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How to breathe in fewer microplastics in your home

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Re: How to breathe in fewer microplastics in your home

#51

Post by VladVladikoff »

OutOfHere wrote: post #14
dijit wrote: post #6

Realistically, the best thing you can do to reduce your microplastics intake seems to be to avoid microwaving in plastic bowls and to avoid using plastic bottles for soft drinks and water. (Though cans actually use a thin film of plastic inside too.. so, maybe just avoid packaged water?) Beyond your personal intake though there's bigger fish. Car tyres are the #1 source for microplastics entering rivers, and it's not…

One action doesn't obviate the need for another. Also, stop using dishwashing pods and laundry pods with the dissolvable plastic layer encasing them. Use powder or liquid detergent instead. If you can't find it in store, look for it online, because it definitely is in stock.

Where I live it has become almost impossible to find powdered dish detergent. Everything is the pods.

Re: How to breathe in fewer microplastics in your home

#52

Post by Gigachad »

scotty79 wrote: post #41
alt227 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If cars are causing microplastic pollution, Im sure bikes and trains are too. Im seems using rubber/plastic compounds for tyres and brakes is always going to cause this issue on any vehicle.

With cars there are higher energies involved, and things like that tend to grow with square or cube of the energy. I wouldn't be surprised if car was causing orders of magnitude more plastic pollution than a bike per person per mile.

It’s quite intuitive to think about. The entire tread of the tire becomes ground up plastic dust. Cars burn through significantly more KGs of tires in a year than a bicycle.

Re: How to breathe in fewer microplastics in your home

#53

Post by [deleted] »

strogonoff wrote: post #13
sigmoid10 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the fact that they are so ubiquitous and yet no causal relation between microplastics and any health issue whatsoever has been identified in any rigorous study until today [1], I'd say a lot of this reporting is fear mongering by the eco/organic industry, aimed at gullible people who know very little about science. Not as insane and unphysical as electro smog, but definitely nowhere near asbestos. The linked ar…

> BPA is a known endocrine disruptor. Although initially considered to be a weak environmental estrogen, more recent studies have demonstrated that BPA may be similar in potency to estradiol in stimulating some cellular responses. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21605673/ > In 2017 the European Chemicals Agency concluded that BPA should be listed as a substance of very high concern due to its properties as an endocri…

[deleted]

Re: How to breathe in fewer microplastics in your home

#54

Post by bertil »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #38

I've heard that removing latex gloves when breathing might help...

Classic case of PR leveraging a real, anecdotic observation on one single result, but completely flipping it to pretend it’s a systematic result, to saw doubt on all scientific findings around microplastic. The same companies behind this last story have done the same thing to slow down regulation to limit the impact of smoking, alcohol, processed foods, oil refinery, global warming, lead pipes…

Re: How to breathe in fewer microplastics in your home

#55

Post by alt227 »

bertil wrote: post #43
alt227 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If cars are causing microplastic pollution, Im sure bikes and trains are too. Im seems using rubber/plastic compounds for tyres and brakes is always going to cause this issue on any vehicle.

The amount of damage to tires is proportional to the fourth power of the weight per axel. That means that for the same journey, a bike sheds (3000 kg / 80 kg)ˆ4 so about 20 million times less. Assuming that the rubber is the same—and not that it has proprietary chemistry that may or may not contain carcinogens. Eight orders of magnitude of difference feels relevant. Almost every train I know use metal wheels. We can…

Lovely tone, you sound like a really nice person.

I never mentioned train wheels at all. Their brake pads are made from things like carbon, ceramic, and resin compounds. These wear down like any brake pads and so cause the same dust pollution. Remember that some trains in the world are over a mile long and have over 1000 wheels.

I dont see anybody claiming that bikes or trains cause anywhere near the same level as cars, but it is important to remember that they still do cause some and so they are not a silver bullet. Solutions still need advancing in order to completely remove these pollutants from human transportation systems.

Re: How to breathe in fewer microplastics in your home

#56

Post by sigmoid10 »

dijit wrote: post #46
sigmoid10 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I still subscribe to science and not speculation. But I guess I am increasingly alone with that idea on HN. And to be clear if someone points out a rigorous causal link, I'd be onboard immediately. But this purely speculative fear mongering based on random scientific observations targeted at non-scientists is similar to what you see in the homeopathy and energeticism circles. Except noone here would believe th…

The science disagrees with your hypothesis that "provably, nothing is the matter".

Then please link to it. I'm still waiting for a causal health issue meta analysis that disagrees with me. Shouldn't be hard, if "the science" as you call it has come to a consensus. But I have only seen wild speculation so far like the one linked here.

Re: How to breathe in fewer microplastics in your home

#57

Post by Gigachad »

schiffern wrote: post #23
OutOfHere wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way to get air purifiers to really work well is to install them at the air intake, i.e. in the windows, or where the central air intake is, so all incoming air passes through them. I use indoor air purifiers too, but not as a substitute for ones at the intake. Note that tires and diesel fumes are prominent neighborhood sources of harmful particulates. It is not expensive to run intake fans in the spring and fall…

That helps for pollution that comes from outside (traffic, pollen, wood smoke), but most of the microplastics are generated by moving/wearing synthetic textiles inside the home. Positive pressure systems are great, love 'em, but there's a quantitative mismatch in this case. Above ~1 ACH your HVAC costs will go through the roof (even with heat/humidity recovery), but for effective filtration you need 6-8 ACH to catch…

And for pm2.5, at least in Australia, it’s entirely generated from cooking. Outside air is very clean.

Re: How to breathe in fewer microplastics in your home

#58

Post by bertil »

alt227 wrote: post #55
bertil wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of damage to tires is proportional to the fourth power of the weight per axel. That means that for the same journey, a bike sheds (3000 kg / 80 kg)ˆ4 so about 20 million times less. Assuming that the rubber is the same—and not that it has proprietary chemistry that may or may not contain carcinogens. Eight orders of magnitude of difference feels relevant. Almost every train I know use metal wheels. We can…

Lovely tone, you sound like a really nice person. I never mentioned train wheels at all. Their brake pads are made from things like carbon, ceramic, and resin compounds. These wear down like any brake pads and so cause the same dust pollution. Remember that some trains in the world are over a mile long and have over 1000 wheels. I dont see anybody claiming that bikes or trains cause anywhere near the same level as ca…

> Im sure bikes and trains are too. > … for tyres and brakes

You are welcome to edit your comment to clarify.

Re: How to breathe in fewer microplastics in your home

#59

Post by dijit »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #56
dijit wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The science disagrees with your hypothesis that "provably, nothing is the matter".

Then please link to it. I'm still waiting for a causal health issue meta analysis that disagrees with me. Shouldn't be hard, if "the science" as you call it has come to a consensus. But I have only seen wild speculation so far like the one linked here.

Sure. Here's a few:

- Microplastics found in 76% of human semen samples, with PET-exposed men showing reduced sperm motility: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12299061/

- Multi-site study across China (113 men), PTFE microplastics linked to sperm dysfunction (published in eBioMedicine/Lancet): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...

- Microplastics found in every human testicle sampled, at 3x the concentration of dogs, with PVC correlating to lower sperm count in canines: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36948312/

- In-vitro exposure of human semen to polystyrene MPs showed time-dependent decline in motility and increased DNA fragmentation: https://www.mdpi.com/2305-6304/13/7/605

The mouse study I linked earlier isn't the whole picture; it's one piece. The "no human evidence" line was maybe defensible in 2022. It isn't anymore.

Also, re: "1000 mg/L is unrealistic".. the study used two doses, 100 μg/L and 1000 μg/L. Raw surface water in Amsterdam has been measured at ~50 μg/L. The lower experimental dose is well within an order of magnitude of real-world contamination. That's how dose-response science works.

Comparing this to homeopathy is… a choice.

Re: How to breathe in fewer microplastics in your home

#60

Post by schiffern »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #49
schiffern wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>microwaving in plastic bowls More generally, never let hot food touch plastics. The high temperature is what damages the plastic surface, not anything special about microwaves. For instance the same thing happens with plastic tea bags in hot water: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004565352...

Wait, WHAT? There are _plastic_ tea bags? Really? Didnt know that we reached that level of degredation already! :-D Another example comes to my mind: In lot of European conutries, at "cheese corner/bar" in the supermarket, every time a piece of cheese is cut, they are removing the foil, cutting the cheese, and then re-packing it in new foil after that - and this for every chees bar in every supermarket: How much kilo…

The kicker? It's only on high-end tea, because it's more expensive than regular tea bags.
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