The Microplastic Dilemma

[Forsher]

Someone was complaining about how Children of Men is an unrealistic dystopia. Quite honestly, it may be the most plausible dystopia ever advanced.

The book apparently uses male infertility as its basis as well. That's even more realistic.

That's really where my views on microplastics and people begin and end... and half remembered headline about their being implicated in the various infertility struggles humanity currently faces (the headline may, for example, have been about forever chemicals).

[Dimetrodon Empire]

I do think if properly researched, the health effects would become apparent, even if everything seems "normal" from our current perspective.

And we might see more obvious effects if the concentrations get higher. Better to start working on the problem before it gets worse.

Exactly.

[Page]

All things in the universe were once searing star dust in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang. We are all one and no matter how artificial and spiteful of nature stuff like plastic seems, it's still just star dust. Which is to say philosophically speaking, I don't give a shit.

Do I care how microplastics might be affecting my health? Well, yeah.

[Valentine Z]

Life in Plastic. It's NOT fucking fantastic.

For the topic, yes, I really do want to care and I actually genuinely want to do my best. But will my (and your) efforts be negated by the big companies? Yeap. To be clear, I am not saying we shouldn't try; just need to get this through the bigwigs up there.

[Krasny-Volny]

There you are, maturing in your mother's womb, and all of the sudden, you're plastic. You didn't ask for this, you didn't choose this, yet there it is, and it's treated no differently than being a normal fetus.

Microplastics found in every human placenta tested in study (The Guardian)
Scientists express concern over health impacts, with another study finding particles in arteries

Microplastics have been found in every human placenta tested in a study, leaving the researchers worried about the potential health impacts on developing foetuses.

The scientists analysed 62 placental tissue samples and found the most common plastic detected was polyethylene, which is used to make plastic bags and bottles. A second study revealed microplastics in all 17 human arteries tested and suggested the particles may be linked to clogging of the blood vessels.

Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood and breast milk, indicating widespread contamination of people’s bodies. The impact on health is as yet unknown but microplastics have been shown to cause damage to human cells in the laboratory. The particles could lodge in tissue and cause inflammation, as air pollution particles do, or chemicals in the plastics could cause harm.

Huge amounts of plastic waste are dumped in the environment and microplastics have polluted the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. People are known to consume the tiny particles via food and water as well as breathing them in, and they have been found in the faeces of babies and adults.

Prof Matthew Campen, at the University of New Mexico, US, who led the research, said: “If we are seeing effects on placentas, then all mammalian life on this planet could be impacted. That’s not good.”

He said the growing concentration of microplastics in human tissue could explain puzzling increases in some health problems, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), colon cancer in people under 50, and declining sperm counts. A 2021 study found people with IBD had 50% more microplastics in their faeces.

Campen said he was deeply concerned by the growing global production of plastics because it meant the problem of microplastics in the environment “is only getting worse”.

The research, published in the Toxicological Sciences journal, found microplastics in all the placenta samples tested, with concentrations ranging from 6.5 to 790 micrograms per gram of tissue. PVC and nylon were the most common plastics detected, after polyethylene.

The microplastics were analysed by using chemicals and a centrifuge to separate them from the tissue, then heating them and analysing the characteristic chemical signature of each plastic. The same technique was used by scientists at the Capital Medical University in Beijing, China, to detect microplastics in human artery samples.

Microplastics were first detected in placentas in 2020, in samples from four healthy women who had normal pregnancies and births in Italy. The scientists said: “Microplastics carry with them substances which, acting as endocrine disruptors, could cause long-term effects on human health.”

The concentration of microplastics in placentas was especially troubling, Campen said. The tissue grows for only eight months, as it starts to form about a month into pregnancy. “Other organs of your body are accumulating over much longer periods of time,” he added.

So the issue of microplastics in the environment has been a problem floating around at the back of my mind for years, just like the microplastics seeping into my - and your - spinal fluid. I've already known that plastic was omnipresent, but this article has reawakened my concerns about these particles which are so thoroughly saturating Earth and the creatures living on this planet, to such an extent that it is probably quite literally impossible to have a baseline control comparison without them. However (or if I guess) we are able to get a grip with our negative impacts on this planet, plastics are one problem which may never truly be going away, and since they simply don't break down in any kind of sane timescale, it is something we'll have to live with for a very long time.

So, what do you think of being a plastic person?

The biggest source of microplastics is textiles - especially with the rise of modern athletic clothing. Most textiles manufactured on an industrial scale since the 80s and 90s have some kind of microplastic embedded in them during the manufacturing process. That's everything from basketball shorts and jerseys to winter hats and scarves to running shoes and hiking boots.

I once visited a ski town where microplastics had inundated the local river, and residents blamed this on the puffy jackets and ski clothes worn by the scores of visiting tourists. While they didn't have an empirical evidence to support their claim, there was a huge correlation between the rise of the local tourism sector and the level of microplastics in the river, so clearly there was some kind of connection. Theories suggested included fibers from the sheer volume of people simply floating through the air and winding up in the river, or people laundering their clothes in washing machines which eventually deposited those fibers into the river.

I knew a geologist who stated the the primary source of microplastics on some of the remote South American mountains he'd climbed for ice core samples were mountaineers wearing the same type of clothing. He said this in sort of a self-depreciating way while wearing a polyurethane jacket. The only way to avoid this type of contamination was to do as the native people did in those areas and wear wool winter clothes that had not been subject to modern manufacturing practices. I accompanied him on one of his trips and noticed that the older locals dressed like American Civil War soldiers - homespun wool hats, gloves, shell jackets and overcoats, pants made of the same material, and leather boots. They wore those same jackets and coats for decades.

Of course even among the younger villagers who wanted to buy Nike and Adidas name brands, we were already starting to see microplastics infiltrate the local population as well.

[Almighty Biden]

There you are, maturing in your mother's womb, and all of the sudden, you're plastic. You didn't ask for this, you didn't choose this, yet there it is, and it's treated no differently than being a normal fetus.

Microplastics found in every human placenta tested in study (The Guardian)
Scientists express concern over health impacts, with another study finding particles in arteries

Microplastics have been found in every human placenta tested in a study, leaving the researchers worried about the potential health impacts on developing foetuses.

The scientists analysed 62 placental tissue samples and found the most common plastic detected was polyethylene, which is used to make plastic bags and bottles. A second study revealed microplastics in all 17 human arteries tested and suggested the particles may be linked to clogging of the blood vessels.

Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood and breast milk, indicating widespread contamination of people’s bodies. The impact on health is as yet unknown but microplastics have been shown to cause damage to human cells in the laboratory. The particles could lodge in tissue and cause inflammation, as air pollution particles do, or chemicals in the plastics could cause harm.

Huge amounts of plastic waste are dumped in the environment and microplastics have polluted the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. People are known to consume the tiny particles via food and water as well as breathing them in, and they have been found in the faeces of babies and adults.

Prof Matthew Campen, at the University of New Mexico, US, who led the research, said: “If we are seeing effects on placentas, then all mammalian life on this planet could be impacted. That’s not good.”

He said the growing concentration of microplastics in human tissue could explain puzzling increases in some health problems, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), colon cancer in people under 50, and declining sperm counts. A 2021 study found people with IBD had 50% more microplastics in their faeces.

Campen said he was deeply concerned by the growing global production of plastics because it meant the problem of microplastics in the environment “is only getting worse”.

The research, published in the Toxicological Sciences journal, found microplastics in all the placenta samples tested, with concentrations ranging from 6.5 to 790 micrograms per gram of tissue. PVC and nylon were the most common plastics detected, after polyethylene.

The microplastics were analysed by using chemicals and a centrifuge to separate them from the tissue, then heating them and analysing the characteristic chemical signature of each plastic. The same technique was used by scientists at the Capital Medical University in Beijing, China, to detect microplastics in human artery samples.

Microplastics were first detected in placentas in 2020, in samples from four healthy women who had normal pregnancies and births in Italy. The scientists said: “Microplastics carry with them substances which, acting as endocrine disruptors, could cause long-term effects on human health.”

The concentration of microplastics in placentas was especially troubling, Campen said. The tissue grows for only eight months, as it starts to form about a month into pregnancy. “Other organs of your body are accumulating over much longer periods of time,” he added.

So the issue of microplastics in the environment has been a problem floating around at the back of my mind for years, just like the microplastics seeping into my - and your - spinal fluid. I've already known that plastic was omnipresent, but this article has reawakened my concerns about these particles which are so thoroughly saturating Earth and the creatures living on this planet, to such an extent that it is probably quite literally impossible to have a baseline control comparison without them. However (or if I guess) we are able to get a grip with our negative impacts on this planet, plastics are one problem which may never truly be going away, and since they simply don't break down in any kind of sane timescale, it is something we'll have to live with for a very long time.

So, what do you think of being a plastic person?

The biggest source of microplastics is textiles - especially with the rise of modern athletic clothing. Most textiles manufactured on an industrial scale since the 80s and 90s have some kind of microplastic embedded in them during the manufacturing process. That's everything from basketball shorts and jerseys to winter hats and scarves to running shoes and hiking boots.

I once visited a ski town where microplastics had inundated the local river, and residents blamed this on the puffy jackets and ski clothes worn by the scores of visiting tourists. While they didn't have an empirical evidence to support their claim, there was a huge correlation between the rise of the local tourism sector and the level of microplastics in the river, so clearly there was some kind of connection. Theories suggested included fibers from the sheer volume of people simply floating through the air and winding up in the river, or people laundering their clothes in washing machines which eventually deposited those fibers into the river.

I knew a geologist who stated the the primary source of microplastics on some of the remote South American mountains he'd climbed for ice core samples were mountaineers wearing the same type of clothing. He said this in sort of a self-depreciating way while wearing a polyurethane jacket. The only way to avoid this type of contamination was to do as the native people did in those areas and wear wool winter clothes that had not been subject to modern manufacturing practices. I accompanied him on one of his trips and noticed that the older locals dressed like American Civil War soldiers - homespun wool hats, gloves, shell jackets and overcoats, pants made of the same material, and leather boots. They wore those same jackets and coats for decades.

Of course even among the younger villagers who wanted to buy Nike and Adidas name brands, we were already starting to see microplastics infiltrate the local population as well.

tl:dr woven cotton is the greatest cloth humanity ever developed

[Fractalnavel]

It's hard to beat plastics for many things. I imagine if you look for "natural" fibers and particulates that you'll find that we're immersed in those as well. But we evolved with them to one degree or another, and organics may possibly be removed by metabolic processes. Maybe plastics could be engineered for something like that, but that could conceivably lead to some undesirable effects.

Other technical materials that are further from organics than plastics may not have the same problems, but they could also be worse. Hard to say. Plastics kind of fall into a chemical uncanny valley, close to life, but not life.

Then there's climate to consider: do plastics sequester (atmospheric) carbon, add it, or is it neutral?

[Saarenmaa]

Well, as a result of the progress and development of civilization we have some negative consequences, and not only microplastics is one of them, but others, like especially the deterioration of human health and environmental degradation. This definitely and immediately needs to be corrected.

[Ifreann]

From the moment I recognised the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I longed for the strength and certainly of plastic. I yearned for the purity of the blessed petroleum products. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither and fail you, and you will cry to my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for plastic is eternal.

[Adharcaili]

From the moment I recognised the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I longed for the strength and certainly of plastic. I yearned for the purity of the blessed petroleum products. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither and fail you, and you will cry to my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for plastic is eternal.

Indeed, my turtle-killing brother. We are eternal

[Limitata]

PLASTICS IN MY BLOOD PLASTICS IN MY BLOOD PLASTICS IN MY BLOOD PLASTICS IN MY BLOOD PLASTICS IN MY BLOOD PLASTICS IN MY BLOOD

[Dimetrodon Empire]

From the moment I recognised the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I longed for the strength and certainly of plastic. I yearned for the purity of the blessed petroleum products. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither and fail you, and you will cry to my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for plastic is eternal.

This is funny.

[Kalaron]

From the moment I recognised the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I longed for the strength and certainly of plastic. I yearned for the purity of the blessed petroleum products. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither and fail you, and you will cry to my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for plastic is eternal.

This is funny.

Now we just need Reditus to read IT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gIMZ0WyY88

[Ifreann]

This is funny.

Now we just need Reditus to read IT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gIMZ0WyY88

Hello everyone.

[Eahland]

(Image)

I mean, the same way Future Archaeologist's do? It's not like the stuff is going to go away in 3000 years.

My plan for messing with Future Archaeologists is to be buried in my armor.