They mention this as a way to recycle plastics, but for me this seems like a perfect way to get lots of tiny plastic particles out and into the environment once the road starts to wear.
back
8 comments
Ready for another batch of "Scientists tracked down a mass killer of $SOMETHING"?
See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25431550
yeah... you're not wrong. Plastics are basically organic compounds and they screw around with organisms very easily.
Tho asphalt is already made with bitumen (a petroleum product) so it's not like it's THAT much different. Hopefully we aren't concentrating even more problematic compounds than what already existing in the asphalt.
>Tho asphalt is already made with bitumen (a petroleum product) so it's not like it's THAT much different.
Plastics generate microplastics. Does bitumen generate microbitumen?
yes. the road surface is abraded as it's driven over, which creates oily dust. essentially "microbitumen".
also, road usage already causes microplastic pollution in the form of tire wear, so while including plastic in the road surface might increase the overall volume of microplastic pollution, it won't increase the distribution of it - areas near roadways are already microplastic hotspots.
This is the right question. We talk about micro plastics, has anyone looked at concrete micro particles and the effects on humans? What about just the fine dust from top soil? What is the effect on humans?
Reminds me a little bit when people get overly worried about keeping things clean without realizing everything is covered in bacteria that you ingest on a regular basis.
Does bitumen bioaccumulate into food supplies? Why compare the two?
Ran into this interesting factoid a couple days back:
"Kerogen is solid, insoluble organic matter in sedimentary rocks. Consisting of an estimated 10^16 tons of carbon, it is the most abundant source of organic compounds on earth, exceeding the total organic content of living matter 10,000-fold.... Petroleum and natural gas form from kerogen. Kerogen may be classified by its origin: lacustrine (e.g., algal), marine (e.g., planktonic), and terrestrial (e.g., pollen and spores).... Kerogen is insoluble in normal organic solvents in part because of its high molecular weight of its component compounds. The soluble portion is known as bitumen."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerogen]
All from the same (previously locked-up) family of goodies, it seems.
Here's one thesis that claims it probably does not:
Do microplastics bioaccumulate? Or at least in the sense that we think of bioaccumulation?
This was my first thought as well. I’d rather discarded plastics be concentrated in dumps than thinly spread across the land.
Or why not use it just to make fundaments, underground insulation or just a ground water barrier. My understanding is that the underground environment causes less degradation to plastics than a one exposed to sun and constant friction.
But might affect ground water quality.
Future generations will see our use of plastic like we see asbestos, HCFCs, and leaded gasoline. Nobody denies its utility. It just kills people and wildlife. Once we ban at least single-use plastic we'll recoil with horror at what we did and how long we took after realizing what we were doing to stop ourselves.
I’ve recently come to see this truth. Like reading the vintage ads recommending cocaine to help your tooth ache.
I just hope the future finds a way to undo so much of the damage.
> Like reading the vintage ads recommending cocaine to help your tooth ache.
Cocaine didn't result in large scale environmental damage, to this day it's still in widespread medical use as a local anesthetic.
Imho a much more apt example would be something like "plutonium toothpaste" and the fact how humanity has irreversibly changed Earths biosphere by introducing large quantities of atmospheric plutonium 239 during the countless nuclear weapon tests [0].
Any acknowledgement of potential deadly consequences out of that mostly exist in some fringe awareness [1], and pretty much never comes up in any debates around the risks and dangers of nuclear as a source of energy generation.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0096340215581357
[1] https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civi...
> I just hope the future finds a way to undo so much of the damage.
Future? We can undo it now -- just with life improvements and simplifications, I've dropped my emissions 90%, according to online calculators. I take two years to fill a load of trash at home, which used to be weekly. Many other changes. And one person changing is exactly what causes more people to change.
As a result, Mayors, Congressmembers, and other politicians, CEOs, champion athletes, and more have come on my podcast, helping lead large communities. The Hacker News community is particularly recalcitrant, believing that Mars and fusion are simple and will solve everything while flying less or having fewer children is against human nature and solve nothing, but there's variation.
Systemic change begins with personal transformation.
That sounds like work and inconvenience though. Let's just hit the snooze button and hope the mighty people of the future can figure it out se we don't have to make any changes to our lifestyle.
No doubt we’ll recoil I know horror, but we’ll probably recoil in horror at plenty of things we don’t know better about…that’s progress.
Thankfully we don’t judge we don’t judge people who made errors in the past out of ignorance. ;)
[deleted]
HCFCs are refrigerants that deplete ozone. They are not made from corn.
Breathable micro-plastics doesn't sound nice.
I thought that’s happening anyways because we burn most of the plastic waste?
In a proper incineration plant it's so hot that there is no microplastics left over
But where does it go then? What’s the chemical reaction? Is there only CO2 and water left then?
I knew that this sort of comment was on top when I clicked the comment section :-)
PS: I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s just fits the HN sentiment perfectly.
The article states that there is no advantage to the paving by having plastic mixed in. This begs the question why, other than landfill diversion of plastics, replace aggregate with plastic?
Greenwashing.
It's already everywhere
https://www.wired.com/story/plastic-rain-is-the-new-acid-rai...
Quantity and dosage also matter.
Micro plastics are terrifying, but I’m trying to think why exactly. If the road is shedding plastic dust along with the ground full of insoluble things like tar, rock, pebbles and stone; what’s a tiny particle of plastic any different from a grain of sand? I’m not asserting that micro plastics aren’t bad, just trying to understand what are the risks compared to a lot of dirt around us. I think dust on microscopic scale is inorganic insoluble solid particles and we seem to breathe/eat this stuff with no issue. Are polymers any different than dust particles when it comes to risks to humans in inhaling and ingesting it? Is it something else?
Dust is mostly chemically inert, while plastics aren't:
> Results
> Numerous animal studies have shown that exposure to nano- and microplastics leads to impairments in oxidative and inflammatory intestinal balance, and disruption of the gut’s epithelial permeability. Other notable effects of nano- and microplastic exposure include dysbiosis (changes in the gut microbiota) and immune cell toxicity. Moreover, microplastics contain additives, adsorb contaminants, and may promote the growth of bacterial pathogens on their surfaces: they are potential carriers of intestinal toxicants and pathogens that can potentially lead to further adverse effects.
https://particleandfibretoxicology.biomedcentral.com/article...
Every now and then I read something like this and wonder how long human lifespans would be if you combine modern nutrition, and healthcare but remove the toxicity of our modern environment.
Roman leaders often lived into their 60s/70s.
Biden is 78, Pelosi is 81, Trump is 74, and Bernie is 79.
US Life expectancy is 79.8 ... so we have basically made it so a good chunk of people, not just the leaders live into their seventies.
There's a good chance that there's something in our current genome that makes us get old and die ending in our 70s.
> modern nutrition
Uh...
Roads do contain asphalt which isn't significantly different from a long chain plastic. Even worse is the tire dust itself.
Microplastics can penetrate various biological barriers that were designed to keep dust etc. out. These biological barriers are already not perfect, things like heavy metals (lead, cadmium, …) do the same and can cause massive damages, which is why our only solution is to limit their uses and prevent them from leaking into the environment as much as possible.
TIL, thanks for the insight. It's remarkable already that human body can take so much abuse, and still survive.
Multicellular organisms are highly parallel, trillions of cells in a human. Even inside a eukaryotic cell (gigantic compared to far smaller bacteria) there is a huge amount of parallelism and non-linearity like in some assembly line.
The discussions about some health consequences always come up with "death" as the binary outcome measure. This is so useless. There already is an effect for tiny amounts of molecules. Functions in cells work worse, and cells work worse. This affects all of your functions. Since you are only ever exposed to tiny amounts even when it accumulates - e.g. for heavy metals - all those small problems are either not noticed or attributed to age, which of course also advances.
I had the "benefit" of diagnosed mercury poisoning (gray zone - enough to warrant chelation treatment, university clinic researcher doctor who always forgot to send his - very moderate - bills unless I reminded him several times for a year each time, so no over-diagnosis for profit).
From a disappearing nodule in my thyroid that I had had for decades, unchanging, that suddenly disappeared within weeks of chelation to the great amazement of an endocrinologist who had recommended surgery and who ultra-sounded me twice because he could not believe it, to a huge long list of "minor" ailments that I had increased over the decades and that I had ignored and also attributed to age (I never bothered doctors, far from hypochondriac, never thought much of it), to my returning ability for abstract thought, to digestion going from delayed and stinky to perfect (really), from sleep problems to easy and perfect sleep, to never tired, soooo much went away. With the doctors permission and supervision I chelated far longer and far beyond what would have been justified officially, since it kept helping even though measured amounts were getting really tiny.
Only because I saw the contrast, which rarely anyone ever does because for most people it's a very very gradual slope downhill, or they believe it's "genes" or age, do I even consider environmental factors. I once saw a webpage from a decades-long inner medicine clinic doctor who opened a private practice - in which she offered purely psychological bullshit "treatments" that you see from "alternative medicine". Her reasoning, explained on her (old, clinic-time) website: It's either genes or psychology in her clinical experience, meaning you can hardly ever really do anything but mitigation. Environmental factors never entered her mind. (I have no doubt any cases she diagnoses as "real" will be referred to a clinic by her right away, so not critic on her person from me.)
Which make sense, because the science behind the many, many each very tiny amounts of chemicals and their influence is very hard. Diagnosing it on an individual level, and not just on a population level (the latter does not help a doctor when there is a concrete patient in front of them), is even harder. So as a public health administrator allocating funds I perfectly understand why it flies under the radar. Because individual doctors working with individual patients can't really do much of anything. That is then equated with "there is no problem" (or they would do something about it). Oh and the "they didn't die so it can't be so bad" attitude.
.
Oh and by the way, completely non-scientific and my opinion after watching myself through many boring cycles:
- The common cold helps "getting stuff out". Significantly. I now wonder if eradicating it will have worse long-term outcomes for other issues. Also, not taking medicine to lower the symptoms for example for a good nights sleep might actually be better, the symptoms are part of that "getting stuff out". Yes it's very uncomfortable. It's horrible if you have to get up and go to work the next day.
- The best treatment by far are low stress (no alarms to wake you up to go to work when you would still sleep), sleep, rest as needed (during the day, just lying down and letting the mind go off somewhere - no reading or listening, the brain has to have "free time" to do things on its own - work from home is best!), walking (needed to get things moving, from my body experience the normal blood and ECF circulation is not sufficient.
- Changing sides left/right/left/right/... "I cannot find sleep" actually already is part of the brain's cleanup cycle! A lot of time spend in that phase may be an indicator that there is quite a bit. Clearly, having to get up for an early commute the next day adds stress and makes this hard to bear. But I recommend to accept it. It's a natural reaction, not something that should be suppressed. Yes it makes nights "work".
- The last 1-2 hours of sleep, that some (many) people find makes them more sleepy and groggy, are essential (okay, all phases are, but that's the one people like to skip).
- Being groggy after an afternoon nap is the same. Part of "getting stuff out".
You can call me out on any of this and I have no way to contradict you apart from anecdotes without any scientific value (nothing was measured, for example).
I mean, we use plastic as implants in bodies like heart valves and joints. Hell, it’s a lot of Teflon. I think the jury is still out on the effect.
We also still use mercury amalgams in tooth fillings, that doesn't mean we should pollute the environment with random unrelated mercury compounds.
Oh, there are issues with breathing any kind of dust. Big issues. We should avoid adding dust into the air.
Plastics, unlike inorganic dust, bind to heavy metals and organic pollutants. Animals (of all sizes, but this concerns mostly plankton) mistake them for food and this causes pollutants to concentrate in the food chain.
Microplastics in soil also lower yield and have other adverse effects on crops (but this afaik needs to be studied more).
> What’s a tiny particle of plastic any different from a grain of sand?
Here you go:
> The smallest microplastic particles are capable of entering the bloodstream, the lymphatic system, and may even reach the liver.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/22/micropla...
And they're -- additionally to the above -- often endocrine disruptors, carcinogenic, causing male infertility, most probably playing a role in all sorts of chronic diseases.
From what I have read plastics contain chemicals that interfere with our endocrine system.
> Micro plastics are terrifying
Micro plastics are in lots of cosmetics already.
Roads already have a lot of tire dust due to tire wear, I don't think this will be a significant extra source of pollution.
> The polymer solves a longstanding problem that the asphalt industry has encountered since the first attempts at using recycled plastics in roads, namely how plastic separates once it's melted into the hot asphalt.