this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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I've been more and more conscious about microplastics. I was not aware that the laundry and dishwasher pods are just plastic which then goes into the water system.

What can be done to prevent microplastics?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (7 children)

All I've ever heard about microplastics is that everyone is filled with them and that they are everywhere.

What I haven't heard is why that is a concern. Is it going to affect my health in the long run? When? How much do I have to have consumed for it be an issue?

Even if we identify those issues, can it be removed? Will it make a difference?

For such a 'everyone is now worried about this' type problem, I never once heard why they're concerned. I suppose I could look it up, but I'm surprised that all of the discussion is about the issue existing, but not why it's an issue to begin with.

[โ€“] planish 1 points 9 months ago

Plastic at the microscopic level, if they aren't doing anything chemically interesting, really ought to function about like "rock, but light". Most organisms don't run into trouble because there are tiny bits of rock in the world, so I would expect tiny bits of plastic not to be a huge problem. Which is sort of backed up by how we have noticed microplastics everywhere and we haven't seen huge problems resulting from it (most people are still alive, most children still develop to adulthood, etc.).

But it's entirely possible that some of these plastics are not chemically inert, and that they emit chemicals that do exciting and unwanted things in people's bodies. If we can't keep our plastics from becoming microplastics, we probably need to discontinue the manufacture of non-implantable plastics, since all the plastics will end up in someone's body at some point.

And it's also possible that the microplastics physically do do something interestingly bad. I think there was a recent study to this effect on heart disease. But at this point, that's the question we need to be asking. How many or what kind of microplastics does it take to give a ferret epilepsy? Not "are there microplastics in my all brands of peanut butter?"

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