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 matters that much until a mechanism of actual damage is established.
I grow around 1/3 of my own food. Yes all with RO water. I'd like to get above 50%.
Specifically produce, however we grow most of what we eat. We pressure can, dehydrate and ferment to preserve. I have background and decades of experience in growing, which is to say it's more than just standard hobby garden level.
The RO water is not to avoid microplastics (although that might a side benefit) but rather that the water is highly mineralized. It would be a long post to explain why I do this. Some is theoretical health concerns, some is more practical.
I built my own RO system it cost around $1500 including a water softener. There are some ongoing supplies every year, maybe $200 or less.
I don't have any links I just figured it out, but it's not super complicated. I made it out of undersink RO membrane housings (housings from those little RO systems you can buy for around $300 that do a couple of gallons a day). The membranes have pressure pumps in front of them that get it up to a couple hundred gallons RO water total a day.
Basic steps are 1) Soften the water, 2) Pass it through very tight filters (like 1 micron), I also carbon filter for organic contaminants, 3) Booster pumps put water through osmosis membranes and from there into a storage tank.
I just used plastic totes with gravel in the bottom to house the membranes and booster pumps.
I should write up a blog post on it one day because professionally installed osmosis can be expensive.
> 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.
There is no strong evidence of anything yet, but consider how long it took to "prove" to society's satisfaction that cigarettes are harmful, despite most scientists finding the lung cancer connection quite clear from pretty early. Comprehensive and long term data takes a long time. It could be worth it to be cautious in the meantime.
If microplastics are making our lives 10% worse in some dimension, we will have to stumble onto what that dimension would be basically by luck and then spend at least a decade rigorously studying it before we could make useful assertions.
The hubub about microplastics is that, we don't have great civilization wide health data on most health dimensions, so we don't even have good baselines to figure whether we have regressed in many ways. IF there is a negative effect, it will effect everyone all over the planet and there is no escape
It's an extreme corner of the likelihood/amount of harm graph, and some people think that corner of the graph warrants caution even before harm is proven.
It's the same situation we faced with leaded gasoline, and the US is pretty bad when it comes to those kinds of "mild, diffuse harm that mostly affects people who can't afford whatever system the wealthy use to avoid the harm" problems.
It's not fearmongering, we are literally gambling that microplastics have minimal harm right now.
That is perhaps the most insidious property of all when it comes to microplastics--it's incredibly difficult to work that out.
We don't have control groups, they're found in virtually every complex organism on Earth, including (best we can tell) all humans, so we can't form a control group.
We've only recently really started to notice, care, or study them, so we don't have strong historical data to compare against.
We don't have many isolated populations (especially of large enough size) where microplastic bioaccumulation is the only major difference in how their lives have changed in biologically relevant ways over the decades, so we can't effectively isolate the effects of microplastics from other confounding factors.
So you have these things that basically became completely ubiquitous--an unavoidable fact of not just human life, but all complex life on Earth--before anyone realized, with several other major global factors shifting concurrently. The end result is that, by the tools and methods with which we perform science, it's nearly impossible to study their exact effects. Maybe they're a slow-burning apocalypse subtly disrupting the mechanisms of life at their most fundamental levels and only getting worse with time, or maybe they do nothing or next to nothing like having a glass of sherry with your Sunday brunch once a week, or maybe they're somewhere in that vast, murky expanse in between the two extremes. Hell, there might even be a net benefit somehow. We just plain don't know, and don't know how we could know, so speculation is just about all we've got at present, and without knowing it's really hard to say if the messaging and literature surrounding the subject is aggressively over-alarmist or recklessly under-alarmist. The best we've really got is the simple fact that we notice them now, and thus have the chance to pay close attention, part of which is regularly taking basic measurements like these to try and correlate trends.
About all we do know is that they weren't here before, and "before" encompasses 99.9999% of all life that we know to have ever existed, so it's definitely weird and maybe probably bad.
There's definitely criticism to be had with the broader state of public health and science communication that harm, or at least the understanding that "we have literally no idea what the broader implications of this are but they're maybe probably not good", are considered to be implicit, either due to fallacious appeal to nature or the simple fact that alarmist headlines catch more attention, generating more traffic and revenue, and thus acceptance rates and grant money downstream. Which is, I think, the real core of the issue.
Imagine a grocery store that is within a short walking distance, such that you don't need to haul a weeks worth of groceries but can get fresh food every single day.
US supermarkets are massive, take forever to buy small amounts of groceries, and even the walk to and from the car is long.
A better world is possible! (If better grocery stores constitute a "better world")
> you don't need to haul a weeks worth of groceries but can get fresh food every single day
I lived that life in my 20s
Turns out I don't actually want to go to the grocery store every day. I want to go once a week and stock up, which I can do thanks to inventions like the refrigerator and the automobile
no judgment on you in particular, but i’m not a fan of this thought process. I believe it’s a major cause for why americans (statistically) are so obese. and i say this as an american that lives in a city but has family in the suburbs.
running errands with your own two feet every day by walking, cycling, etc keeps people healthy and lean. this country has a major car problem. it’s sad.
of course one can go to the gym to stay lean and healthy, but that’s even more time consuming than stopping by the store for 5 minutes on the way home, and it requires extreme motivation. Hardly an improvement i’d say.
> running errands with your own two feet every day by walking, cycling, etc keeps people healthy and lean. this country has a major car problem
I did live this exact lifestyle in my 20s. I was definitely more active but my diet was way worse. I was closer to a lot of restaurants, and I was closer to a lot of bakeries and convenience stores and such as well.
A healthy lifestyle also requires a healthy diet and city living gave me far too much easy access to snacks and junk food. A lot of "it's only 5 minutes to go buy a snack". Daily stops for coffee that often included a pasty
Yeah, the walkable city does mean people are more active
It doesn't necessarily mean they are much more healthy. It still requires other forms of self control (which I admit, I struggled with)
I agree, it’s not a magic fix for all issues! But it does address one major component, the physical activity part. The other is diet, which is a separate issue of course.
I don't believe it. If you lived right next door to the grocery shop would you still only go once a week and stock up?
Nobody wants less flexibility, rigid plans and higher maintenance costs. I think what you really want is a big house with lots of space away from other people and since you can't have your cake and eat it too you've sacrificed everything else.
I actually did live in an apartment a block away from a grocery store and yes, you're right. I would not trade my current house for having a grocery store that close
Because living in apartments sucks
But even if I did live in my current house with a grocery store right next door, I still would prefer to go as few times a week as possible. Planning ahead and limiting how often I am at stores helps me tremendously with sticking to a budget, which is also something I place a lot of value on
When I lived close to a grocery store not only did I spend more because the prices were higher, I also made more frequent trips for things on a whim, like snacks and treats. It was a much more expensive lifestyle
Maybe other people don't have that same struggle with convenience, but I do. By making the barrier higher, my life is more affordable and I eat less junk food for sure
This depends on a) what you want, and b) the apartment. If you want a garden, then an apartment is a non-starter, obviously. Also if you care about what the exterior of the building looks like that you'll want a house. But other than it doesn't make much difference.
The main difference for me is insulation from your neighbours. I've lived in good apartments and bad ones. The best ones you simply forget that you even have neighbours. The worst ones you can't forget because you can hear their conversations and them locking doors etc. The trouble is it's hard to tell what it's going to be like before you move in and this isn't the kind of thing that has standards or that anyone seems to think about. So for someone sensitive to noise, but also likes to make a lot of noise (I'm a musician), I'm resigned to living in a house too. But I'm not sure it has to be this way.
Well good news, nothing is stoping you from bringing home a full cartful of groceries that walking distance either. You just have more options.
Now, if you are really attached to your car and are only open to using your car for groceries, stay in suburbia, it's oversupplied through centralized planning and not at risk of going anywhere!
> Well good news, nothing is stoping you from bringing home a full cartful of groceries that walking distance either
Dunno about you but I only have two hands and can only carry so much at one time
I could have bought and brought a wagon or something I suppose, but that presents its own problems.
Where do I store the wagon in my tiny apartment?
What do I do with it when I'm actually in the store shopping, to make sure no one steals it while I'm in the store? I can't bring it into the store, it's too bulky for narrow urban grocery store aisles
How do I get my wagon full of groceries to my apartment, with no elevator?
Actually how do I get my empty wagon up to my apartment even, it's not going to manage narrow stairwells very easily even empty. So even if I leave it at the bottom and carry my groceries up by hand, I still have to get the wagon itself upstairs somehow
And then I also own a wagon that takes up my limited apartment space, which I only use to get groceries and provides no other utility for my life.
Unlike a car which I use all the time and only one of those uses is getting groceries
They're incredibly popular here, and yes, all supermarkets will have a lock stand near the checkout area so you can leave them there and easily reach for them as you're bagging your groceries. They're also foldable and/or small enough to fit in almost any closet.
They can hold a surprisingly big amount of cargo if you pack things right. Here in Spain they're definitely used for weekly hauls of groceries, although it might be pushing it if have more than two kids.
Not only that, but if you're close to a road at all, you'll intake the micro-plastics and nano-plastics.
So you really need to move away from roads. That's possible, but it's really hard to do in most developed nations. Just moving away from a city won't get you to where you need to be. Even when you get there, you have other issues. Like, food, energy, water/sewage treatment, etc.
I don't think people realize how difficult it would be to get away from this particular pollutant in our environment. I mean most of us don't own 500 acres in the Brazilian, Namibian, or Ghanaian countryside that we can retreat to. Even Brazil may be too far gone at this point to be honest. And Brazil is enormous. A lot of space. The number of tolerable nations that would have unaffected areas is decreasing fast. This really is a global problem.
ETA: Some remote parts of Canada and Alaska might fit the bill? Assuming you're not big on quality of life.
You can have really very good quality of life in remote areas. You just might die before you get help if you have a heart attack or something. But the rest of the time it's great!
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.
"Microplastic Free", no, there is no such thing right now. But I'm very far from any major roads/interstates and hundreds of miles to any big city. I didn't move out here to avoid microplastics though, it just (maybe) turned out that way.
I'm actually not terribly afraid of microplastics at all, I just don't like urban environments.
I make at least trip one trip a week. Why would I need to go every day?
I may stop by a store again during the week for a smaller trip if there's something I really need, or pop to a corner store if I need to grab something like drinks for guests, but it's not out of my way.
It's really not a big deal. Bike panniers can hold a ton.
I've seen what a week's worth of groceries looks like for four people and short of a rickshaw you ain't getting all of that on a bicycle with or without panniers. I'm fairly certain the respondent is coyly ignoring the headcount requirement in my original sneer.
Trivial if you leave near a grocery store. If you live in most US cities, much more the suburbs, then being dependent on your vehicle to do literally anything is part of the problem. In very few places in the US can you choose to do otherwise.
