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Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

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Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#71

Post by c3534l »

exabrial wrote: post #46
WalterBright wrote: post #8

Plastics should be taxed.

Couple of points: Taxes don't work to work to change behavior, or people would have stopped speeding a long time ago, sugary drinks wouldn't sell in Seattle, and people would stop buying coffee in California. They are an unfortunate excuse used by politicians to fool the public into "hey I'm doing something!". Instead, innovation is needed around providing biodegradable solutions that can outcompete their plastic cou…

> Taxes don't work to work to change behavior

This is absolute nonsense and flies in the face of established economic theory backed up by empirical evidence. I don't understand why there are so many people in this thread pulling assertions out of their ass like this. HackerNews is better than that.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#72

Post by WalterBright »

exabrial wrote: post #46
WalterBright wrote: post #8

Plastics should be taxed.

Couple of points: Taxes don't work to work to change behavior, or people would have stopped speeding a long time ago, sugary drinks wouldn't sell in Seattle, and people would stop buying coffee in California. They are an unfortunate excuse used by politicians to fool the public into "hey I'm doing something!". Instead, innovation is needed around providing biodegradable solutions that can outcompete their plastic cou…

All you have to do is look at the evolution of beer cans. Over the decades, you'll see a steady reduction in the amount of metal used in them. This isn't for any environmental or regulatory reasons, it's purely cost reduction, since COGS (Cost Of Goods Sold) reduction is a powerful way to increase profits.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#73

Post by subcosmos »

timr wrote: post #54
subcosmos wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it really? Elevated blood glucose, as in Type 2 Diabetes, has LONG been known to be primarily driven by excessive production of glucose by the liver due to liver insulin resistance. In fact, the way that the drug metformin improves diabetes is by shutting that pathway down. http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/50/8/1807.short Thats not dietary, thats the hormone insulin being ignored by the liver. This…

TCF7L2 is a transcription factor. It is involved in many pathways in human biology, of which diabetes is one. Observing that it is downregulated in diabetics provides no evidence for or against any theories concerning BPA.

It's also the most statistically significant gene, in the whole dang genome, associated with Type 2 Diabetes.

And out of a compound library of 20k chemicals, BPA had the top effect on it.

Seems significant to me

Also worth noting that BPA has been shown to specifically effect the occupancy of TCF7L2 at transcription factor binding sites in Chip-Seq experiments.

http://press.endocrine.org/doi/abs/10.1210/endo-meetings.201...

Lastly, before calling someone else's claims psuedoscientific, you may want to do some homework and check your previous biases. We could certainly use someone with your skills to help model BPAs interaction with the Androgen receptor. Might just save millions of lives....

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#74

Post by fredsir »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #64
fredsir wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's irrelevant. It's still the fat that causes type 2 diabetes. That doesn't mean keto can't work because it clearly can as long as it doesn't lead to overconsumption of fat. Also there are different kinds of carbs. As long as you keep to whole-food carbs, you practically can't eat too many (except for a few kinds like nuts and seeds and avocados) because you will be full long before it's too much. It's a differen…

This is not true (whole food carbs vs processed food). Carbs are carbs, and should be avoided as much as possible (no more than 20-30g/day).

I can only recommend that you go and do some research on the difference between whole-food carbs and processed carbs, because that is a very unhealthy (and unscientific) view on probably the single most important nutrient for the human body taking into account the fact that carbs is literally what evolution selected as our preferred brain-fuel, not ketone bodies.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#75

Post by harshreality »

baxtr wrote: post #61
subcosmos wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can keep running on the macronutrient treadmill, like we've been doing for 50 years, or we can find molecular evidence that jives with genetics. Check out this study, where they fed mice water, water+fructose, or water+fructose+BPA. At the end of the experiment, only the BPA containing solutions had elevated liver fat https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300483X1...

But what about other countries than the US? Japan, Europe? They use lots of plastic too. I haven’t heard of a diabetes epidemic there yet though.

Trends in prevalence of diabetes in Asian countries, doi: 10.4239/wjd.v3.i6.110 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3382707/

Diabetes in Asia and the Pacific: Implications for the Global Epidemic, https://doi.org/10.2337/dc15-1536 ( http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/39/3/472 )

Someone needs to do a dietary and sociological study of Vietnam, because it looks like they've been least affected by the diabetes epidemic, up until the early 2010s at least.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#76

Post by WalterBright »

delecti wrote: post #43
robotkdick wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because plastic is so cheap, producers will pay the tax, continue using plastic, and pass the costs onto consumers. Given the higher cost of other materials, changing consumer behavior (which is not easy, but it's happening right now, and achievable through further exposure and education) may be the only way to change producers' behavior. While a tax seems like an easy fix, it may also cause the government to come to…

> While a tax seems like an easy fix, it may also cause the government to come to rely on income from plastic acting as a deterrent to law-making which discourages the use of plastics. I don't know how common such a thing is, but in Washington state if a tax is labeled as a "fee", it must be earmarked for a specific purpose. If we put a "plastic fee" on products packaged with single-use plastics, and then mandated th…

I'd sell a plastics tax as revenue neutral, i.e. coupling it with a tax reduction on something else.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#77

Post by sgslo »

c3534l wrote: post #68
newswriter99 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"within about 50-100 years" That's how bottlenecks work, but not evolution. No species is going to evolve in the next century which will be able to suddenly break down plastic and turn it into energy/nutrients. The ones that do, mostly bacertium and fungi, were pre-disposed to doing so, and didn't suddenly X-men their way into consuming plastic. As for organisms such as the Chinese mealworm that "eats" plastic bags,…

> No species is going to evolve in the next century which will be able to suddenly break down plastic and turn it into energy/nutrients. Such a species already exists: https://www.sciencealert.com/new-plastic-munching-bacteria-c... There are also bacteria that can break down nylon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria I don't understand why people are so dismissive of ideas that are a simple google sea…

The sentence after the one you quoted referenced the species that already exist.

> The ones that do, mostly bacertium and fungi, were pre-disposed to doing so, and didn't suddenly X-men their way into consuming plastic.

Not to be a smartass, but I don't understand why people read a post to the first sentence that upsets them then instantly reply without reading the rest.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#78

Post by subcosmos »

harshreality wrote: post #70
subcosmos wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can keep running on the macronutrient treadmill, like we've been doing for 50 years, or we can find molecular evidence that jives with genetics. Check out this study, where they fed mice water, water+fructose, or water+fructose+BPA. At the end of the experiment, only the BPA containing solutions had elevated liver fat https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300483X1...

There's a notable lack of dose-response relationship in most of the collected data, and n=12 for each group doesn't inspire confidence even if in some cases the p-value suggests significance. There are already a lot of measurements taken and included in the table where differences were not that large. Were other measurements taken and not reported in the table? Has anyone attempted to reproduce this? Most importantly…

I havent yet seen other studies comparing BPA with carb ingestion, but I hope they are done. Its important to root out the effect since BPA lines every single soda-pop can.

Aside from that though, there are many other mouse studies.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2605....

As well as studies showing that BPA in human urine is associated with insulin resistance and obesity

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/97/2/E223/2836542

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#79

Post by asteli »

Re: microfibers making it into water systems:

This is a con to synthetic fibers that I hadn't been considering before. Recently I learned that cotton has a pretty high environmental footprint (land use, highest pesticide use of any crop, high water consumption) [1], and thus started moving some of my clothing purchases toward polyester-blends (trades the cons of cotton for petrochemical and energy use).

Does anyone have a good grasp on the total environmental impact of these options, considering the entire chain (mining/extraction/cultivation -> disposal/environmental release)?

[1]: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/CBD-Fiber-Selection... [edit: added source]

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#80

Post by [deleted] »

c3534l wrote: post #68
newswriter99 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"within about 50-100 years" That's how bottlenecks work, but not evolution. No species is going to evolve in the next century which will be able to suddenly break down plastic and turn it into energy/nutrients. The ones that do, mostly bacertium and fungi, were pre-disposed to doing so, and didn't suddenly X-men their way into consuming plastic. As for organisms such as the Chinese mealworm that "eats" plastic bags,…

> No species is going to evolve in the next century which will be able to suddenly break down plastic and turn it into energy/nutrients. Such a species already exists: https://www.sciencealert.com/new-plastic-munching-bacteria-c... There are also bacteria that can break down nylon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria I don't understand why people are so dismissive of ideas that are a simple google sea…

[deleted]
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