I am busy and don’t have time to research all of the ways corporations have poisoned us.
What are some good rules on how to avoid microplastics?
Eat local foods? Avoid processed foods? Walk/bike? Use dry soaps? Don’t use any take away containers? Avoid walking near busy roads? Use cotton/wool for all clothing?
It’s too late to avoid them. Microplastics are being found literally everywhere on the planet.
Short answer: very simple
Avoid plastic
You buy bottled water?
That has Microplastics.
You buy or store food in plastic?
Microplastics…
Use plastic straws?
Welp, Microplastics
Etc…
Basically it’s difficult to avoid it since we use plastic almost everywhere daily, but not impossible.
Microplastics have also been found in our drinking water. So maybe stop drinking water altogether.
I can confirm that if you stop drinking water, in 72 hours or so you won’t have to worry about microplastics.
I’ve heard that anyone who’s drank water has died anyways.
Ban Hydrogen DioxideIsn’t it dihydrogen monoxide?
well … yeah … if you want to be technically correct
All the plastic objects you listed are the long term cause of micro plastics. You don’t get micro plastics from the plastic wrap on food or plastic straws. Micro plastics come from the straws thrown away that slowly break down into micro plastics over decades.
So avoid plastic to help the environment, but that won’t change your micro plastics injested right now. It’s in the food itself.
This.
Avoiding plastic in your day to day might prevent leeching, which is nice, but you’ll still encounter it in the natural environment.
The problem is the plastics never really chemically break down. They do undergo mechanical weathering though, so it all breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces over time. Eventually these particles are microscopic, and make their way into everywhere and everything it seems, from soil to rainwater to your breakfast cereal and your testicles.
You can probably filter it out of your water, I imagine reverse osmosis is likely effective since plastic molecules are somewhat chonky. A HEPA filter should get at least the larger particles out of the air. I don’t know how effective it’d be with smaller particles, sometimes called nanoplastics. Avoiding synthetic fabrics probably would help somewhat, but I haven’t read anything about this.
You can’t get it out of your food though, we don’t know enough yet about reliable ways we could keep plants from taking it up through their root systems. From plants it gets into the food chain, and much like mercury with fish, it’ll likely end up concentrating in animals, like us. You could potentially grow your own food via aquaponics using filtered water and maybe keep it plastic-free, but this is a real reach here. And you’re basically vegan now and have to literally grow all your own food.
Note, I’m largely speculating regarding methods.
Some reading material, this first one is about plant uptake:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8618759/
Water filtration:
It’s reddit all over again. The top voted post is wrong. You post correct info with sources and you are buried at the bottom.
I did get to the thread a little late, the top comments were already in place. I also did make the choice to drop my reply in support of someone that was saying something valuable that wasn’t getting much attention, instead of my own op reply.
It’s Lemmy though, I have a feeling most of us read everything just due to how little there is to read. But yeah, we do share the natural first-commenter advantage thing that reddit has, it’s a weakness of the overall format. AskHistorians created their highly successful sub mainly due to how much this irritated them. lol
Thanks for the input
Basically it’s difficult to avoid it since we use plastic almost everywhere daily, but not impossible.
Car tires and brake pads produce micro plastics in our water system. It’s probably impossible on an individual basis to completely avoid them.
“Plastic came out of the Earth; the Earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place: it wanted plastic for itself, didn’t know how to make it, needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old philosophical question: “Why are we here?” Plastic, assholes!”
George Carlin.
Carlin the King.
You can’t completely avoid them, but avoiding plastic food/drink containers is an easy thing to do. Good for the environment too, not just your health.
I sure do miss glass bottles.
probably because they’re clear
No, acshually…
<GROAN>
Damn dad jokes…
Become a communist and start advocating for workers to run the economy because we wouldn’t fuck ourselves over like capitalists will.
Afaik it tends to concentrate further up the foodchain, so keeping meat, especially fish, out of your diet will help. Particularly filter feeders like shrimp and anything that eats those.
I’d also like to add that wrapping food in plastic reduces waste considerably, so you might want to look into that and balance your view against that.
In what way does wrapping food in plastic reduce waste?
It’s better to look into it yourself, as I’m not knowledgeable on the topic.
Afaik a significant portion of all food is wasted by supermarkets, restaurants, and at home. Wrapping it in a thin foil keeps it fresh and extends shelf life considerably. So it’s important to weigh all these things in order to find what’s best environmentally.
Further, it might be the type of plastic that’s safer for food and is trivial to recycle. It’s also very thin and soft and so that might require a lot less resources to produce compared to harder and thicker plastics. For example a plastic bottle might contain more plastic than say the wrapping of 100s of paprika’s. Just pulling those nrs from the air but it’s just to give a rough idea.
https://www.aamc.org/news/microplastics-are-inside-us-all-what-does-mean-our-health
My take-aways from this article:
There’s no good study on microplastics in humans.
They’ve tested “pristine” plastic on mice and it’s pretty bad.
The plastics we’re exposed to are loaded with chemicals and toxins.She carries a stainless-steel water bottle and avoids plastic water bottles. She doesn’t microwave food in plastic containers and only uses glass, wood, or metal kitchen items, including mixing bowls, spoons, cutting boards, and food storage containers.
takes her shoes off to avoid tracking in dust from the outside and uses a HEPA filter to capture particles from the air.
Great point. Tires are one of the leading products polluting our environment and lungs.
This article also links to The Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at UCSF which offers a guide for minimizing exposure to bad stuff. https://prhe.ucsf.edu/toxic-matters
Here’s a relevant NYT Article - How to Minimize Your Exposure to Microplastics
Some people here say space, but anything that takes you to space contains microplastics, in fact you yourself contain microplastic. The only way to avoid microplastics is simply to not exist at all. And I don’t mean dying, when you die you still have microplastics in your body.
Die
On Mars.
In the past
…ures of plastic waste
Avoid anything that comes in plastic packaging and distill your own water. You will still need to drink normal water but I can’t imagine any municipality is currently equipped to deal with microplastic so reducing your intake is probably a good idea.
Short of moving somewhere very rural and growing all your own food, it is close to impossible.
As a resident in a pretty rural area you might want to avoid moving to rural areas due to increased cancer rates due to pesticide use and poor water conditions. But don’t you worry about our poor corporations that are wrecking shit, our lovely governer passed legislation that prevents people from suing them. though her and the corporations assure us there is nothing to worry about. They pinky sweared and everything.
Nice! I’m glad it all worked out in the end!
I read an article not that long ago that stated that they’re in men’s testicles and women’s ovaries. In other words, they have become a part of your physical body and will become a part of the bodies of the next generation (likely several generations). They’re unavoidable.
Move to a different planet? I think this cat is out of the bag, they are everywhere now, it’s the lead of the current generation.
The steps you listed seem like reasonable action anyway, but there simply isn’t anything you can do to avoid them here.
you don’t. you can try to mitigate it by using less plastic yourself, buying local foods, whatever, but it won’t make much of an impact.
the less bad news is that plastic, by its own properties, is chemically relatively inert, so they’re really not that harmful. they’re still bad, mind you, just not all that hyped up to be.
PFAS are extremely inert, yet they wreak all kinds of havoc in the bodies of humans and animals.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per-_and_polyfluoroalkyl_substances
Scientists thought, as you say, that them being chemically inert means they wont be dangerous to living creatures. Sadly they were proven wrong on that.
The two most common sources of microplastics that enter your body are from the vessels you eat/drink from, and from particles in the air from things like clothes, carpets, furniture, linens.
How to avoid? Use stainless steel, aluminum, copper, (or other metals), ceramic, or glass storage vessels for things like water (including your Brita) for warming things in the microwave, or for storing food, and reduce buying things in plastic if you plan on keeping them there for awhile (eg glass ketchup bottle). Replace any plastic water pipes in your wall with good ol copper. My main water vessels are all stainless steel.
For particulate, consider air filtration, buy clothes/furniture/carpets made from natural animal/ sources like cotton, wool, bamboo, avoiding plastics like polyester. That includes your scrubbing utensil for dishes. Your carpets are probably made with some sort of plastic, so if it’s too much to do hardwood, or replace with a natural fibre, the Dyson vacuums are good at getting out loose microplastics.
Be warned, one time I almost bought a stainless steel cup from a reputable retailer, and upon further investigation it was just plastic with a steel coating… Yep, made in Communist China…
