The Most Disturbing Places We've Found Microplastics So Far

[legitster]

I'm curious - has there been a place yet that hasn't found microplastics yet? Some of the places I have now read about seem so unlikely (archeological dig, deep bore holes, returning spacecraft) that I am now thinking of other plausible alternatives:

- some "microplastics" are naturally occurring phenomenon

- cannot run a test without the sample being compromised

- like the presence of carbon-14 in the atmosphere after the first atom bomb, it ubiquitous enough that there is no point testing for its presence

[throwup238]

> Some of the places I have now read about seem so unlikely (archeological dig, deep bore holes, returning spacecraft)

I think there's good reason to be skeptical of all these results because of contamination. Microplastics are everywhere in a lab from the clothing scientists wear to the sample containers they use to hold everything. The most common consumables like microplates and pipette tips are made out of plastic, covered in plastic, and delivered in plastic.

We went through this same process with DNA in archaeology a few decades ago. Until the equipment was sensitive enough and labs figured out how to properly prepare the samples, they kept coming back with wild conclusions about the stuff they were studying. Stuff like taking live plant matter as controls and then not properly cleaning out equipment before testing the archaeological sample.

It's a hard problem exacerbated by the rush to publish or perish.

[avmich]

Maybe we need to just make sure their concentration is below thresholds?

[jasondc]

Try buying food that isn't stored in plastics, worse yet, the supply chain before you get the food probably uses plastics between the various components. Seems like such a hard problem to solve.

[CalRobert]

Plastic is used intensively to make the food too. This is a sea of plastic in Spain used for growing. https://vertical-farming.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/alme...

Plastic stops weeds, stops birds, is the skin of greenhouses - every step of growing seems to involve another damn square kilometer of plastic. A lot of it just degrades in to microplastics in the soil, too.

(My wife and I did a market-garden type smallholding for a while and it's damn near impossible to get away from plastic)

[legitster]

Honestly though - what's the point? It seems that everything is contaminated whether or not it ever touched plastic in its lifetime.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

The very ubiquity of microplastics coupled with the lack of definitive harm is pretty strongly suggestive that they are pretty innocuous as far as chemicals go.

[legitster]

Something that doesn't get talked about very much - the exponential improvement in scientific equipment in the last few decades has vastly improved our ability to detect incredibly trace elements.

[nope1000]

The harm is hard to assess without a control group.

[llamaimperative]

Sure, just like lead.

[spacephysics]

Is there food safe plastics that don’t leach microplastics? My RO filter uses plastic tubing, I imagine within the filters themselves there’s plastic

[ta988]

Not all plastics are equal. Some really don't leach much of anything in their normal use.

The main source of microplastics in water bottles isn't the bottle that's the filters (and the residual amount in the bottle is pretty astonishing)

[FuriouslyAdrift]

Microsplastics mostly come from paint and clothing.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/how-to-reduce-micropl...

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/fashions-tiny-hi...

[franckl]

Fyi you can get a stainless steel under sink RO system for less than 200usd on amazon, no plastic piping either.

[JackMorgan]

This is why I switched to a countertop electric water still. It boils a gallon of water in a few hours, then I just refill and plug it back in. The water tastes great too.

[anthropodie]

How did we fail to forsee the effects of plastic before unleashing it on humanity and the world? Is there some org or body that would prevent such thing from happening in future with other material? If we have not learn anything from this we are doomed to repeat it.

[throwup238]

Plastic is a miracle material on par with wood and fossil fuels. We didn’t stand a chance! The economic incentives to use it would have overrode anyone who brought up concerns, even if they had the scientific evidence back then.

Likewise with other chemicals like tetraethyllead in gasoline. We’ve known lead is toxic since Vitruvius but the first anti-knocking agent was just too useful so everyone kind of ignored it.

[TeMPOraL]

We're still to identify any meaningful effects of microplastics other than them being everywhere and looking foreboding.

That on top of what others said - it's hard to predict effects and their scale before actually doing the thing that causes them. Also, it's only in the last 100 years that we learned that large-scale effects and environmental damage of various chemicals are a thing in the first place; it was hard for people to even conceptualize or imagine such things.

[tyho]

We have done a better job with radioactive materials and CFC's than with plastics generally. Plastics suffer from their harms being very difficult to identify, they are still argued about today, no such uncertainty for radioactive materials or CFC's, their harms were (relatively) quickly identified.

[xkcd-sucks]

Consider that CTE chronic traumatic encephalopathy was discovered only a couple decades ago, despite the fact it could in principle be physically observed with stone age technology [0]. Knowing and caring where to look are important, and its tricky if there's no conceptual framework for it

[0] gently bash someone on the head for decades, cut out their brain, notice it's all shrunken and weird in composition ... maybe in a culture with strong warrior and ritual cannibalism practices

[pixl97]

>How did we fail to forsee the effects of leaded gasoline....

Humanity is mostly reactive. Once people are harmed then we launch a decade long fight against massive corporations who gaslight us as to how safe their product is and spend millions in delaying court battles and faking positive public opinion.

[legitster]

This, except for the invention of agriculture.

[tmaly]

I am not sure if we will ever purge nature of them.

But we could reduce them going forward with better packaging science and use of biodegradable plastics.

[stevenwoo]

We are on an exponential curve of deployment of plastic because it’s cheap, anything else would require research time and money https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/worlds-pla....

[avmich]

We may (much) better control their renewal (control on new production) and employ some good "enemy", like a microorganism(s) feeding on (some of) them. It's not an easy problem for sure.

[legitster]

> use of biodegradable plastics

Depending on the type of biodegradable plastic, part of it's degradation process would be to break down into small pieces of microplastics.

[drewcoo]

I can't even eat dog testicles anymore!

Tell me that's not somehow disturbing . . .

[nehagup]

I mean, it's enough to say "literally anywhere, including our blood and most tissues", because it doesn't get more disturbing than that