I remember when I found out that shit was plastic. I always assumed they were organic material of some kind, like the body scrubs with the crushed up walnut shell in it (which probably has fucking microplastic in it, too). So disgusting.
This is why we need to change how shit works. It shouldn’t go: company does some shit > fall out > government steps in. It should go: company has an idea > must get permission first from environmental agencies
Nah corporations really don’t give a shit at all, like all chewing gum is literally just plastic too and sheds tons of microplastics into your mouth as you chew it.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/rethink-chewing-gum-habit-essentially-plastic/
Plastic is an organic material though, so your assumption was correct.
The difference is in the definition or organic. When the average person thinks organic, they mean something that is or used to be alive. When a scientist think organic, they’re talking about carbon compounds.
Plastic are made from fossil fuels which are from primordial plants. So still organic according to your definition. Just a few hundred million years since it was alive.
Interesting. Always thought chewing gum was more like when you made “plastic” out of the caesin in milk.
You can buy chewing gum made from natural materials but it’s not the norm. Most chewing gum is made from mineral oil.
Also, chemically they are identical. Plastic made of a plant is still a plastic.
Nah it’s just rubbery dried chicle sap, no chemical refining like with oil
This is what it looks like
… I should call her
Yes really, still a polymer: it forms polyisoprene upon drying. You also find the stuff (synthesised from oil, yes, but chemically indistinguishable) in tires and condoms.
That’s a different plant
I can almost taste the six seconds the flavor added to that will last!
Five minutes of microplastics or a blink of flavor? Answer might just be no gum :(
Yeah no idea why this is so hard to achieve but it’s a very noticeable difference.
Plastic is an organic material, trees are mostly plastic (lignin, a phenolic polymer, cellulose a polysaccharide polymer, hemicellulose an heteropolysaccharide and suberin a polyester-like polymer).
The problem we’re having is a naturalistic fallacy crossed with the unpleasant fact that almost everything we touch sheds dust and powder absolutely everywhere. This along with spores and yeast and other dusts constantly enter our bodies.
Plastic is only of note because we made it.
Any problems beyond that is speculative and will requires ginormous gobs of grant money to actually answer with anything than precautionary principle-based FUD.
Hydrocarbon based plastic absolutely isnt natural, there are many different kinds of plastic in existence but overwhelmingly stuff from the last 50 years has been the
inorganic hydrocarbonnon biodegradable hydrocarbon type which doesn’t break down and is likely a endocrinologal distruptor & a carcinogen.inorganic hydrocarbon
Hydrocarbons are, by definition, organic compounds made exclusively of carbon and hydrogen.
Do you know of any hydrocarbon that do not contain hydrogen nor carbon and that are relevant to this discussion ?
Care to not nitpick a slip of the mind (that’s already been pointed out and corrected) literally just after I had woken up and address the actual point?
current plastics not biodegradable is the same problem that trees had for 300 million years. I think it’s a matter of time before some yeast evolves the ability to eat plastic. Then all plastic will start to mold and rot like all other organic matter.
as for being “endocrinologal distruptor & a carcinogen”, yes so is a lot of other stuff, probably stuff in wood, again, like turpentine
We’re not going to ban all plastics until some company has a proprietary alternative that they can force us to buy by making all other products illegal to produce. But that new alternative doesn’t exist yet.
My advice, don’t eat electrical junction boxes
Ty for the response. I do agree we will likely wind up with some sort of plastic eating organism at some point, problem is how many centuries will that take. Might be a opportunity to apply gene editing at some point in the medium term future.
Fair point on turps but turps and other compounds from wood dont tend to linger in the enviroment for as long as plastic does currently.
Unfortunately any solutions will be taken by porkies and as you say regulatory captured into making our lives more expensive rather than for the betterment of humanity, should be govt ran labs looking into this sort of stuff not corpos with dollar signs in their eyes. Having saidthat some early stage alternatives such as a seaweed based biodegradable plastic could help hugely in the single use plastic department.
I think my face scrub still has these. But I would have to check, it might be just sand they put in there. Works great tho.
Edit - I checked, the ingredients say it’s silica. So yes, they put sand into it.
Don’t like thinking about how much of that probably made it to my brain, organs, and muscles :)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1
This study released last year based on samples from cadavers suggests there’s enough in your brain to make a plastic spoon
Sometimes I feel like my brain is a plastic spoon already
Maybe they can recycle me into a plastic spoon then.
Please, do name and shame.
Used to?
Oh I’d somehow forgotten this era
That shit was in everything non solid for like 2 years
Plastic gotta be this age’s lead/quicksilver.
It is. Along with PFAS.
Except plastic doesn’t really seem to do anything. It just “is there”. Unless you swallow enough of it to clog something, it doesn’t seem to do anything.
We’ve seens lots of “it might interefere with hormones”, but that part is always to be confirmed in the next research grant request and then we never hear about it again.
Plastics are a broad category. But specific plasticizers, like BPA, have been demonstrated to cause specific endocrine issues, up to and including a causal link to certain cancers, miscarriages, and other reproductive/immune issues. And it’s not just correlations being found, as the research is showing the mechanism of action by actually inducing the effects in vitro.
And so when a particular plasticizer has been shown to be harmful, the research goes into other chemically similar plasticizers to see whether they have biological effects, as well. BPS is another plasticizer that is being studied, as it is chemically similar to BPA.
So we haven’t shown that all microplastics are bad. I’m skeptical that these effects would extend to all plastics. But some common compounds that are present in many plastics are a cause for concern, and the difficulty in treating water or waste for microplastics in general means that some of those harmful compounds are present in lots of places where we’d rather not.
We moved from leaded gasoline to unleaded gasoline based on the specific dangers attributable to lead itself. We can do the same for the specific compounds in our plastics shown to be harmful. Maybe the end result is that we have a lot of safer plastics remaining. But your comment seems to suggest that we not even try.
Wtf is this meme border?
bordering on insanity
It’s that bullshit when they take a vertically oriented picture/video, stretch it and blur it to a 4:3 ratio, and center the content over it.
Imo a waste of bandwidth and computer power for people who can’t cope with the idea of vertical content on a horizontal screen, on a platform primarily accessed by phones anyway.
And now its on your balls. That’s the tragedy.
That’s not micro though?
No, but these beads pretty much go straight into the local waterways where they can very quickly break down into micro plastics. All so a human didn’t have to use a tool like a brush or a loofa to scrub themselves. Convenience at any cost.
Tbh many brushes and loofahs are plastic and erode into microplastic too.
It’s not what microplasitcs are! Does anyone knows what micro is at this point?
Microbeads are manufactured solid plastic particles of less than one millimeter in their largest dimension.[1] They are most frequently made of polyethylene but can be of other petrochemical plastics such as polypropylene and polystyrene. They are used in exfoliating personal care products, toothpastes, and in biomedical and health-science research.[2]
To add to this, the definition of microplastic is less than 5mm. So yes, 1mm microbeads are microplastics.
a micron in size?
If these aren’t microplastics, what are?
“Micro” just means “small” in this case and doesn’t mean “microscopic” or have anything to do with “micrometer”.
The definition of “microplastic” according to NOAA: “Microplastics are small plastic pieces less than five millimeters long”.
The problem with that, is that if you include everything “small” in the definition, the word loses all it’s meaning, feeble as it is already.
The word microplastic was introduced to describe not just any small piece of trash, but specifically that very small, invisible, pieces of plastics that are, as it turned out, everywhere, in the air, in the water, in our food, in our blood, even in space. If you add just small pieces of rubbish to it, we remove all the sense from the word, and will need another one.
Yeah, it’s sooooo funny… it’s heeeeeeel-larious! I don’t know about you, but I for one can’t stop laughing!
The way language is used or abused creates patterns in the mind.
I strongly suspect that this way of using language is not healthy at all, for an individual nor for a community.Funny has apparently been used to describe something suspicious for more than 200 years. So say it with a wild west accent.
