Earlier quoted context omitted.
We do..?
How so?
In the EU it is taxed through VAT on electricity.
Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
271–280 of 318 posts
Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#272Can we please have science articles about science and research and leave biographies of scientists out of it? I want to read about plastic. I don't want to read about what the researcher who works on it wanted to do in her childhood.
Please. It's one of the worst things about this type of journalism and constantly gets in a way of a good story.
Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
> 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? Then we need to explain why this suddenly became a problem in the 1970s. Life is more boring now? We all lost our willpower? People understood nutrition better before that? Something has changed, either in humanity or the environment. My bet is the envir…
Was there enough extremely cheap and tasty food before the 1970s?
Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wool is a great material to consider as well.
Especially for socks during exercise. I find it helps keep my feet dry much more than cotton oe synthetics.
Last year I discovered the joy that is merino wool ski clothes. A friend had a pro-discount on Icebreaker and I stocked up before a ski trip. Excellent stuff.
Here's a good/entertaining video that compares synthetic to merino for ski layers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh8BFytupwA
His conclusion is that the synthetic was just as warm, but the merino wool did a better job of dissipating .. aromas... and stayed 'clean' longer.
It's unfortunate that a lot of the 'wool' out there is still blended with synthetics for cost or supposed-technical reasons.
Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#275Re: 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 h…
I suspect that bamboo clothing is the way to go. Bamboo grows anywhere and requires very little input and no pesticides. I don't know what the carbon footprint of turning it into thread is, though. I suspect still smaller than polyester. Plus, bamboo clothes are super soft.
Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#276Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#277Personal 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.
How would locals know where the garbage came from?
I'm not caught up with the microplastics problem.
But I suspect the locals had read testimony from scientists studying the problem. People really give a shit about pollution in Hawai'i.
It also seems very unlikely that the quantity would be there without ocean currents bringing it in from the big offenders like China.
Hawai'i has a pretty small population of people who are widely very concientious about polluting the ocean, compared to most other people in the world.
Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Came here to say the same. We stayed in a beachfront house in Laie and the beach was covered in microplastics. Every morning there’d be workers raking the beach to clean it up, but the beaches would be covered in the microplastics again by the end of the day. While I was swimming I’d be surrounded by it as well. It seemed very much dependent on currents, as beaches further south on the windward shore were still prist…
I guess in an ocean full of heavier (than most if not all common plastics) sediments and naturally occurring materials the plastic would find it's way to the top (from floating or being just below the surface. It would probably only sink if it was a significant chunk of plastic or something closed with a cap and/or is heavy enough to guarantee sinking. Maybe there could be some way to help sift things out more quickl…
I believe the documentary A Plastic Ocean covers a lot for ocean pollution.
For global warming/climate change- An Inconvenient Truth, which is now probably dated.
I saw a great documentary of the impacts of climate change already being seen in Ladakh firsthand: Jungwa: A Broken Balance. It's pretty depressing to see a village running out of water because of the greed of a society they could never comprehend. Instead they pray for hours, thinking their problems that stem from the environment, are evidence of their own sins. Heartbreaking to see the people that will be impacted the most with the least resources to adapt.
Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#279I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet, but microplastics aren't only in our fish but it's also in American tap water. There is no water filter that I know of available to the consumer public that is fine enough to filter out microplastics of under 3 microns or something like that.
As some commenters have mentioned, these microplastics come from laundry, and more.
I'm currently working on developing disposable pads that are safe with a national Toms one for one model. Current pads and tampons from major brands are made with cotton that can have dioxin as a byproduct from the bleaching process, as well as rayon. Tiny pieces of rayon can get stuck and lead to complications like BVI, bacterial vaginosis. If a tampon can lead to health issues because of the plastic that can disintegrate in her body - I'm kind of really scared about what other type of damage microplastics in our drinking water can do. I mean we already have pictures of what it does to fish. What do microplastics do to the human body?
This is one of the things where I wish I was wrong, so if anyone can educate me on how this is an irrational anxiety, I'd appreciate it!
Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere
#280Earlier 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…
You obviously did not read my post all the way through.