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Microplastics in the human brain

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Microplastics in the human brain

#121

Post by raddan »

mythrwy wrote: post #98
idiotsecant wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you consume drinks? Meat? Produce? All these things are chock full of their own micro plastics. It's unavoidable. We can probably reduce contamination but our children's children's children won't be free of it, not until organisms evolve to efficiently eat it. Then we'll have whole other sets of problems.

Do I consume drinks? No, except water and instant coffee, no soda, no beer. Meat? Yes in small quantities and much of it comes from the local environment. I grow most of my own produce, with RO water. Yes they are unavoidable, just the plastic containers etc probably give some and I do eat candies and imported bananas and bread etc. But pretty sure I get a lot lower dose than most people. However I'm not sure it matt…

> However I'm not sure it matters that much until a mechanism of actual damage is established.

This is the thing about all the microplastics articles I see popping up: they rarely include any description of harm. If they even mention it, it is only speculative, as in this article. Until I read a scientific article about real harms, I am going to regard most of the microplastics news as fearmongering. Humanity has been surrounded by vast quantities of plastic for decades; if there was a big effect, wouldn’t we have seen it by now? If it has big effects, those effects would be surprising, which means that the evidence would have to be strong. I don’t see a lot of strong evidence.

If anyone reading this has a paper like this, please share.

Re: Microplastics in the human brain

#122

Post by tocs3 »

mythrwy wrote: post #62
shironandonon_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t work. It’s in the rainwater. No rainwater on earth is safe to drink. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62391069

Does osmosis remove? Is it in all groundwater? Because I have a well. A deep one. And an osmosis system.

6 months ago on HN "Boiling and filtering can remove microplastics from drinking water: study:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41193531

Re: Microplastics in the human brain

#124

Post by drawkward »

pulvinar wrote: post #51
kijin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on where the sand is. I don't want that stuff in my lungs.

Lungs have been dealing with sand dust since there were lungs, have they not? Honest science on a foreign material in the brain or body should be able to present a baseline amount of total foreign material for comparison. If our environment is now 10% microplastics, then 10% of the foreign material found in the brain being microplastics would be normal.

Such an easy point, and yet the parent posters dont get it...

Re: Microplastics in the human brain

#125

Post by raddan »

nozzlegear wrote: post #117
dymk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hope you never have to drive to the grocery store

My grocery store is literally in another town 20 miles away. I have an EV but apparently those are even worse for microplastic generation. Am I screwed?

An EV is objectively not worse for the environment. And virtually all vehicles contain large amounts of plastic (eg PVC). I recently heard model year 2024 vehicles are ~30% plastic by weight.

I’d wait until somebody can clearly state what the demonstrated harms of microplastics are before you conclude that there’s nothing you can do. An EV reduces emissions that we KNOW are bad, and over their lifetimes, the reduction is huge compared to an ICE vehicle. If you’re worried, though, walk or bike whenever you can.

Biking to grocery store is not an option for you, but you can still make a difference if you think about it. Eg, go to the store less frequently. Switch to a chest freezer for perishables. And so on. Draw up an energy budget and do the math.

There is a cost to human life, sure. But you can make it work if you really care enough. You are definitely not screwed.

Re: Microplastics in the human brain

#126

Post by _sys49152 »

jondwillis wrote: post #29

Really regretting chewing on all of those straws as a kid, eating hot food out of all of those takeout trays, keeping my car windows open, living near roads… and…

I rode a hard plastic bike seat on my bmx to school and back everyday. eyes emoji. my kids i shoot out will be g.i. joe figurines

Re: Microplastics in the human brain

#127

Post by sooheon »

twelvechairs wrote: post #113
hammock wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we need more lightweight cars , not heavier, since tire wear is proportional to vehicle weight to the fourth power. Ironically, CAFE regulations and EV incentives both did the opposite

Roads and road standards are a tragedy of the commons. People keep buying bigger cars and demanding more, wider lanes and parking spaces because they don't take any of the burden individually - it's the taxpayers as a whole that foot the bill. Paradoxically most of the 'small government' types are often the biggest road users.

The solution to tragedies of the commons is to internalize externalities. Tax should scale with carbon use, congestion contribution, and microplastic emission.

Re: Microplastics in the human brain

#128

Post by raddan »

lenerdenator wrote: post #74
tcfhgj wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody is going to stop driving. Car tires are the largest source of microplastics. many already have, bicycles and public transport ftw

There's realistically fewer than twenty metro areas in the US where the majority of commuters could rely solely on biking and public transit for everything. Twenty might be generous, even.

That may be true, but you don’t have to rely on biking for “everything.” Some biking is better than no biking.

I live in a small college town a couple of miles from the college. I walk, run, or bike to work nearly every day. But I am not a purist about it. We have a snowstorm forecast for tomorrow so I am going to drive (my EV). Would it be better for the environment if I walked? Probably? Does one trip really make that much of a difference though? Probably not.

I think there are likely many many places where people can walk or bike to some of the things if not all of the things. People really should do that more (not the least reason because biking is wonderful). Biking to the grocery store is mostly impractical for me as it is many miles away. But that’s ok! I am doing other things.

Re: Microplastics in the human brain

#129

Post by crazygringo »

scotty79 wrote: post #19

Cool. Now how much sand is in your brain? Equivalent of two glass spoons? Sand dust is way more abundant than plastic and similarly inert.

You're being downvoted, but I think it's a really good question.

We eat and breathe all sorts of stuff that comes in nano-sized particles. We've been inhaling smoke from cooking fire, eating plant matter crushed between rocks rubbing against each other, drinking water with dissolved bits of all sorts of things, and so forth for many millenia now.

The body seems to have mechanisms to clear most of this stuff out of us over time, no? Isn't our body chock-full of waste products from our cells that are constantly getting flushed out? Is there any reason to think that nanoplastics would be different?

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