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Is there some sort of Pareto principle that could be applied to reducing plastic intake? Can someone suggest a few easy steps that would cause >50% reduction in plastic intake, for those who don't have time to dig through the research, and can't make drastic life changes?
I'll offer "don't microwave in plastic containers" as a starter for ten.
Second might be "get a metal water bottle".
My suggestions:
* switch from microfiber to e.g bamboo sheets
* donate blood periodically to reduce your body’s load https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790905
* add a filter to your washing machine to divert microplastics from the wastewater e.g. https://planetcare.org/There's an article that says that 78% of microplastics in the ocean are from tire dust alone.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/tire-pollution-toxic-chemical...
Another easy thing to do is to prefer clothes with natural fiber types (cotton, wool, etc). A lot of the particulates in one's home are generated from just the abrasion of your clothing as you move around. When those are natural particulates instead of synthetic, you'll end up inhaling a lot less.
Related is improving airflow and vacuuming regularly so that these particles don't accumulate as much.
Those are my top two. I'm also avoiding the grocery store bagged chicken sitting under a heat lamp, hot coffee in god-knows-what lined "paper" cups, and fatty or acidic items in plastic containers. No plastic cutting boards. No polypropelyne shirts or sheets. I'm just guessing at where the plastic comes from but it makes me feel better.
But ultimately, look around the grocery store or just life - everything's got plastic in it. If there are drastic negative health consequences to plastics (and it's looking really likely that there are), what the hell do we do about it? We've almost certainly committed too far to plastics to fix it on any meaningful scale.
Partial, but an easy one: Don't combine all three of these: Heat, food/drink, plastic.
Eating mostly plants, get everyone doesn’t want to go full veg, would probably help.
Given that it bio accumulates trying to get closer to the bottom of the food chain should reduce intake.
This is a really good question, and I'd love to know the answers here too
Switch to loose tea (if you drink tea), with porcelain tea kettles to brew, and metal strainers into porcelain mugs. The tea bags are made with plastics.
While you're switching back to porcelain, glass, and metal, avoid things made in China if you can. Their porcelain and glass is high in lead (often poisonously so).
Eliminate any black or charcoal colored plastics that you can. When you get to-go containers for food, transfer it to a dish (porcelain) or bowl (porcelain or glass) immediately when you get home before putting it in the refrigerator.
Never microwave with plastic wrap (a.k.a. cling film). We use paper towels if it must be covered, or another plate if it's liquid.
No plastic utensils, no "paper" plates (paper plates are mixed with plastic to make them hold up better) and have their own forever chemicals in them.
Get a pour-over kit (ceramic or porcelain, glass, and metal). We still use paper filters, but make sure they're actually paper.
No polyester clothing, or at least more than 65% or 70% cotton.
Be aware, aluminum bottles (and cans, although they have recycle-ability benefits over plastic) usually have plastic liners. Glass (with its weight and durability problems), stainless, and titanium are good.
The truth is we're probably still unaware of the worst offenders but here how I go to reduce my exposure, in no particular order:
Food:
- avoid all that came into contact with plastics, use glass containers
- sea salt has microplastics in it, rock salt can be a better alternative
- don't use plastic utensils or equipment, like plastic grinders
- overall, avoir processed and packaged food, buying locally helps
- eat smaller animals: bioaccumulation is worse in larger animals
- I almost completely eliminated all seafood from my diet, if you want to eat fish, prefer the smaller ones
- use glass water bottles or reverse osmosis system that can filter smaller particles for drinking water
- if you enjoy soda, you should know most of them are contaminated, that is because carbonation increases internal pressure and mechanical stress on the bottle walls, which can accelerate the degradation of the plastic and release of particles. And it gets worse: every time you open the bottle, the pressure release causes even more degradation
- therefore for soda: use glass bottles too, cans are coated with plastic but not as bad as the bottles (they use epoxy resin which is more stable and the stress on cans is less than plastic bottles), but here glass is still king.
- I use a service in my city that delivers boxes of glass water and soda, it probably exists in your city too and is more affordable than you might imagine
- there is not much you can do to avoid microplastics outside, car tires supposedly account for 28% of all microplastics entering the environement, avoid living close to busy street? Truth is we don't have enough studies and data to truly know about that
- use an air purifying system for your home, the commercial ones are mostly bs, make yourself one with at high MERV rating (MERV 13 or above), there is a whole community of DIY builders, look it up
- use a vacuum cleaner that uses bags and possibly has an HEPA filtering, this will prevent you from blowing all the microplastics that may have shed on your floor into the air, make sure to keep in properly maintained
wood cutting board
Because otherwise plastic is miracle material.
Alternatives are lot less practical or do not offer same advantages. Glass is heavier, less sturdy, possible produces shards that cause immediate damage such as cuts. Most metals need the plastic coating to be non-reactive.
And then products packed in plastic stored in inert gas last amazingly long time. Which is very big selling point for many customers.
> a group of Italian researchers followed 257 people who had plaque in their carotid arteries. They found that 20 percent of the people in their study who had microplastic-laden plaque had had a heart attack, stroke or had died after almost three years, compared to 7.5 percent of the people who didn’t.
Microplastics could be a proxy for diet. Which is why we need more studies!
> Scientists still don’t know what this plastic is doing to us.
I think it's because of this and how expensive, inconvenient, and possibly dangerous the alternative is. There's a lot of risk of illness in food handling, and things like one-time use containers and disposable gloves have done a lot to help.
"Microplastics found in X" has become a pretty weird sport.
The phenomenon is worth studying, but it's not hugely surprising given how ubiquitous they are (another thing you find in every human, probably in higher quantities, is sand). But despite tons of scrutiny, there are no studies showing that it's actually hurting us.
We've done some really sketchy things in the early days of industry (leaded gasoline, etc), and have gotten into this overdrive where we're jumping the gun on a lot of substances that are probably not bad. Every year, you have several headlines in the mold of "X is everywhere and might be killing us"... but never really followed by that "oh yeah, it was really killing us" part.
> Everything that goes into our bodies gets filtered through our livers and kidneys, so maybe it’s not a big surprise that bits of plastic find their way into those organs. Same with our hearts; microplastics end up in our blood and can get stuck in our clogged arteries.
> But our brains are designed to keep things out ... researchers behind the brain plastics study think the tiny shards of plastic hitch a ride on fat molecules to get [past the blood-brain barrier] inside brain cells ... The researchers estimated that the average brain studied had about seven grams of microplastics in it.
Having 7g of _anything_ foreign inside my brain seems like cause for concern to me.
The "getting bonked on the head a lot might be killing us" narrative has progressed rapidly in the past 20 years, fwiw, and you'd think we would have noticed it earlier given it is visually evident postmortem and doesn't depend on technology
There is no sound evidence of having so much microplastics in the brain. The studies that show it are very broad, incomplete and did not check for false positives.
"The main analytical method used in this study was pyrolysis gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. This method can give false results when used to measure plastics because fats (which the brain is mainly made of) give the same pyrolysis products as polyethylene (the main plastic reported)"
And then you have something like this: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32882126
We already know cancer rates are going up for young people. What's changed, apart from all the extra chemicals floating in our blood?
Immediate consequences versus long-term consequences. Leaded gasoline is still being studied on how impactful it was.
https://dupri.duke.edu/news-events/news/20th-century-lead-ex...
Agreed. I think its something to look into but surely the boomers who went through the plastic industry in the 60s had it way worse when we had way less stringent standards and were getting exposed to and even eating now banned substances. If they survived it..and by survive I mean lived to a healthy 80-100 year life for the most part then we probably will be fine.
> Every year, you have several headlines in the mold of "X is everywhere and might be killing us"... but never really followed by that "oh yeah, it was really killing us" part.
Asbestos? Cigarette smoke? BRUH lol.
"Why Aren't We Losing Our Minds over the Plastic in Our Brains?"
Because people value convenience and low costs over most risks. It's actually amazing that Organic food has found as much traction as it has with the increased cost and less convenient shopping.
> It's actually amazing that Organic food has found as much traction as it has with the increased cost and less convenient shopping.
I'm not surprised about this one. Store tomatoes look really nice, but have no flavour, and it's noticeable with other fruits and veggies too.
If our society had half a brain we would be banning as much single use plastic as possible, replacing it with whatever is appropriate.
"But it's expensive!" Yes. Properly disposing of waste costs money.
The dirty secret is that a LOT of it is tire dust.
We're addicted to our cars. It isn't going to get better.
Just enjoy the ride while you can. There is no hope to fix anything.
When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.
Convenience, and the absolute iron grip the chemical, petroleum, and retail industries have on politicians. Dare I say the only way to fix the problem with plastics is for a global leader to unilaterally lay tariffs on a wide range of plastic products and packaging, while eliminating them on alternatives to force the industry to move away from plastic.
Donating plasma may filter micro-plastics from blood. A study showed it to be effective for removing PFAS:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8994130/
AFAIK there hasn't been a study focused on plastics, but it seems plausible.
People don’t want to be inconvenienced so they’d rather have plastic in their brains. So many people can’t cook their own food, fix their own stuff, read an instruction manual, read a book, distinguish fact from fiction, remember what they had for breakfast, remember their best friends birthday.
Plastic is a petroleum product and the petroleum industry controls nearly every news station (Fox + Murdoch is the big one) have trillions in lobbying dollars and has complete capture of the most powerful governments on Earth. What you think and the science about plastic and climate change that we've known for decades doesn't matter.
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There are a lot of things going on in the US currently where I could ask "Why aren't We Losing Our Minds over ....?" The answer is money. Moving away from plastic is expensive and consumers aren't demanding it so business as usual.
Losing my mind over the plastic in my brain wouldn’t do any good either, it’s already there.
Maybe the plastic is telling us to not worry about the plastic?
It's interesting to wonder that if something in the environment did cause widespread cognitive impairment, how long would it take for us to realize it was happening?
My wife considers microplastic ingestion unavoidable and refuses to make any effort to mitigate it. So I think a certain "health-fatigue" spread around the world.
I cannot comprehend it but I can certainly observe it.
Because we'll get used to it.
Or rather, those capable of handling it better will have a slight advantage and guide the hand of civilization.
Why lose your mind over something you cannot change?
It's because of all the plastic in there.
Because FOX and Newsmax is not covering it. No one cares about real science and facts in the US these days.
I still expect that women will wake up to and react against the plastic in semen.
> So, yes, while correlation does not equal causation, these are fairly alarming signs. Yet we live in a country that believes wholeheartedly that we just keep doing what we are doing while we figure it all out.
Yes, I believe this wholeheartedly. I agree it's an important area to research, and I support regulations to try and minimize the amount of stuff that ends up in the environment and our bodies. It's pretty likely our great-grandchildren will learn about the bad old days when consumer goods were just shedding microplastics everywhere.
But I don't think it's worth giving up the benefits of widespread plastic usage while we figure out better alternatives, and I've never seen an argument that it is beyond the kind of vague gestures towards the naturalistic fallacy the source article presents. "Imagine 2.5 teaspoons of sugar. Now sub in plastic. Gross." - neither of these seem particularly gross to me.
Maybe because plastics isn't conductive?
Neuroplasticity
Maybe if it does have a negative effect it's just balancing out roughly what we got rid of with respect to e.g. leaded fuels.
As with most things, the answer is capitalism
Imagine if after all the panic over climate change, nuclear warfare etc, the thing that collapses our civilization is little bits of Tupperware in our brains? lol
I'm more scared of macroplastics, a 2 ton hunk of plastic falling on you will kill you way faster.