Starting the title of this article with the word "Beer" is misleading. A neat trick, caught my eye.
Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
21–30 of 318 posts
Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#22I strongly suspect that within about 50-100 years something will evolve that can digest all of this plastic. Which will probably cause us as a society to move back to glass and metal as storage components.
Why do you strongly suspect this?
No high quality source of hydrocarbons goes unexploited for long.
Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#23Text-only version: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=636845604
Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#24I strongly suspect that within about 50-100 years something will evolve that can digest all of this plastic. Which will probably cause us as a society to move back to glass and metal as storage components.
Why do you strongly suspect this?
He kind of has a point.
There are mutations in microbes all the time that allow plastic digestion, probably millions every day.
Only needs one that really punches through.
Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#25[deleted]
Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#26With 15 minutes of effort typing commands into a large bioinformatics database, you too can convince yourself that these contaminants may be behind the Diabetes epidemic. https://medium.com/@InfinoMe/diabetes-time-to-resort-to-plas...
IMHO, the contamination of the food supply with rancid vegetable oil is a more important factor in the diabetes epidemic. Almost all of the vegetable oils at grocery stores are refined so customers don't realize they're using rancid oils. Vegetable oil is useful as biodiesel, and for making paints and stains. A drying oil is an oil that hardens to a tough, solid film after a period of exposure to air. The oil hardens…
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Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#27Plastics should be taxed.
Agreed. There should be a mitigation cost associated with all plastics. Nothing more frustrating than buying a container for some food that will last for millennia meanwhile the food was consumed in a couple minutes...
More generally, I hope more will push for taxes on all things we want to discourage as means of weening off. Oil, coal, plastic, high impact animal products. All of them have huge external costs, none of which are payed by the consumer or producer directly.
Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does the blocktext and link have to do with your supposition?
Most so-called "vegetable oils" were traditionally used as drying oils. This was before the paint industry figured out how to use petroleum distillates in their products in the mid-20th century. Linseed oil was renamed "flaxseed oil" when the market for stain made with linseed oil dried up. Containers of vegetable oils typically develop a sticky film on them, due to the drying oil effect.
Maybe I'm not viewing this with the proper historical context, but I don't understand why you are saying the market for linseed oil has "dried up" for non-food uses. Boiled linseed oil, which contains linseed oil, is probably the most common oil based finish for woodworking.
I also looked at this website about "Linseed oil market analysis" [1], which shows that Paints & Varnishes is still the largest user of linseed oil. Then processed foods, then pharma, then cosmetic, then flooring (which is probably also as a finish).
I'm eye-balling the graphs because they don't have a table, but it looks like processed foods is only about 20% of the market. That might be a lot, I don't know, but it doesn't seem fair to say all this excess linseed oil is going into foods because there is no other use for it.
1: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/linseed-...
Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#29Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#30I strongly suspect that within about 50-100 years something will evolve that can digest all of this plastic. Which will probably cause us as a society to move back to glass and metal as storage components.
Why do you strongly suspect this?
Well for one, bacteria already exists that eats plastic: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6278/1196
It's not too far fetched to assume this already-existent bacteria could continue to exist and possibly mutate into something more efficient or proliferate to encompass the entire ocean.