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From clothing? Do you have any idea how prevalent it's become? It is hard/impossible to find clothes without traces of plastic.
It seems plastic in fabrics can mostly be replaced with cotton.
Does someone have good papers on the negative effects of microplastics (ideally on humans)? A while back I tried to look for those, and it was nontrivial to find papers that would conclusively show that they are harmful, and the mechanisms of this harmfulness. There's a ton of press about where they are (everywhere) but (as a layman) you could argue it's because they're not very reactive, and this lack of reactivity…
This is probably one of the most prominent studies till date: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38446676 Microplastics and nanoplastics in atheromas and cardiovascular events. N Engl J Med. 390(10):900-910, 2024. Summary: People with artherial plaque that contains micro- and nano-plastics have a higher risk of death during the followup period. It's an observational study, sample size is not too big, but some findings l…
There are very good, very practical reasons we moved from glass (and metal and other materials) containers to plastic. Unless those factors are sufficiently addressed, plastic is here to stay.
For those who haven't been keeping track or are just too damn young to know history, those factors include:
* Weight. Glass and metal, and also other materials like ceramic and wooden containers, are heavy compared to plastic. This additional weight means it takes more energy to transport, meaning more costs in fuel and labor.
* Fragility. This namely applies to glass; glass containers are fragile and they are very dangerous to handle if and when they break. Plastic containers are much more durable, and even if they break they are seldom as dangerous as broken glass. More broken containers also mean more goods lost to spillage, which in turn means additional cost to re-manufacture and re-ship.
* Durability. Going along with the above, plastics are equal to metal containers in keeping contents and the outside world separated. This is incredibly important for ensuring food safety.
* Contaminants. This applies primarily to metal containers, but also paper and sometimes ceramic. Metals leach into foods, this is mostly prevented with special coatings but it's not perfect and the coatings themselves are also contaminants that will eventually leach. Likewise paper containers which have coatings applied so liquids don't seep through, and sometimes ceramic containers to prevent leaching. We know these contaminants are bad, unlike microplastics where we still aren't conclusively sure.
* Cost. Plastic is cheap compared to basically every other material we can make containers out of. This is a great boon to the consumer who ultimately ends up paying the most markup.
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"were wearing wool, wood and leather and somehow even managed to do something like mountaineering" Serious mountaineering is still done with merino wool.
You obviously have no clue about "serious mountaineering" and what you are talking about in general. Even though I do have a couple of merino wool items, they can be replaced with synthetics quite easily (the only real upside of wool is it is very warm and comfortable to sleep in), and no amount of wool will replace the other 95% of my clothing, which is mostly synthetic. Well, except for down, obviously, which is th…
Let's also not forget while down is natural, the material encapsulating it is usually not!
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As another commenter pointed out, you could (and people surely did) make the same argument about lead or asbestos. That alone doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do.
We have clear evidence that asbestos and lead are very harmful. I don't think we have that evidence for plastic (yet). Also you totally can start buying plastic free clothes here and now. Just more expensive usually.
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It seems plastic in fabrics can mostly be replaced with cotton.
What is your evidence that microparticles from cotton are not also toxic?
When we are trying to predict the implications of unproven technologies on complex worldwide economies, there is talk of "obvious inevitability"
When we express concerns that chemicals humanity recently started coating the entire planet with at an alarming rate seem to get really deep into every kind of living tissue and nearly everything else we've ever seen bioaccumulate like that has caused a lot of unforeseen issues that took a long time to suss out but most turn out to be at least somewhat harmful, there's all this "well we don't have longitudinal RCTs with enormous sample sizes showing the specific harms of every specific plastic published in prestigious journals yet so who knows really"
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As another commenter pointed out, you could (and people surely did) make the same argument about lead or asbestos. That alone doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do.
We have clear evidence that asbestos and lead are very harmful. I don't think we have that evidence for plastic (yet). Also you totally can start buying plastic free clothes here and now. Just more expensive usually.
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Why is it impractical? It would be unpopular and put prices up but it could be done. We would have to reduce the amount of clothing that is produced but that is hardly a problem as we produce vastly more than we need. We could eliminate fast fashion for a start.
You don't hear people saying, man, that asbestos and lead did a bang up job on X. But you 100% see 100% of women wearing stretchy pants. For the longest time I exclusively wore cotton jeans and then they became impossible to find and I finally realized what plastic was good for: fat people. Now I see men wearing them all the time. The struggle of the 80s on people killing themselves to fit into jeans is not longer a…
I am fairly convinced that this comment section is among the best demonstrations for "isolated demands for rigor" I have personally ever seen, especially paired with any comment section about an AI-related article When we are trying to predict the implications of unproven technologies on complex worldwide economies, there is talk of "obvious inevitability" When we express concerns that chemicals humanity recently sta…