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Stapleton said she now relies more on filtered water at her home in New Jersey.
But study co-author Beizhan Yan, a Columbia environmental chemist who increased his tap water usage, pointed out that filters themselves can be a problem by introducing plastics.
“There’s just no win,” Stapleton said.
Oh, man.
I've been saying this to people for a long time. Here in my country, most water filters are based on charcoal and a final filtering element. That element used to be made of cellulose and other organic materials, but in the last decade, they started coming with that element made of polypropylene, until all the cellulose ones disappeared from the market. Just imagine your water passing though a porous layer of plastic, like a rigid sponge... this is a serious microplastic source.
You're talking like .01% as much plastic use per liter as plastic bottle water packs. Is that not....much much better?
I'm not sure how much microplastics are released in that way. It can be better than bottles, but if we used non plastic materials for so long, and it worked fine, I see no reason to put plastic in there.
But the filters introduce way way fewer.plastics...?
Distill water, then add minerals back into it, and bottle in glass, profit.
Probably the best way. Distillation uses a lot of electricity, doesn't it?
Not necessarily. It just requires excitation at a molecular level. You can get creative with your source. They have been playing around with low energy methods like LED or even just using the sun, geothermal, etc.
Yes, I'm aware of different way to distill, but if this were to work in a home/commercial setting, it needs to be accessible/affordable.
I'd personally love to get a home distiller, but I read they were very expensive to run :(
I was about to write back that we are not far off the advances to make these affordable and then did a google search and found that you can get a distilled unit on Amazon for $180 that is capable of making a gallon in 5 hours for about $.45 worth of electricity. That is far less than what it costs to buy distilled water at the store, which is around $1 a gallon. If you look at this from a break-even analysis, you technically start to reap the rewards of ownership after about 800 uses since the first 400 uses basically cost you $1.45 per gallon, then the next 400 costs you $.45 per gallon, but you are recouping that extra cost over the $1 retail price, so by the 800th use, you are getting water at less than half the price of the store.
A gallon is not much though, not for a family. If you have to double or triple that amount, the electricity costs will really add up. If you're talking European electricity costs, you might as well drink expensive wine instead 😂
If cost was more in line with traditional filters, then it may be a more accessible option. But electricity costs are only going up.
Even with fission, nuclear is a panacea of energy with almost no waste for modern reactors. I can see there being an initial rise in energy costs to get those projects built out though. If they are phasing out nuclear, that would be dumb.
Additionally, researchers at MIT recently found that you can evaporate water without heat, so that should hopefully be a thing in the near future.
Resistive heating is 100% efficient at turning electrical energy into heat
”The International Bottled Water Association said in a statement: “There currently is both a lack of standardised [measuring] methods and no scientific consensus on the potential health impacts of nano- and microplastic particles. Therefore, media reports about these particles in drinking water do nothing more than unnecessarily scare consumers.”
Fuck capitalism - "no don't be too cautious, just consume until we can finally prove what tiny particles accumulated in your organs can do. How bad can it be?"
This is the same attitude the US Food and Drug administration takes. A product can only be scrutinized if a new ingredient is proven to be harmful.
Yet another reason to quit buying so much bottled water
I guess. It seems like it doesn’t matter tho because it’s not just bottled water. It’s literally everything.
All the food you eat. Anything you drink. The air you breathe. The clothes you wear. Literally everything you interact with has some amount of plastic that you’re consuming.
You can put down the bottled water but the alternatives aren’t much better. Either way you’re being bombarded by microplastics.
Oh, How I long for the olden days... I would literally die for a fresh glass of water plucked from a local stream. The copious amounts of lead and mercury combine with the rich abundance of feces, microbacteria and other organic matter, to create a pure, natural live giving elixir.
Now all of that has been removed and replaced with modern plastic. No thanks
Yet another reason to quit buying ~~so much~~ bottled water...
Would be nice if I could drink the tap water here
So plastic is made from oil, right? And oil is made from Dinosaurs. So we're just surrounded by Dinosaurs. Even micro-Dino's.
Is this their revenge?
Oil comes from decaying organic matter, mostly trees and vegetation.
shhh he likes to think gasoline is a triceratops
I prefer T-Ret brand oil myself.
Oh boy I sure do love plastic with my water.
Realistically though, is there any way to really filter out these?
Plastic-digesting microbes.
I am a plastic digesting mega organism apparently!
You're not digesting it; it's slowly disrupting all your systems.
Sawyer tap filters remove 100% of microplastics (which I'm really hoping is legit!). They fit right on your tap and other than looking a bit funny work great. Just replaced my Brita filter with one a few weeks ago.
Quoting as 100% effective is a good indicator of bullshit in any scenario
Well also that tap water filters are usually a giant plastic contaminant themselves.
Best filter is to not have them in the first place
Pretty soon drinking water is going to have to go through a centrifuge first haha.
I wonder how the refillable plastic 5 gallons are with plastic, we need to go back when they were made of glass
Someone needs to invent soft glass that doesnt break so easily. Surely it cant be that hard.
It’s not too hard, but it’s more costly, and consumers want a cheap as possible.
Borosilicate glass fits the ticket (what pyrex is made of) but is quite expensive.
I've seen a lot of reporting on finding microplastics in new places and new quantities, but is there reliable evidence that it actually does damage? Genuinely asking, can someone please send me the papers?
I think it's still a bit early for us to know how it's affecting us. It's the kind of data that takes a lifetime of micro plastics to see how it will kill us. But knowing how much cancer various plastics already give us, it's safe to assume this is a bad thing.
This isn't like smoking or drinking. There isn't any control group. We have no population to compare a lifetime of microplastic exposure against. It isn't like lead, either. Plastics pollution to date guarantees a continuous supply of microplastics for decades/centuries.
You're right, I assume that even at the very best, an uncontacted tribe would still be contaminated to some extent
Does this include like nalgenes and camelbacks and things of that nature?
Are they just guessing? Measurements are pretty definative
Well I mean how awesome am I going to get plastic in my system? It's not like that stuff just grows on trees.
Thank god I stopped using plastic bottles and blottled water over a decade ago.