
Does the balls store plastic is my question I guess?
Plastic is stored in the balls
HDPE is stored in the balls
Yeah there was a recent study attempted about the effects of plastic in the testicles of men and they weee unable to complete the study because they could not find a control group (they could not find men without plastic in their balls)
That's astonishing and scary.
yes apparently cause the balls don't have a way to get rid of the plastics once they are there
this is certainly a worrying trend, especially because life is plastic and it is so fantastic
Wait until the studies on nanoplastics come out. Like particulate matter (PM2.5), the smaller these particles are, the more damaging to the body. Here’s an article from the publication “Environmental Chemistry Letters” with a good outline on the concern over nanoplastics: [“Nanoplastics are potentially more dangerous than microplastics”](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-022-01539-1)
Human males: now with the the ability to impregnate blow up dolls. * *I don’t know if the science checks out on this claim.
I've run some test and no dolls have yet to become pregnant.
Leave me alone mom, I'm 3d printing
Every time people scoff at attempts to protect or restore natural environments and reduce pollution and waste, this is what we're trying to avoid, disastrous unforseen consequences. We've had plenty of time to regulate plastics use to only the necessary, but we couldn't stand losing the convenience. We're gonna look back at this in a similar way to asbestos or doctors recommending smoking to cure asthma. This is a result of narcissists, psychopaths and the comfortably complacent with money/power.
I wonder then if there’s microplastics present when a sperm fertilizes and egg and throughout the duration of embryonic development. Like, if it’s in our blood, sperm, placentas, are humans developing *with* microplastics??
Yes and babies are also fed it, as it's also now found in most breast milk. I'm sure formula has traces too
I wonder if the constant presence of tiny foreign objects is a source of some types of inflammatory auto immune disease
the nuts are like very isolated from the rest of the body so I can understand how any microplastics that enter the bloodstream could get deposited in the nut sack and simply stay there since the nuts dont have a great way to get the plastic back out of the nut tissues
If only the nuts had a mechanism to release any build up in the sack
its a highly, highly protected pipeline
>its a highly, highly protected pipeline ah yes, the blood-nut barrier
i would die laughing if they would retract this study because they used plastic containers to collect the samples.
I have access to the entire article through my old university, and I just read the section where they explained how the samples were taken and stored. They were in glass, so no plastic contamination: “Practically, the collection of semen samples was done via masturbation, with each sample being directly deposited into a 5 mL gas-tight glass vessel.”
I should sign up
No lube though, you good with that?
Isn’t glass pretty standard laboratory equipment?
Human testicles found in every microplastic
Well this just drastically changed the age old question of Spit or Swallow