Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 318 posts

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#181

Post by WalterBright »

rhacker wrote: post #132
mehrdadn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You do realize "work" isn't a binary thing?

Cigarettes can be an indicator: http://www.nber.org/papers/w18326 > Our evidence suggests that increases in cigarette taxes are associated with small decreases in cigarette consumption and that it will take sizable tax increases, on the order of 100%, to decrease adult smoking by as much as 5%.

Canada tried increasing cigarette taxes a lot a couple decades ago. The result was the emergence of a black market, smuggling, and drive-by shootings of the rival smuggling gangs.

The tax was lowered back down.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#182

Post by kingkawn »

kingkawn wrote: post #107

Personal anecdote; just got back from a trip to Hawaii. Many of the beaches there had significant deposits of pebble sized and smaller visible plastic particles. Presumably there’s exponentially more smaller ones that I couldn’t as easily see. Some of the beaches had plastic floating in the water. Locals said it wasn’t island dumped garbage, it was brought in from currents from the ocean. Horrific to see.

For those asking for pictures, I didn’t take any of the plastic in the water, only the beach. It was near Laie on Oahu. It seemed current and shoreline dependent.

https://postimg.cc/gallery/2d0q09gqk/

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#183

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…

Note that this study specifically showed that fructose alone did not increase liver fat content unless BPA was present in the solution. See figure 3, but yes, I agree that it would have been nice if they tried BPA without the fructose.

This really does make sense. When that pathway is suppressed, the adipogenic program is activated, which turns on the SREBP-1 pathway and stores lipid droplets. Without this pathway activated, fructose is processed and exported out of the liver, preventing harm to the liver.

I would argue that we should really test every new manmade chemical against a library of our proteins before we synthesize anything new and introduce millions of tons of it to the world. Not doing so can have disasterous consequences.

Samuel Epstein, before he died, documented a great many examples of horror stories we just barely averted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQoc6WP3QJo

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#184

Post by subcosmos »

allover wrote: post #159
subcosmos wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The treadmill is the endless debate over whether or not fats vs carbs are more obesogenic. This debate continues ad-nauseum and distracts from more nuanced explanations. High fat consumption raises inflammatory profiles through mechanisms that are poorly understood. Carbohydrates seem to cause similar inflammation, but this is largely do to advanced gylcation end-products created from fructose, specifically. Overeati…

> Overeating is not interesting. The reason people do overeat is very interesting What if it's not. What if people just overeat because life is boring, and food tastes good, and we all have differing levels of willpower & education on nutrition? > if you hit the literature you find that this is largely driven by damage to the hypothalamus by environmental exposure. Sounds like nonsense, can you elaborate?

There is a specific part of the hypothalamus called the arcuate nucleus. It lacks a blood brain barrier, because the neurons there have a special function to sense blood-born hormones like insulin and leptin. When sensed, the brain interprets this as a "full tank of gas" and suppresses appetite while increasing metabolism.

Since theres no blood brain barrier here, these neurons get damaged easily due to things in the blood. When that happens, they don't see leptin anymore, and obesity develops. Fructose and high fat diets have both been shown to cause inflammation here. (hypothalamic gliosis)

heres a random selection of many papers http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/65/3/551.figure...

We also know that certain viruses show up in obese people (adenovirus36). As the field develops, I would not be surprised if labs demonstrate both viral infection of the hypothalamic ARC and damage by endocrine disruptors there.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#186

Post by zeth___ »

jacobolus wrote: post #167
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that vein, I’ve noticed how little many seemingly progressive companies care about plastic waste. Lots of products that I would think are meant to cater to a progressive, “green” crowd use thick packaging apparently to give the product a premium feel. Hint brand water is one example, and a bag of Forager chips I had recently did this too. The thick plastic gives the product a premium feel but is utterly destructiv…

Products like chips should be forced to use biodegradable bags (whether wax paper, bioplastics, ...). Similarly, disposable drinking straws, cutlery, the little wrappers they come in, etc. should be biodegradable. At most it might cost a few cents more per unit, but when millions of them get dumped in a river somewhere, they won’t stay there permanently. Trying to eliminate packaging altogether is hopeless at this po…

Sure in the third world.

Doing that in the first world makes about as much sense as a tax on bowel movements because people in India don't use toilets and we need to pay for the increase in communicable diseases.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#187

Post by zeth___ »

woogiewonka wrote: post #151

As an individual who wants to make the biggest impact on this issue, what are my options? I am a UX/UI designer and I wonder what I could do to help rid the world of microplastics. I was thinking off the top of my head: 1. Write a letter to every company that uses exorbitant amount plastic in it's product or packaging (tons of them here in Japan) and try to make them aware of the issue (appeal through emotions - thei…

As posts in the thread have made clear, this is a third world problem which is being exported to the rest of us.

A captain for proper sanitation and waste disposal in China and Africa would greatly reduce this problem.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#188

Post by jibcage »

trumped wrote: post #141
DoreenMichele wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An attempt at explaining metric measures to Americans by referencing something readers of an online article should have ready access to.

could have said 3/16" and it would have been close enough (but either way, it is pretty big) edit: Most Americans know what 3/16" is, right?

You’d probably be better off rounding up to 1/4”.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#189

Post by mirimir »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #138
lwanga wrote: post #136

"Scientists call the tiny pieces "microplastics" and define them as objects smaller than 5 millimeters — about the size of one of the letters on a computer keyboard." I am not quite understanding this sentence. Size of the letters on a computer keyboard!? What?

An attempt at explaining metric measures to Americans by referencing something readers of an online article should have ready access to.

OK, how about 22 caliber?

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#190

Post by [deleted] »

nostromo wrote: post #109

A small number of countries are responsible for the majority of plastic in the ocean. China is far and away the worst offender: https://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_12211_... https://www.iswa.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Calendar_2011_03_...

[deleted]
Post reply on HN