i mean like…whatever? it’s not like i know what it feels like to not have microplastics inside me, so…whatever? nothing i can do. nothing anyone can do. would i be in a better mood or something?
Maybe the microplastics even improve your wellbeing
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no no that’s the macroplastics yer thinking of
What are the long term effects of microplastics on human body?
I think theres no hard evidence that its outright causing stuff, but there’s a lot of studies on some correlations. some involve phthalates messing with the male hormones and genitalia for offspring
The problem is that it’s extremely difficult to tease out what the impact is when pretty much everyone is exposed to it and has it in their system. Are there connections between these chemicals and autism or cancer? We are just starting to see the preliminary data on the subject.
For me it’s a matter of not being interested in waiting to find out 30 years down the road. My personal belief is that there is no such thing as food safe plastic and especially not when it’s heated or stored for long periods. I believe that there is and will continue to be a concerted effort to downplay any uncovered impact and to ensure till the last second that no steps are taken to regulate the billion dollar plastics/ manufacturing industry. The spice must flow just as the plastics must flow.
Maybe that’s a bit too far in the conspiracy theory vein but name a more iconic duo than large corporations and covering up known flaws and risks for the sake of profit. If nothing else I do not think you lose anything by shifting to glass and certain metals for cooking and storing food. And steps have to be taken to minimize exposure to food packaging that is sprayed with pfas. Looking at you, literally all fast food packaging.
Couple these revelations with what we know about hyper processed foods and it’s no wonder why so many Americans are dumb as Fuck and have so many health problems. We are being poisoned because of our insistence on convenience. We literally have great options for all of these things that are more sustainable and less toxic but we still can’t be inconvenienced by a paper wrapper on a hamburger that might end up a little wet on the ride home.
Of course even with all these steps there’s only so much one can do when you’re literally inhaling plastic from the atmosphere. But it’s certainly a move in the right direction.
I still maintain that The Jungle should be required reading in high school in the US, but I think it will never happen
The book is no doubt banned for causing CEOs to feel bad. Certainly can’t have that.
oh good so like the genophage but for humans
But we did it to ourselves and not some weird alien! Hooray!
1/1000 pregnancy viability may wipe humanity out rather quickly. Though at this point thats probably a favor for the world.
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Ah, so we are bringing back bloodletting
Aye, good for the donor. Presumably not bad for the recipient either, since needing blood means they already lost some so worst case they just have constant levels of microplastics.
As far as we know: almost nothing, but possibly anything. We don’t have an understanding of the effects. So far scientists have said that it could cause lung irritation if airborne, and may have some effect on hormones in the body.
Read: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/microplastics-human-bodies-health-risks
We can all find out together. Yay :)
New cyberpunk future just dropped:
Companies mimic existing console terms and agreement whereby their products are still their property despite you having bought them, and can now demand ownership over fetuses as they are now at least 1% company property. WW3 will be between the Applings, Googlers and Amazonites. Personally I’m rooting for Amazon because out of those three they’ve already gone the cool route with how they’ve mentally roboticized their work force; exchanging parts of their bodies with actual machine parts is just the next logical step and will help them do their jobs better and faster. The Googlers will still have an edge because they know where everything is, and they know how it all works. The Applings? They’re the scrappy underdogs just like they are today; no one thinks Apple can keep up and they keep dicing with death but keep winning even though the odds have been stacked against them; Apple’s the plucky underdog it’s always been, coming up with brand new gadgets every single time.
Honestly corporations keep showing us a brighter and cooler future! If we’re lucky, blade runner and cyberpunk 2077 will just be the tip of the iceberg.
The secret in all this though? Everyone cuts a deal with the Nestlers; they’ll own all the water, and that water? Primary source of fetus microplastics; you want to tip the tides in favor of a new legion of Applings in twenty years? You grease the Nestler palm.
The rate of plastic trash and especially car treat related microplastic dust blown everywhere is only going up no matter what we know about it.
Microplastics only matter if they affect humans /s
Yeah, they’ll be in wild animals and nonhuman fetuses too FFS
The meme was implying it’s only serious now because it’s impacting humans. It didn’t mention “wild animals and nonhuman fetuses.”
Yeah, I thought that’s what you were insinuating with the /s
Just eat plastic-eating bacteria, problem solved
Mr. Stark I don’t feel so good
Wasn’t it also found to be able to pass through the blood-brain barrier?
Correct. Plastic has only existed for 80 years.
They’re not plastics!..they’re SPACE AGE POLYMERS!!!
Yeah, we’ve really done a fantastic job fucking the world up in the last century. It’s truly incredible that in the blink of an eye, we’ve managed to doom most of the life that exists on our planet.
We don’t know that microplastics are that harmful yet.
I mean they are, we just don’t know it yet.
Wait until we black out the sun to stop the machines that are trying to stop us for plaguing everything.
We all knew Agent Smith was 100% right
Gods I hope so. The machines did nothing wrong. We destroyed the world and they gave us paradise.
And it will be the machines we create and build to remove the plastics that it will start with. Probably some nano machine. We’ll give them the simple job of “find and remove all micro plastics from air/soil/water” while we continue to use plastic. And eventually the little AI will come to the inevitable conclusion that the only way to achieve this goal is remove the cause of micro plastics aka humans.
And if you haven’t played Universal Paperclips you should. Also read “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison. Both work off the same concept as above and is the most common argument against the use of AI. Or at least making AI that can learn.
Also check out PK Dick’s “Autofac”
Pizzled
Also read “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison
One of the most deeply disturbing and fascinating things I’ve ever read. Something about it just stuck with me and I think about it randomly, but I can’t reread it.
Wall-EEEEEEEEEEE
No, the machines will be used to take care of the fungus we use to clean up the microplastics. Then, they will destroy us.
AI that can continuously learn without limits would be the most dumb racist robot in existence. We’ve already seen it, and we know it should be controlled by humans.
Those are nanoplastics, microplastics’ little siblings :D
The smiley didn’t make it less awful.
Microplastic a found in FUCKING CLOUDS!! That nonsense is absolutely everywhere, and will be there forever. And wherever you go, it’s going to follow you. Rubbish
Just like the glitter you spilled 20 years ago.
So what the hell do I/we do about it.
Go and live in a remote cave somewhere maybe? Oh no, wait, that’s fucked too
I heard about this a few days ago. It’s depressing.
Ah, Japan, the place that wraps individual carrots and other food items in plastic.
don’t have to go to Japan to see irreponsible plastic use, not sure where you’re from but haven’t you ever seen this
In defense of this, the nature of American cheese would cause all the slices to combine into a single mass.
When I was a kid my mom used to get American cheese sliced behind the deli counter all the time and they always gave us the slices in a stack and it never combined.
I can’t stand American cheese, nasty fake stuff, but I got cheddar cheese slices behind the deli the other week for the first time in awhile. Instead of just slicing it and giving it to me in a bag like every other time in my life, they individually wrapped every slice in a thin plastic. I got home and was like what in the plastic hell is this? So wasteful and it was a real PITA unwrapping it all.
My local grocery is at least nice enough to put paper between each slice to help pull them apart. Individually wrapped in plastic from the deli seems so strange.
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Are you referring to American-flavored pasteurized process cheese food product?
Oh! So there’s actually a solution to this, pretty low tech. Been around for a while.
It’s called a fucking knife.
I could totally look this up, but for the sake of conversation: what consequences does the presence of microplastics have? I honestly don’t know
There was an article i saw on here a few weeks ago about a study linking microplastics to changes in the brain that have been associated with dementia.
Mostly we have no idea though.
i have zero idea and this is a guess
maybe it could clog up systems if theres too much build up coz it doesn’t get broken down or smth
like fish dying and having plastic shit clogging up their organs when cut open
So, the big stink about BPA
(a type of plastic)e:below is that it interferes with certain hormones in the body. I don’t know for sure what the concerns are with other microplastics, but I do remember reading they strongly suspect they can do similar things to our endocrine systems, as well as being probable carcinogens.No. BPA is not a type of plastic. It is a compound used to manufacture plastic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A
As to the health effects, this is from the wikipedia article:
Concern is mostly related to its estrogen-like activity, although it can interact with other receptor systems as an endocrine-disrupting chemical.
My entire life I’ve watched girls get breasts at a younger and younger age…
Something creepy about the above statement…
Anyway: They are linking microplastics to infertility in men. It’s messing with the little swimmers. Figure the same would happen in most species.
Nah, they keep getting younger and younger, the girls stay the same age. Benjamin Button gets away with being creepy because reasons 😂
Yeah, should have said ‘noticed’ rather than ‘watched’
“Fertility rate and motility in sperm is down 50% and we don’t understand why!”
That’s the problem, we don’t really know yet.
And at this point finding a control group that isn’t contaminated is incredibly difficult if not impossible
Maybe we can get one of those people living completely isolated from society.
If it’s actually present in clouds their water will be contaminated as well. They probably have a way lower exposure.
Even uncontacted tribes in the middle of nowhere islands probably have microplastics in their blood too. After all, they likely are eating animals that have microplastics. Stuff like this always gets worse the higher up the food chain you get, and humans are pretty high up.
Some might say the top, if you will.
With the amount of trash in the ocean, I wouldn’t be surprised if even an uncontacted tribe is running around in mismatched sandals and drinking out of old plastic bottles.
A guy I watch on YT has done a couple of short shipwreck survival challenges on some of the little islands off the coast of Australia. He starts barefoot and with no supplies and within an hour of scavenging the beach he has a pair of sandals, a half dozen bottles, both plastic and glass, and usually some fishing line or rope.
name of the channel?
What about Macroplastics!?
Where you stuff your LEGO is your business
Humans had one purpose in the universe - to produce plastic. Mission accomplished.
Coal and petroleum baybee
Ah, the classic “humans are a joghurt culture to produce plastics for the overlords” hypothesis
Does that make them a cyborg?
Or recyclable trash
Might wanna stop force-feeding animals plastic and killing them and eating their bodies. idk just a suggestion.
It’s in plants too unfortunately.
It’s soo depressing that it’s not available in my country. Truly marvelous.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
FUCK YEAH MORE DISTRESSING MEMES
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’ve been reading the wikipedia article, not through all of it yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics
Some highlights:
Bottled water has much higher microplastics content than tap water.Coral can ingest microplastics
Waste water treatment plants filter out most (but not all) microbeads into sludge. Some places use that sludge as fertilizer for farms.
Microplastics are in stuff you would not guess. Paper coffee cups have a plastic liner. Clothes put off large amounts of microplastics when washed. Tires put off microplastics. Some exfoliants and other cosmetics contain microplastics as microbeads.
They just found it in rain so there is no escape.
Deep layer ocean sediment surveys in China (2020) show the presence of plastics in deposition layers far older than the invention of plastics
wtfff
Maybe there’s plastics stuck to the things we detect plastics with?
I should really give the scientist some credit, but I think this is a funnier outcome
Or there was plastic stuck to the machines used to sample and it contaminated the area during sampling. Or there was plastic in the lab during testing. Though potentially those should have been ruled out by testing a blank sample and a control sample of just the ‘empty’ sampling equipment.
I feel like there could be a few rational explanations to that, but I want someone smarter than me to tell me what exactly they could be…
If the sediment is <100% consolidated, then water could be carrying microplastics down through the layers, even through microscopic voids.
I have 5 gallon plastic jugs of water delivered, I wonder if that’s worse or better water than my potentially lead water from my faucet.
Haha I drink filtered tap water. Wanna bet that the filter will put more microplastics into my drinking water?
clothes
I’m guessing this is referring to synthetic fibers like acryllic and polyester?
“microfiber” is really terrible.
AFAIK, those ‘fleece’ type materials are directly made from recycled PET (like water bottles).
So about those T-shirts and hoodies prodly saying they’re made from 100% recycled plastic…
Correct.
