A race to see what will kill the most of us first. The plastic or anthropogenic climate change.
Plastic will probably only make us infertile while climate change will kill us AND already stop us from reproducing (or do you feel a kid born today has a good perspective on it’s future?).
Don’t forget Antimicrobial resistance (AMR)!
Don’t forget societal collapse due to low birthrates!
Don’t forget Nuclear War!
Plastic-coated fertilisers?
Rally?
WTF do we need plastic-coated fertilisers for?
to grow plastic infused plants, of course
Now sit down and eat your plasti-corn. There are children in other countries that have to eat normal corn.
Controlled Release Fertilizers (CRF) are coated with a tiny layer of polymer which allow to release nutrients in a very timely and targeted way to various crops (trees, flowers, some cash crops) and used in closed environments such as potting plants or greenhouses.
So it has its use. Guess we’ll need to find an alternative to using polymers now (among a ton of other work).
Can’t we just inject ourselves with plastic eating bacteria or something?
We just need to turn up the UV lights voltage and melt the plastic out. Is that something we could look into?
We are the plastic eating bacteria.
If we knew of bacteria that cleanly ate plastic, we probably wouldn’t be riddled with micro plastics 😉
We know of them and are working on making them more efficient
Those are Ideonella, and the byproducts are still toxic tu humans. Wouldn’t work.
So what does it do? Cancer?
In regards to humans, progress is being made. In coming years, expect greater clarity about effects on our bodies such as:
- inflammation
- oxidative stress (an imbalance of free radicals and antioxidants that damages cells)
- immune responses
- genotoxicity – damage to the genetic information in a cell that causes mutations, which can lead to cancer.
TL;DR yes, cancer. It also fucks with wildlife (blocking intestines, giving off poison)
It’s making men infertile. theres even a shortage of viable sperm today around the world
Ok, that’s one positive at least.
Good chance it probably is, possibly increase chance for asthma, chance for heart attack, another is it probably makes us infertile probably a good thing depending how you think of it.
Is this stuff you know or are you guessing?
Mostly guess though I think remember reading some of it. Here are the links if your interested.
4.1 Fertility effects in adult males
Microplastics Linked to Heart Attack, Stroke and Death
Detrimental effects of microplastic exposure on normal and asthmatic pulmonary physiology
Could Microplastics Be a Driver for Early Onset Colorectal Cancer?
Disclaimer not a doctor, just some random guy in the internet.
I find little shards of plastic in the vegetables from the supplier at work quite often. Sometimes I plate a dish and spot a bit of blue where it shouldn’t be.
I like how we’ve gone from looking at the huge garbage patches in our oceans to the amount of microplastic in a drop of water. I don’t see it as a material issue, you pick a material and with enough quantity it will pollute. It is a consumer society issue. But maybe it will be easier to change consumer society by dangling the microplastic threat effect so the actual cause can be treated - wait, the psychopaths in CEO positions would lose money then, never mind.
Obligatory: The Planet is Fine - George Carlin
Peertube - https://kolektiva.media/w/37198b73-f7f9-4036-aa30-bb2da4763eda
googletube - Kmo8sh77G6YAnd yet doctors insist I’m not getting enough fiber!
Yummm, fruity pebbles
for anyone working with acrylic paint, this stuff is plastic so it’s best not to just chuck it down your sink.
There is a way to filter the plastics https://www.jacksonsart.com/blog/2023/09/28/acrylic-painting-rinse-water-microplastics/
Trying out the golden crash system (though you can just buy buckets and elements yourself to do it cheaper) and it got some very good results.
I fucking hate lemmy now, you are just reddit with a sense of undeserved elitism.
This is a serious as fuck problem and all that anyone replies with are jokes and shitposts.
This is fucking /c/science, not /c/sciencememes
But none of you care especially the mods, so I’m just blocking every one of you.
edit: There’s an entire subthread here that is nothing but masturbation jokes, which of course the mods ignore.
Fuck lemmy and its shitstain mod team same as the reddit mods but with worse hygiene. At least on reddit they keep /r/science clean
scrolling in the comment section of this news article, i’ve only seen people either being concerner/shocked, and some sarcastically talking about recycling or something. Nothing about masturbation.
And if your criticism of lemmy is that it’s being reddit with elitism, then why try to gatekeep the way people are going to react to an article on c/science? Are we all supposed to have degrees in chemistry or biology before making a comment?
Believe it or not people take heavy news a million different ways and react differently. People ending up making a masturbation joke after discussing microplastics in testicles (i assume this is what happened) harm nothing and no one.
I’ve already blocked them so I can’t link though I reported it too so maybe some mod woke their lazy ass up and deleted it as they should have.
That lazy ass is a volunteer spending their free time filtering our crap.
That mods (need to) exist is also a symptom of bigger issues, ideally we don’t need mods and are capable to self organized in a respectful way.
This is not reddit, you have the abilities to make a better science place on the fediverse, be the example of how you think it should be done. (Get off you lazy ass or understand that life for most is more then social media.
Its not perfect but its that freedom to disagree and build your own that sets us apart.
People having a laugh isn’t the problem.
There is a real problem with the thread format of social media however.
My proof is I can’t find the “in this discussion relevant” thread of masturbation jokes because time has moved on and so did the discussion. [Edit: your comment is only 1h old, so not sure whats up]
We need a much better way to organize our speech and discussions because a single scroll page sorted by time, or contextless votes ain’t doing it.
I actually noticed that some of my comments are reacted very different towards depending on the time of day, what side of planet earth is awake at the time.
There is an argument to be had that certain troll farms love to drown discussions in shitposts and maybe we should be more mindful of the patterns.
But to say we should crack down on any form of jokes, which are an important part of our human expression that goes too far, thats what i disliked about r/science
I’m so glad blocks are free.
Doors over there. Feel free to leave.
Or several trillion very small problems.
We’re all trillionaires! 🎉
Found the crab 🦀
DiamondPlastic Hands 🙌 Tothemoonoceanour bodies! 🚀
Studies have identified some of the main sources of microplastics as:
- plastic-coated fertilisers
- plastic film used as mulch in agriculture
WTF?
- plastics recycling.
Uuuuh…
- plastic film used as mulch in agriculture
Wtf. Where and why?!
It’s the black plastic bag material that people used to cover their soil and poke holes through for their crops.
I never thought it was called plastic mulch though.
It serves the same purpose as actual mulch, which is blocking out weeds
Yes, but mulch has the meaning of ground up wood, so I think most people would think it was ground up plastics.
If it was ground up plastic it would probably just get carried off by the wind.
Or plastic greenhouses
Like, everywhere?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=plastic+film+used+as+mulch+in+agriculture
deleted by creator
Plastic was never meant to be recycled.
So, what you’re telling us is, they’ve been lying for decades?
Yup passing on the responsibility from the manufacturer to the consumer
Other great source of plastics are synthetic fabrics. It releases a lot of micro particles in the water during washing and drying cycles.
Have you seen the process used in plastic recycling? The plastic is literally triturated into tiny bits before being heated up for the next stages.
Edit: why the downvotes? I’m just trying to give some context on why plastic recycling is a great source of microplastics
Yep
Maybe global warming will melt all the microplastics into one big macroplastic and that problem will be 100% solved.
Do our testicles all melt together?
Biggest sources:
- 7.6 Mt from macro plastics breaking down
- 1.3 Mt from paint
- 1.0 Mt from tyres
10-40 Mt released into environment/year, and increasing.
I’m kinda surprised that more comes from paint than tires.
You only think that way because the material for a tire is all in one place and easy to see.
Paint on the other hand is effectively invisible when we ‘inventory’ a space mentally.
So a tire in the middle of your living room seems like a lot of rubber but all the paint over every inch of the wall in the same room doesnt, even if the room is big enough for the paint to fill the volume of the tire.
I think it depends on measure, if im not mistaken, by weight arohnd 50% of microplastics are tire dust.
Also depends on where you’re measuring. They make up a ton of the plastics in stormwater runoff for example. Sometimes up to 95% from what I found. And that stormwater often ends up in our drinking water.
Still both from automobile infrastructure. /c/fuckcars bleeding into every Lemmy…
