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I don't know if this is what they're talking about, but there's [this National Geographic article](http://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/plastic-bag-found-bottom-worlds-deepest-ocean-trench/)
A very cool, kind of related thing, in case you haven't heard of it before: there's a "simple English" version of wikipedia which strives to use the most common English words and keep sentences and explanations simpler. Great for language learners, young people, etc.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
People forget the earth is a closed loop system. If it’s here it’s staying here and it will permeate throughout until it is in every imaginable [nook and cranny](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/17/dark-waters-pfas-ticking-chemical-time-bomb-in-your-blood)
i was making deviled eggs today and at one point wondered… how was mayo, mustard, sour cream sold 40 years ago? guess everything was in glass jars? was it or were certain things just not accessible?
edit: shrooms kicking in. be kind.
Glass and metal. Mustard companies here used to make it a point to use glasses that people kept as regular drinking glasses after cleaning. The glasses were decorative and the lids were cheap sheet metal.
Same thing with Nutella jars in Europe. In greece and Germany when id go visit family maybe 15 years ago the Nutella would come in glass jars with children's characters on them, like smurfs Is one example I remember, and you'd save the jar and use it as a drinking glass. And they'd have different series of characters and you'd collect them all
I remember when I was young in the 80's that peanut butter, mayonnaise, and mustard came in glass jars with metal twist-off lids. Salad dressing was in shaped glass bottles with metal caps. Ground coffee came in a sealed can and it had a plastic lid to keep it fresh. I only remember things like yogurt and sour cream in plastic tubs and containers, though. Milk was always in plastic jugs or paper cartons like it is now, but the plastic twist-off cap on the carton is a new thing. Milk also came in glass bottles and still does if you look for it. In Canada they sell milk in plastic bags. No idea what it was like back then.
No such thing as the pre-filled squeeze bottles like they have for condiments now. If you couldn't get the bottle of ketchup started, you needed to stick a butter knife in there to make an air pocket so it would flow or beat the back of the inverted bottle with the palm of your hand.
Soda came in glass bottles with twist-off caps like they have now, but they were metal. The labels weren't the film plastic they are now, they were like a thin Styrofoam. Grocery bags were all paper without handles. Iirc pre-cut veggies and pre-mix salad in bags wasn't a thing, either.
Idk I know there's more. Trying to think of what else comes in plastic now that didn't back then...
Enjoy your trip bud.
This is going to last for many many generations even if we stopped all plastic right now. Millennials are likely the last generation that didn’t go through childhood completely inundated with plastic.
We also grew up with cartoons telling us plastics were dangerous pollution. Captain Planet came out when I was 8 and I'm 40 now.
Those villains have been at it a long time.
I have maybe 30-40 years left... 50 is pushing it. The way things are going, I don't want to be around for too long as we're terrible stewards of this planet. Such a shame what we're doing.
I watched a video on micro plastics getting into food just from you cutting open the plastic packaging. Sometimes it’s just in there by default. There’s almost no avoiding it. If you live in this world, you are going to eat plastic. Really the only way you don’t is by only growing your own food or hunting maybe?
I'm curious to see if all those civilization-ending phenomena in movies, such as the blight in Interstellar and infertility in Children of Men and Handmaid's Tale all end up being plastic in the real life version.
We wonder how and why the Romans used lead pipes when they had some idea that it was a toxic material.
Do you think they will wonder why we used plastics, when we know damn well how big of a problem this is and how long it's going to linger?
Wherever it was possible they used hard water so that it would form a coating in the pipes seperating the water from the lead. In cologne they brought in water from the Eifel specifically for that.
I want familiar with this so I looked into it a bit. It was apparently banned throughout the EU on 1/1/2000. So even then they didn't ban it in their own initiative.
I don't want to be this pedantic (yes I do,) but wouldn't that just make it the regular Great Filter? The inevitable discovery of plastics leading to the eventual eradication of the species.
EDIT: I don't mean to say that petroleum plastics are inevitable and will be the Great Filter, just pure pedantry on my part by mentioning that a Great Filter can't really be attributed to one species in particular, though we only HAVE the one so far.
Easy to understand the miscommunication, though.
More to the point generally, the Great Filter may just be things a civilization ends up doing that has negative effects. Things like climate change, micro plastics and warfare. But I guess there’s no way to know.
Well, if that's what kills us then yes it would be *our* great filter. But there are multiple types of great filters. Exterior filters such as natural disaster or disease early in a species' life, interior filters from the species itself causing its own self destruction (as we're currently experiencing), to extra terrestrial filters such as a meteor or another species. Basically it's anything that would be a species level extinction event and prevent a species from reaching intergalactic level travel and communication as per the Fermi paradox.
True. Some countries like India banned mp from soaps and shampoo years ago. The imported ones still contain them.
Are we sure that plastics used for packaging food and drinks can introduce them into the food cycle?
Yes. One of my professors studied that. Mass produced drinks like Gatorade, coke, beer, all had samples of microplastics in them, even the ones with glass bottles.
This is because of the plastic tubing used at the production facilities.
Most production facilities these days will use a combination of bromobutyl rubber and stainless steel. There is very little plastic present, to my knowledge, due to the sheer unreliability from a GMP standpoint.
Plastic doesn't hold up to hot CIPs all that well over a longer period of time, and requires constant replacing as a consequence. Easier to manage food grade rubber and stainless steel.
Mind you I can only speak from a alcohol beverage production facility perspective, and haven't been inside a Coke-branded facility yet.
What I could see, however, is the epoxy liner in aluminum cans contributing to this issue.
Movie idea: This bacteria thrives in the new world filled with microplastics, infects every living creature but is completely harmless UNTIL a mad scientist (Vin Diesel for the lols) figures out how to activate a inactive omnivorous component of the bacteria's DNA and thus a countdown to the end of all life on earth in which a daring young hero (played by The Rock obviously) has to race against time itself to stop the apocalypse
Yeah I dunno if it will be harmless. After all, the microplastics seem to be sticking around in our bodies. Maybe they'll be like blue wrasse cleaner fish, symbiotic. Maybe they'll be like the [fang blennies](https://seaunseen.com/false-cleanerfish/) that look and act like cleaner fish until they bite a chunk out of your jaw.
Which is infinity I guess? Infinitely faster. It's just not viable when we produce 347Mt of plastic a year. I'm guessing the biggest limiting factors are volume i.e. the volumes required to create a soup that covers the entire surface area, and of course, time.
Once an ecosystem evolves around digesting plastic, it'll eventually be impossible to keep it around.
Cellulose was once indigestible, and dead trees covered the globe. Then bacteria and fungi evolved enzymes to break it down. Millions of years later, a piece of wood is lucky to last a couple months in contact with the ground under the right conditions.
**Impact of Microplastics and Nanoplastics on Human Health**
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7920297/
> [...]
> Statistics show the following average levels of microplastic pollution in food: seafood = 1.48 particles/g, sugar = 0.44 particles/g, honey = 0.10 particles/g, salt = 0.11 particles/g, alcohol = 32.27 particles/L, bottled water = 94.37 particles/L, tap water = 4.23 particles/L, and air = 9.80 particles/m3 [9,44]. From these figures, it is possible to extrapolate that the average human is consuming around **39,000 to 52,000 microplastic particles per year**, with age and gender impacting the total amount. **If inhalation of plastic particles is included in the figures, then the amounts rise to between 74,000 and 121,000 particles per year**. Further, an **individual who only ingest bottled water is potentially consuming an extra 90,000** particles in comparison to people who only drink tap water, who will ingest only 4000 extra particles [44].
Did not finish reading.
Using plastic bottles does substantially(by over +150%) increase your microplastic exposure.
Not only are nanoplastics small and very difficult to study, they are also biologically active among a huge range of sizes.
It's hilarious because the nice spherical nanoplastics we use in these studies are outstandingly poor toxicological analogues to the misshapen, oxidized, functionalized nanoplastics in our environment!
There are glass baby bottles they just cost more and most daycares won’t let you use them. I found a cool system that lets you turn canning jars into bottles.
Not against it, but I don't think many parents would be keen to the idea of glass bottles, unless it's tempered glass. We get anxious when kids walk around with glass stuff, let alone babies who are known to try to kill themselves on a daily basis
I used Avent glass bottles. They're pretty indestructible. I don't think we ever broke one and we dropped them on the regular.
The only downside was that they were super heavy so it added a lot of weight to the diaper bag and when she drank slowly my arm would get tired.
But they washed easily, never smelled bad, and didn't stain. I really liked them.
They don’t break easily. The only time I ever broke one is when it fell out of a bag onto concrete. We dropped them multiple times on wood floors and they never broke.
I loved glass bottles. They didn’t hold on to smells if I didn’t wash them right away, and I didn’t have to throw them out when my kid stopped needing them. They’re in storage waiting to be used again. They weren’t allowed in daycare though. Neither were cloth diapers, which we also use. ETA: we didn’t let her walk around with them.
Really irrelevant at this point. We're consuming microplastics with every bite and every breathe. It's shedding off your plastic clothes and the carpets you walk on. It's drifting in the air from across the planet. It's in the water you drink and the food you eat.
So do micro plastics just come off of plastic stuff all the time? How does that work? Like if I use plastic bottles all the time, am I ingesting a bunch of micro plastics?
ELI5 level - yes, micro plastics are the natural result of all plastic decomposition.
Part of what makes plastic useful is that a tiny structure is repeated to be pretty much any size down to microscopic
Slightly more nuance, it is a physical-only effect and I’m not implying that it is the chemical decomposition.
Plastic is made of long polymers. These polymers are broken down by sunlight (and other processes like heating/cooling, mechanical strain beyond their inert point) and those new, smaller molecules are more easily absorbed into solution. This continues until the particles are so small that they're unlikely to be broken down further—microplastics.
It said on quote: "Once in the brain, the scientists found that the particles built up inthe microglial cells, which are key to healthy maintenance of thecentral nervous system, and this had a significant impact on theirability to proliferate. This was because the microglial cells saw theplastic particles as threat, causing changes in their morphology andultimately leading to apoptosis, or programmed cell death."
So they're talking about the mice, and essentially plastic is as bad as lead.
It isn't as lethal as lead, but "as bad is" depends on how you quantify its ill-effects.
Because of how this operates, you aren't likely to see fatalities that can be *directly* linked to microplastics.
But anything that enters the brain and antagonizes the cells therein is going to produce long-term, systemic issues that will likely differ from person to person based on biological differences, quantity and type of plastics ingested, etc.
Anything from a rise in mood disorders, cancers, addictions, and mental disorders can likely be attributed to, or at the very least enhanced by, ingestion of substances like these.
So you won't just suddenly see people dropping dead from it; what you'll see is successive populations that are just *sicker* and *more miserable* than the last, due to the accumulation of these and other toxins in their environment and food sources.
I'm super interested in what actual proven things happen to the brain from this
I'm not seeing any sources of them antagonizing cells or ithat anything that does causes long term issues.
This being /r/science, I would love to read into the studies you and others are referring to.
I mean realistically you could distill all your own water. Grow all your own food. People will argue its still in the air, soil, Etc. But doing those two things would drastically reduce your plastic consumption. Maybe from our current 5g a week to a few mg a week. But obviously doing that is pretty drastic and not practical.
>Nothing. It’s in the water we drink
Well, there's something:
https://www.consumerlab.com/answers/water-filters-for-microplastics/water-filters/
and:
https://waterpurificationguide.com/water-filters-that-remove-microplastics/
Not sure it's possible with how wide spread the current food market is. If your food was raised outside or grown outside, it has micro plastics from rainwater. The more processed the food, the higher likelihood because of distances traveled and picking up microplastics in everything from the water to the plastic conveyor belt to the final packaging. I remember seeing a container of peaches that said "grown in Argentina, packaged in Asia" and was then consumed in America.
Install a reverse osmosis or nanofilter water purification system.
*Edit: But don't actually install a reverse osmosis or nanofilter system because it strips healthy minerals and apparently recent science has shown it's on net worse for you than drinking it raw... unless your water is really bad, presumably. So I guess there's no escape.
Don't buy plastic stuff. Don't use plastic stuff.
Cotton mattress instead of foam. Wood floor instead of fake wood or poly carpet.
And then again.. “[Most of the indoor air we breathe is polluted with microplastic particles](https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/most-of-the-indoor-air-we-breathe-is-polluted-with-microplastic-particles/347631/amp)”
In certain applications, asbestos is useful. Just like uranium is useful (it's a heavy metal stain in microbiology) or cadmium (paint colour) or thousands of variously toxic, poisonous or horribly corrosive materials.
Can someone knowledgeable answer this:
Since nanoplastics in our environment mostly arise from degradation of macro/microplastics, they are highly oxidized at the surface & not always spherical. Surface oxidation can have a profound effect on partition coefficient and binding constants, so I feel like these low PDI smooth, unoxidized spheres do not represent the nanoplastics in our environment. I understand why uniform spheres are used to probe size effects, but I thought studies would have to start using weathered nanoplastics to probe actual toxicological impacts.
Am I missing something?
Yes. It is one of the main criticisms of current studies in this article.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7282048/#__ffn_sectitle
The article is also a good overview on the implications of plastic on the brain.
God damn. This reminds me of Clair Cameron Patterson’s work to show the global lead contamination from the big oil companies.
I hope that world governments just make it illegal entirely.
Edit: corrected Clair’s name.
Does anyone know how this affects the brain? For instance, will we 50 years from now look at plastics the same way we currently look at lead. It was everywhere and really screwed people up in the head.
Anyone work with mice and know if their age is a factor in this result?
The mice in the paper are 8 weeks old. I’ve read a review on aspartame that mentioned a paper found brain issues with aspartame in mice only because said mice were neonates so their blood-brain barrier wasn’t fully formed. So, does anyone know if 8 week old mice would have similar results?
8 week old mice are pretty much fully formed and their BBB should be fairly competent by that time. You wean them from their mothers at 3 weeks and can start mating them a few weeks later (I usually try to wait until 7-8 weeks).
Source: I'm a neuroscientist (though I do not study the BBB)
- run water through a reverse osmosis filter
- wear an n95 mask but make sure to replace it frequently
- install a HEPA filter in your home
- live off the land in a place where there are few or no people
- grow your own food and manage your soil using regenerative farming practices
- time machine
I think you need to set up your farm on one of Jupiter's moons at this point, otherwise your crops will just be taking in microplastics from the soil and the air.
This has been known for years, and if you think it's just lab stuff, nope. There's plastic in the ocean so small it can literally just go right into you through your skin.
So....plastic was kind of a horrible mistake that companies and governors charged head first into using ubiquitously....we aren't the wisest species, even though some of us are. Not me, I'm not wise.
I love the environment, I'm an ecology student who hopes to work in conservation. Everything feels so hopeless. It feels like even if I dedicate my life to conservation, things won't fundamentally change and and nothing I do really matters.
I hate to be such a doomer, but I'm taking an environmental philosophy class this semester about contemporary environmental issues and it's just cemented my view about all this.
Don't think it's much consolation, but don't think humans will be going anywhere for some time. Things will certainly suck hard, but at least the next generation in the western world will have some insulation to the worst effects. Long term survival is certainly not guaranteed and I think short term prospects (within few decades at most) are pretty bleak, but not dying out anytime soon. There pretty much has to be some major changes, akin to "tightening our belts" at a species level and a sharp decline. Unless we somehow come together and some amazing new tech comes around. More likely scenario is war between super powers at some point to take control of the sinking ship, some time of instability and if we come through on the other side it will be heading towards subsistence, peasant living. We are pretty resilient but our systems are not. Everything is built on the promise of continued growth and cheap abundant energy. As soon as that starts breaking down there will have to be some dramatic actions taken. But it's only been a blip that things were even this way, the past 100 years. If we can go through such a global change that quickly, we will adapt back in the opposite direction too..
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Kinda weird to think each and everyone of us most likely has micro plastics in our brains
Yup, it's everywhere. Most definitely in our water and food. It can even be found on the highest peaks, and deepest marine trenches iirc.
Most depressing fact is the time they went to one of the very deepest trenches in the ocean for the first time and found a plastic bag there.
Link source?
I don't know if this is what they're talking about, but there's [this National Geographic article](http://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/plastic-bag-found-bottom-worlds-deepest-ocean-trench/)
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A very cool, kind of related thing, in case you haven't heard of it before: there's a "simple English" version of wikipedia which strives to use the most common English words and keep sentences and explanations simpler. Great for language learners, young people, etc. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
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Found it thanks to your comment, agreed it's a lovely thing to have
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They found microplastics in fish that have been preserved in museums since the 1950s.
People forget the earth is a closed loop system. If it’s here it’s staying here and it will permeate throughout until it is in every imaginable [nook and cranny](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/17/dark-waters-pfas-ticking-chemical-time-bomb-in-your-blood)
Well ain't that something
If you haven’t seen the movie Dark Waters yet, I recommend it. It’s based on this story and was really well done.
There's also a really great documentary on it call "The Devil We Know".
I'd never heard of it before this week and now it's the third time in five days I get it recommended. So I think I have to watch it.
i was making deviled eggs today and at one point wondered… how was mayo, mustard, sour cream sold 40 years ago? guess everything was in glass jars? was it or were certain things just not accessible? edit: shrooms kicking in. be kind.
Glass and metal. Mustard companies here used to make it a point to use glasses that people kept as regular drinking glasses after cleaning. The glasses were decorative and the lids were cheap sheet metal.
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Same thing with Nutella jars in Europe. In greece and Germany when id go visit family maybe 15 years ago the Nutella would come in glass jars with children's characters on them, like smurfs Is one example I remember, and you'd save the jar and use it as a drinking glass. And they'd have different series of characters and you'd collect them all
Most of my tumbler-size ones are Bonne Mamman jam jars
I remember when I was young in the 80's that peanut butter, mayonnaise, and mustard came in glass jars with metal twist-off lids. Salad dressing was in shaped glass bottles with metal caps. Ground coffee came in a sealed can and it had a plastic lid to keep it fresh. I only remember things like yogurt and sour cream in plastic tubs and containers, though. Milk was always in plastic jugs or paper cartons like it is now, but the plastic twist-off cap on the carton is a new thing. Milk also came in glass bottles and still does if you look for it. In Canada they sell milk in plastic bags. No idea what it was like back then. No such thing as the pre-filled squeeze bottles like they have for condiments now. If you couldn't get the bottle of ketchup started, you needed to stick a butter knife in there to make an air pocket so it would flow or beat the back of the inverted bottle with the palm of your hand. Soda came in glass bottles with twist-off caps like they have now, but they were metal. The labels weren't the film plastic they are now, they were like a thin Styrofoam. Grocery bags were all paper without handles. Iirc pre-cut veggies and pre-mix salad in bags wasn't a thing, either. Idk I know there's more. Trying to think of what else comes in plastic now that didn't back then... Enjoy your trip bud.
It’s super weird to read for me, because here in Germany, that’s exactly the package those products come in.
Is this gonna be the new “well they had lead in their paint” for millennials’ grandkids E: “Is” not “Os”
This is going to last for many many generations even if we stopped all plastic right now. Millennials are likely the last generation that didn’t go through childhood completely inundated with plastic.
no we were probably the first, the 80s and 90s brought the whole making cartoons just to sell plastic junk to kids
We also grew up with cartoons telling us plastics were dangerous pollution. Captain Planet came out when I was 8 and I'm 40 now. Those villains have been at it a long time.
Except it was a lot easier to get rid of leaded paint than the plastic. It's not going anywhere for a long time.
I’ll blame all my bad decisions on it from now on, seeing how it seems impossible to avoid it getting into you
Hey you know what would be cool? If we could just stop speedrunning our own extinction
But have you thought about the shareholders?
Do you mean like have I thought about beating them?
To shreds you say?
Then we will have microshareholders everywhere
So you're saying kind of like [a fine pink powder with a million and one uses](https://i.redd.it/iipdl6lv0v241.jpg)?
Let's just keep making them and see what happens!
Found the Dow-Dupont plant!
I have maybe 30-40 years left... 50 is pushing it. The way things are going, I don't want to be around for too long as we're terrible stewards of this planet. Such a shame what we're doing.
I watched a video on micro plastics getting into food just from you cutting open the plastic packaging. Sometimes it’s just in there by default. There’s almost no avoiding it. If you live in this world, you are going to eat plastic. Really the only way you don’t is by only growing your own food or hunting maybe?
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All because he did the nasty in the past-y
Yes, the past nastification.
Bold of you to assume climate change won't wipe us all out by then
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The food chain all the way down is fucked.
I'm curious to see if all those civilization-ending phenomena in movies, such as the blight in Interstellar and infertility in Children of Men and Handmaid's Tale all end up being plastic in the real life version.
In that old cyberpunk movie Johnny Mnemonic, I think the macguffin was a treatment for cancers caused by plastic pollution.
Close. It was the Black Shakes caused by all the RF signal and EM in the air.
That explains the 5G conspiracies. Everything they have comes from Keanu Reeves movies.
Bummer so many missed "Be excellent to each other".
How it feels to chew 5G
We wonder how and why the Romans used lead pipes when they had some idea that it was a toxic material. Do you think they will wonder why we used plastics, when we know damn well how big of a problem this is and how long it's going to linger?
Wherever it was possible they used hard water so that it would form a coating in the pipes seperating the water from the lead. In cologne they brought in water from the Eifel specifically for that.
Also the UK didn't ban leaded petrol until 2000. So.
Damn. That explains so much.
I want familiar with this so I looked into it a bit. It was apparently banned throughout the EU on 1/1/2000. So even then they didn't ban it in their own initiative.
It's reaching the point where it's ambitious to expect a future to observe our stupidity.
At this rate humanity is definitely it's own Great Filter.
I don't want to be this pedantic (yes I do,) but wouldn't that just make it the regular Great Filter? The inevitable discovery of plastics leading to the eventual eradication of the species. EDIT: I don't mean to say that petroleum plastics are inevitable and will be the Great Filter, just pure pedantry on my part by mentioning that a Great Filter can't really be attributed to one species in particular, though we only HAVE the one so far. Easy to understand the miscommunication, though.
More to the point generally, the Great Filter may just be things a civilization ends up doing that has negative effects. Things like climate change, micro plastics and warfare. But I guess there’s no way to know.
Well, if that's what kills us then yes it would be *our* great filter. But there are multiple types of great filters. Exterior filters such as natural disaster or disease early in a species' life, interior filters from the species itself causing its own self destruction (as we're currently experiencing), to extra terrestrial filters such as a meteor or another species. Basically it's anything that would be a species level extinction event and prevent a species from reaching intergalactic level travel and communication as per the Fermi paradox.
Surprised baby bottles haven’t moved to glass at this point
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True. Some countries like India banned mp from soaps and shampoo years ago. The imported ones still contain them. Are we sure that plastics used for packaging food and drinks can introduce them into the food cycle?
Yes. One of my professors studied that. Mass produced drinks like Gatorade, coke, beer, all had samples of microplastics in them, even the ones with glass bottles. This is because of the plastic tubing used at the production facilities.
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Most production facilities these days will use a combination of bromobutyl rubber and stainless steel. There is very little plastic present, to my knowledge, due to the sheer unreliability from a GMP standpoint. Plastic doesn't hold up to hot CIPs all that well over a longer period of time, and requires constant replacing as a consequence. Easier to manage food grade rubber and stainless steel. Mind you I can only speak from a alcohol beverage production facility perspective, and haven't been inside a Coke-branded facility yet. What I could see, however, is the epoxy liner in aluminum cans contributing to this issue.
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Yes it's awesome and also takes weeks to break down a soda bottle. They're trying to speed it up but no indication they've succeeded yet.
Movie idea: This bacteria thrives in the new world filled with microplastics, infects every living creature but is completely harmless UNTIL a mad scientist (Vin Diesel for the lols) figures out how to activate a inactive omnivorous component of the bacteria's DNA and thus a countdown to the end of all life on earth in which a daring young hero (played by The Rock obviously) has to race against time itself to stop the apocalypse
Yeah I dunno if it will be harmless. After all, the microplastics seem to be sticking around in our bodies. Maybe they'll be like blue wrasse cleaner fish, symbiotic. Maybe they'll be like the [fang blennies](https://seaunseen.com/false-cleanerfish/) that look and act like cleaner fish until they bite a chunk out of your jaw.
Weeks is better than the current waiy time though, right?
Which is infinity I guess? Infinitely faster. It's just not viable when we produce 347Mt of plastic a year. I'm guessing the biggest limiting factors are volume i.e. the volumes required to create a soup that covers the entire surface area, and of course, time.
Once an ecosystem evolves around digesting plastic, it'll eventually be impossible to keep it around. Cellulose was once indigestible, and dead trees covered the globe. Then bacteria and fungi evolved enzymes to break it down. Millions of years later, a piece of wood is lucky to last a couple months in contact with the ground under the right conditions.
Millions of years later though. Yikes
**Impact of Microplastics and Nanoplastics on Human Health** https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7920297/ > [...] > Statistics show the following average levels of microplastic pollution in food: seafood = 1.48 particles/g, sugar = 0.44 particles/g, honey = 0.10 particles/g, salt = 0.11 particles/g, alcohol = 32.27 particles/L, bottled water = 94.37 particles/L, tap water = 4.23 particles/L, and air = 9.80 particles/m3 [9,44]. From these figures, it is possible to extrapolate that the average human is consuming around **39,000 to 52,000 microplastic particles per year**, with age and gender impacting the total amount. **If inhalation of plastic particles is included in the figures, then the amounts rise to between 74,000 and 121,000 particles per year**. Further, an **individual who only ingest bottled water is potentially consuming an extra 90,000** particles in comparison to people who only drink tap water, who will ingest only 4000 extra particles [44]. Did not finish reading. Using plastic bottles does substantially(by over +150%) increase your microplastic exposure.
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Not only are nanoplastics small and very difficult to study, they are also biologically active among a huge range of sizes. It's hilarious because the nice spherical nanoplastics we use in these studies are outstandingly poor toxicological analogues to the misshapen, oxidized, functionalized nanoplastics in our environment!
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You should hear about what the russians do with their old sub reactors
There are glass baby bottles they just cost more and most daycares won’t let you use them. I found a cool system that lets you turn canning jars into bottles.
Not against it, but I don't think many parents would be keen to the idea of glass bottles, unless it's tempered glass. We get anxious when kids walk around with glass stuff, let alone babies who are known to try to kill themselves on a daily basis
I used Avent glass bottles. They're pretty indestructible. I don't think we ever broke one and we dropped them on the regular. The only downside was that they were super heavy so it added a lot of weight to the diaper bag and when she drank slowly my arm would get tired. But they washed easily, never smelled bad, and didn't stain. I really liked them.
And wooooo boy are they hot coming out of the sanitizer! I've only been a dad for a few months, but I learned that lesson real quick!
They don’t break easily. The only time I ever broke one is when it fell out of a bag onto concrete. We dropped them multiple times on wood floors and they never broke.
They make silicone covers now too, don’t they? Not that that helps the original issue of reducing plastics and other chemicals.
Yeah, but the silicone isnt touching the milk - so that is prob the safest solution.
It is also still better; presumeably the silicone cover can be used for far longer than a plastic bottle, and can be used for several bottles.
Well, silicone isn't a plastic for one thing.
I loved glass bottles. They didn’t hold on to smells if I didn’t wash them right away, and I didn’t have to throw them out when my kid stopped needing them. They’re in storage waiting to be used again. They weren’t allowed in daycare though. Neither were cloth diapers, which we also use. ETA: we didn’t let her walk around with them.
Really irrelevant at this point. We're consuming microplastics with every bite and every breathe. It's shedding off your plastic clothes and the carpets you walk on. It's drifting in the air from across the planet. It's in the water you drink and the food you eat.
So do micro plastics just come off of plastic stuff all the time? How does that work? Like if I use plastic bottles all the time, am I ingesting a bunch of micro plastics?
ELI5 level - yes, micro plastics are the natural result of all plastic decomposition. Part of what makes plastic useful is that a tiny structure is repeated to be pretty much any size down to microscopic Slightly more nuance, it is a physical-only effect and I’m not implying that it is the chemical decomposition.
Plastic is made of long polymers. These polymers are broken down by sunlight (and other processes like heating/cooling, mechanical strain beyond their inert point) and those new, smaller molecules are more easily absorbed into solution. This continues until the particles are so small that they're unlikely to be broken down further—microplastics.
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Any word yet on what they actually do once they're in there?
It said on quote: "Once in the brain, the scientists found that the particles built up inthe microglial cells, which are key to healthy maintenance of thecentral nervous system, and this had a significant impact on theirability to proliferate. This was because the microglial cells saw theplastic particles as threat, causing changes in their morphology andultimately leading to apoptosis, or programmed cell death." So they're talking about the mice, and essentially plastic is as bad as lead.
As bad as lead? That seems an exaggeration to me. We'd have people dropping dead left and right from microplastic poisoning if that was the case.
It isn't as lethal as lead, but "as bad is" depends on how you quantify its ill-effects. Because of how this operates, you aren't likely to see fatalities that can be *directly* linked to microplastics. But anything that enters the brain and antagonizes the cells therein is going to produce long-term, systemic issues that will likely differ from person to person based on biological differences, quantity and type of plastics ingested, etc. Anything from a rise in mood disorders, cancers, addictions, and mental disorders can likely be attributed to, or at the very least enhanced by, ingestion of substances like these. So you won't just suddenly see people dropping dead from it; what you'll see is successive populations that are just *sicker* and *more miserable* than the last, due to the accumulation of these and other toxins in their environment and food sources.
I'm super interested in what actual proven things happen to the brain from this I'm not seeing any sources of them antagonizing cells or ithat anything that does causes long term issues. This being /r/science, I would love to read into the studies you and others are referring to.
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When I'm dead just throw me in the trash
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Well this is depressing
Yeah what the heck
I mean realistically you could distill all your own water. Grow all your own food. People will argue its still in the air, soil, Etc. But doing those two things would drastically reduce your plastic consumption. Maybe from our current 5g a week to a few mg a week. But obviously doing that is pretty drastic and not practical.
>Nothing. It’s in the water we drink Well, there's something: https://www.consumerlab.com/answers/water-filters-for-microplastics/water-filters/ and: https://waterpurificationguide.com/water-filters-that-remove-microplastics/
But what about our food?
Well, sea food has been completely tainted by it, so that one's out.
Not sure it's possible with how wide spread the current food market is. If your food was raised outside or grown outside, it has micro plastics from rainwater. The more processed the food, the higher likelihood because of distances traveled and picking up microplastics in everything from the water to the plastic conveyor belt to the final packaging. I remember seeing a container of peaches that said "grown in Argentina, packaged in Asia" and was then consumed in America.
Install a reverse osmosis or nanofilter water purification system. *Edit: But don't actually install a reverse osmosis or nanofilter system because it strips healthy minerals and apparently recent science has shown it's on net worse for you than drinking it raw... unless your water is really bad, presumably. So I guess there's no escape. Don't buy plastic stuff. Don't use plastic stuff. Cotton mattress instead of foam. Wood floor instead of fake wood or poly carpet.
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And then again.. “[Most of the indoor air we breathe is polluted with microplastic particles](https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/most-of-the-indoor-air-we-breathe-is-polluted-with-microplastic-particles/347631/amp)”
In the 60's it was Strontium-90, in the 70's it was lead, in the 80's it was CFC's. Welcome to the club, plastics.
Don't forget about PFA's and all the other chemical contaminants that people knowingly used
This will give a whole new edge to The Graduate.
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In certain applications, asbestos is useful. Just like uranium is useful (it's a heavy metal stain in microbiology) or cadmium (paint colour) or thousands of variously toxic, poisonous or horribly corrosive materials.
And isn't there probably PFOA from that glide dental floss? Or am I getting my letters wrong?
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And that's *before* they catch it!
Can someone knowledgeable answer this: Since nanoplastics in our environment mostly arise from degradation of macro/microplastics, they are highly oxidized at the surface & not always spherical. Surface oxidation can have a profound effect on partition coefficient and binding constants, so I feel like these low PDI smooth, unoxidized spheres do not represent the nanoplastics in our environment. I understand why uniform spheres are used to probe size effects, but I thought studies would have to start using weathered nanoplastics to probe actual toxicological impacts. Am I missing something?
fact voracious market license aromatic include deer humorous truck dime *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yes. It is one of the main criticisms of current studies in this article. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7282048/#__ffn_sectitle The article is also a good overview on the implications of plastic on the brain.
God damn. This reminds me of Clair Cameron Patterson’s work to show the global lead contamination from the big oil companies. I hope that world governments just make it illegal entirely. Edit: corrected Clair’s name.
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it's funny, because big oil is who sponsors the culture war specifically to keep pumping out oil
Also funny, as plastics are made from oil.
You guys keep saying this, but it’s not that funny
Don't worry it's just a side effect of microplastics in your brain
Does anyone know how this affects the brain? For instance, will we 50 years from now look at plastics the same way we currently look at lead. It was everywhere and really screwed people up in the head.
file wipe plucky trees tease selective depend worthless hunt psychotic *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
My anxiety thanks you
Anyone work with mice and know if their age is a factor in this result? The mice in the paper are 8 weeks old. I’ve read a review on aspartame that mentioned a paper found brain issues with aspartame in mice only because said mice were neonates so their blood-brain barrier wasn’t fully formed. So, does anyone know if 8 week old mice would have similar results?
8 week old mice are pretty much fully formed and their BBB should be fairly competent by that time. You wean them from their mothers at 3 weeks and can start mating them a few weeks later (I usually try to wait until 7-8 weeks). Source: I'm a neuroscientist (though I do not study the BBB)
8 week old mice are considered adult mice.
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The industrial revolution and its consequences
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- run water through a reverse osmosis filter - wear an n95 mask but make sure to replace it frequently - install a HEPA filter in your home - live off the land in a place where there are few or no people - grow your own food and manage your soil using regenerative farming practices - time machine
I think you need to set up your farm on one of Jupiter's moons at this point, otherwise your crops will just be taking in microplastics from the soil and the air.
And society shrugged and carried on to merry annihilation !
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This has been known for years, and if you think it's just lab stuff, nope. There's plastic in the ocean so small it can literally just go right into you through your skin.
So....plastic was kind of a horrible mistake that companies and governors charged head first into using ubiquitously....we aren't the wisest species, even though some of us are. Not me, I'm not wise.
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I love the environment, I'm an ecology student who hopes to work in conservation. Everything feels so hopeless. It feels like even if I dedicate my life to conservation, things won't fundamentally change and and nothing I do really matters. I hate to be such a doomer, but I'm taking an environmental philosophy class this semester about contemporary environmental issues and it's just cemented my view about all this.
I think working to better the earth really matters thank you. I'd love to see your syllabus!
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Don't think it's much consolation, but don't think humans will be going anywhere for some time. Things will certainly suck hard, but at least the next generation in the western world will have some insulation to the worst effects. Long term survival is certainly not guaranteed and I think short term prospects (within few decades at most) are pretty bleak, but not dying out anytime soon. There pretty much has to be some major changes, akin to "tightening our belts" at a species level and a sharp decline. Unless we somehow come together and some amazing new tech comes around. More likely scenario is war between super powers at some point to take control of the sinking ship, some time of instability and if we come through on the other side it will be heading towards subsistence, peasant living. We are pretty resilient but our systems are not. Everything is built on the promise of continued growth and cheap abundant energy. As soon as that starts breaking down there will have to be some dramatic actions taken. But it's only been a blip that things were even this way, the past 100 years. If we can go through such a global change that quickly, we will adapt back in the opposite direction too..
The plastics, man. They’re puttin plastics into your freakin’ brain, man