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UBC device uses wood dust to trap up to 99.9 per cent of microplastics in water

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Re: UBC device uses wood dust to trap up to 99.9 per cent of microplastics in water

#91

Post by jacquesm »

WJW wrote: post #90
jacquesm wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PFAS will potentially put 3M out of business just like talcum powder did to J&J.

J&J still exists and will continue to exist though? They settled for some 9 billion, which is a lot but not enough to sink a company with a ~400 billion market cap.

400 billion market cap companies do not usually have 400 billion in liquidity laying around. And after the first bankruptcy there may now well be a second:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/jj-effort-resolve-talc-lawsuit...

Re: UBC device uses wood dust to trap up to 99.9 per cent of microplastics in water

#92

Post by onion2k »

gpt5 wrote: post #86
oever wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When microplastics break down they get smaller and become nanoplastics. Nanoplastics have been detected. Here is a paper that shows how to measure nanoplastics. Dilute solutions with polystyrene particles from 400nm down to 40nm were prepared and measured. Demineralized water was put in a polystyrene cup. Microplastics were removed and the remaining nanoplastics were measured. A concentration of ~10^12 particles/l wa…

They've been detected in a synthetic lab condition, but not in the wild.

It'd be a bit weird if they weren't in the wild though, wouldn't it?

Re: UBC device uses wood dust to trap up to 99.9 per cent of microplastics in water

#93

Post by feedsmgmt »

joker_minmax wrote: post #54

I feel like we keep hearing about technologies like this that are going to change the world but none of them ever actually get implemented... just me?

"business people" will pretty much only allocate resources to endeavors that are financially profitable for themselves and these same people quite often provide financial incentives to politicians who promise to advocate for policies that result in additional profitability for the business people regardless of the environmental or social consequences. Those elected politicians need to be replaced and the capacity for the "business people" to influence elected officials with financial contributions should be limited and involve mandatory transparency. No more unlimited dark money pools.

Re: UBC device uses wood dust to trap up to 99.9 per cent of microplastics in water

#94

Post by kthejoker2 »

Can we not make it a requirement for all of these solutions to provide a small infobox about how much the prototype costs, how long it took to build, and some sort of scalability / feasibility index?

Anything can work at a small enough scale with enough budget and time.

Re: UBC device uses wood dust to trap up to 99.9 per cent of microplastics in water

#96

Post by userbinator »

soperj wrote: post #43

I like how we all now know that microplastics and PFAS seriously contaminate our water sources, but there's no real thought about things like nanotubes doing the same thing. Wonder what consuming carbon nanotubes might do to us.

Probably nothing, just like microplastics.

Re: UBC device uses wood dust to trap up to 99.9 per cent of microplastics in water

#97

Post by permo-w »

mrob wrote: post #38
permo-w wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that seems extremely unlikely

I just weighed an empty teabag: 0.19g. I think it's highly likely that less than a gram of mass-produced paper has lower environmental cost than is needed to clean a whole teapot. You need hot water, and detergent, and the teapots are cleaned individually, so you have the overhead of heating intermittently used pipes etc. Teabags are a mature technology where production efficiency is highly optimized.

you need hot water or detergent, not both, and as another commenter mentioned, you don't need to wash the pot anyway. you're sterilising the thing every time you use it

teabags may well be a mature optimised technology, but they're releasing microplastics and that's worse than using 0.000% more energy, if you even are, which I doubt, when you factor in the additional weight required for transporting the bags, the transport of the wood for the paper, etc etc etc.

also, highly optimised does not mean highly optimised for the environment. where in Europe and parts of the America your energy supply may well be up to 40 or 50% renewables these days, or higher, you can be sure it isn't in the developing country your teabag was manufactured in. plus fumes, plus whatever land they stripped to plant the trees for the paper, if they're not cutting down old growth in the first place

Re: UBC device uses wood dust to trap up to 99.9 per cent of microplastics in water

#98

Post by konschubert »

feedsmgmt wrote: post #93
joker_minmax wrote: post #54

I feel like we keep hearing about technologies like this that are going to change the world but none of them ever actually get implemented... just me?

"business people" will pretty much only allocate resources to endeavors that are financially profitable for themselves and these same people quite often provide financial incentives to politicians who promise to advocate for policies that result in additional profitability for the business people regardless of the environmental or social consequences. Those elected politicians need to be replaced and the capacity for…

the above solution is silly expensive.

Expensive doesn’t mean that somebody is greedy, it means that it takes a lot of effort from a lot of people - effort that could probably be spent more effectively.

Re: UBC device uses wood dust to trap up to 99.9 per cent of microplastics in water

#99

Post by oever »

gpt5 wrote: post #86
oever wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When microplastics break down they get smaller and become nanoplastics. Nanoplastics have been detected. Here is a paper that shows how to measure nanoplastics. Dilute solutions with polystyrene particles from 400nm down to 40nm were prepared and measured. Demineralized water was put in a polystyrene cup. Microplastics were removed and the remaining nanoplastics were measured. A concentration of ~10^12 particles/l wa…

They've been detected in a synthetic lab condition, but not in the wild.

In the paper, the nanoplastics were measured in demineralized water that had been sitting in a regular disposable polystyrene cup (like the ones that people drink coffee from) for five minutes.

So the measurement reflects the nanoplastics that one ingests when drinking a cup of coffee from a polystyrene cup.

Because nanoplastics sizes are of the order of the wavelength of visible light, the particles were measured with fluorescence microscopy.

Nanoplastics were also found in high concentrations in store bought plastic bottles of mineral water as well as in water that had been sitting in baby bottles.

Re: UBC device uses wood dust to trap up to 99.9 per cent of microplastics in water

#100

Post by WJW »

jacquesm wrote: post #91
WJW wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

J&J still exists and will continue to exist though? They settled for some 9 billion, which is a lot but not enough to sink a company with a ~400 billion market cap.

400 billion market cap companies do not usually have 400 billion in liquidity laying around. And after the first bankruptcy there may now well be a second: https://www.reuters.com/legal/jj-effort-resolve-talc-lawsuit...

As I understand it that link describes a plan to use the bankruptcy of a subsidiary (NOT the main company) as a way to resolve the court cases in one go. The subsidiary is funded with enough money to pay the expected settlements (with the parent company guaranteeing any shortfalls) and bankruptcy is used here as a legal tool rather than a "we are out of money" point. Matt Levine had a great section about this in his newsletter but I cannot find an un-paywalled link to that atm. It's the one from Jan 31 if you are subscribed.

According to their latest annual report (https://www.investor.jnj.com/asm/2022-annual-report, page 45), they had some 14.4 billion in "cash and cash equivalents" at the start of this year. Their net debt position was 16.1 billion on Jan 1 2023 (page 46 of the same report), up from 2.1 billion the year before due to an acquisition so there is likely quite some room to take on additional debt. Total net earnings for 2022 were just below 18 billion. Paying a 9 billion USD settlement will be painful for sure, but even double that would be just a single years' worth of profit. J&J is extremely likely to survive this problem IMO.

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