Plastic Rain In Protected Areas of the United States (wired.com) 81
Writing today in the journal Science, researchers report a startling discovery: After collecting rainwater and air samples for 14 months, they calculated that over 1,000 metric tons of microplastic particles fall into 11 protected areas in the western U.S. each year. That's the equivalent of over 120 million plastic water bottles. Wired: To quantify just how bad the problem has become across the American West, the researchers used collectors in 11 national parks and protected areas, sampling both rain and air. Each had a "wet" bucket to collect rainwater, and a "dry" bucket to collect air. A sensor would detect rainfall and open up the "wet" bucket while closing the dry one. And vice versa when it's sunny out, so the dry bucket would collect microplastic particles carried on the wind while the wet bucket stayed shut. The researchers also modeled where each particular storm they collected rain from had originated, looking at the size of the cities it traveled through before dumping water, and microplastics, into the wet bucket.
Overall, they found that a stunning 98 percent of samples collected over a year contained microplastic particles. On average, 4 percent of captured atmospheric particulates were actually synthetic polymers. The particles that fell in rain were larger than those deposited by wind -- lighter particles are more easily caught up in air currents. Microfibers, from sources like polyester clothing, made up 66 percent of the synthetic material in wet samples and 70 percent in dry samples. Plus, the team wasn't able to count clear or white particles and fibers with their equipment, so their tally is likely conservative.
Overall, they found that a stunning 98 percent of samples collected over a year contained microplastic particles. On average, 4 percent of captured atmospheric particulates were actually synthetic polymers. The particles that fell in rain were larger than those deposited by wind -- lighter particles are more easily caught up in air currents. Microfibers, from sources like polyester clothing, made up 66 percent of the synthetic material in wet samples and 70 percent in dry samples. Plus, the team wasn't able to count clear or white particles and fibers with their equipment, so their tally is likely conservative.
Diffusion sucks. (Score:2)
It "sucks" pollution from all sources and spreads it all over the place. It is a simple law. It can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with. It doesn't feel pity of remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until your garbage is spread.
So, your only option is to negotiate with the sources.
realistic solutions? (Score:2)
Re:realistic solutions? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do airconditioner filters, filter these out?
I dunno, but humans aren't the ones most likely to suffer from this and the critters out there don't have AC.
what options do we have?
Stop producing them?
Re: realistic solutions? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not really a hard problem either.
We've lived without artificial microfibers for almost all of human history.
Also, there are natural microfibers too. Like a high quality wool. Which is superior to artificial microfibers anyway, since it stays warm, even when wet.
I think we could artificially create such wool. If it's the exact same molecules (including the natural protein folding!), and there's no residue due to the chemical process, it will have the exact same effects.
(I don't know if silk is a microfi
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How do you impose that kind of transition on the rest of the world?
Great point! Fuck it, let us give up in solving the problem!
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How do you impose that kind of transition on the rest of the world?
Great point! Fuck it, let us give up in solving the problem!
It seems reasonable to highlight the challenges and identify the obstacles we need to overcome. Are we so weak and in need of ego stroking that our response to a challenge is to focus on the easier goal of "saving face" in a discussion?
Where does sarcasm fit in the exchange of useful ideas and problem solving? It doesn't seem to help motivate anyone.
Could you imagine if American football cheerleaders used sarcasm to rally the crowd?
Cheerleaders: "Why don't we all just give up?!"
Crowd: "Fuck it
Re: realistic solutions? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets say greens swept the elections across the first world (hah) and severely restricted persistent and very persistent waste. How do you impose that kind of transition on the rest of the world?
I dunno, but we have to start by setting an example.
Anything else won't work because they'll be able to point at us and say it's the fault of the 1st world consumers with their tumble dryers and fleece jackets.
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Well, his proposal would be working out a new wave of synthetic materials which are more compatible with nature. In such a hypothetical it may well be the case the new materials are better quality and/or cheaper as well as being friendly. There is a chance that they may be manufactured from resources that replenish on a more reasonable timescale (petroleum will eventually be exhausted).
Now I don't know how *likely* such a fortuitous advancement would be, but it would be a slam dunk if it ticks all those box
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In such a hypothetical it may well be the case the new materials are better quality and/or cheaper as well as being friendly.
Manufacturers already spend research money on both improving quality and reducing costs.
What you are suggesting isnt for them to continue doing what they are doing, but to instead restrict their research money, spending it on green-approved methods only.
Notice what it looks like when the lipstick is taken off of what you are saying.
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It's presenting an aspirational target and voicing that there is interest so that companies are given some idea to the extent some people *might* vote with their wallets on a green tech and that a 'green' tech is not necessarily incompatible with quality and cost.
Now probably most of us are unqualified to assess the feasibility of that happening, but generally the mindset is 'green is not good business' in executives and it would be helpful if those executives would at least entertain 'green' strategies bei
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First of all, who do you think has been hiking all over the west coast of the US wearing micro fibers?
I am one of them. Let's start with ourselves.
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We've lived without artificial microfibers for almost all of human history.
We've lived without many things for most of human history, among those things is a long life expectancy.
I guess if we regressed to a pre-plastic era we could also hope that on the whole the human race would have to endure your ignorance for a shorter time period.
Re: realistic solutions? (Score:5, Interesting)
We don't need to go without plastic. We just need to not waste and liter it everywhere. The vast majority of the plastic we produce is doing nobody any real good -- like producing hundreds of little plastic bottles of water per year for people who could be reusing a single bottle that whole year with basically no inconvenience.
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Sure, except that a large percentage of those plastics were microfibers. They are released when people wash or even wear plastic clothing, or when microfiber towels are simply USED. So even if you controlled your wastewater impeccably you'd still be producing loose microfibers.
We need to severely reduce our use of plastics in any context in which it is not recycled.
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Well, circling back to the suggestion that a reduction in plastic would necessarily mean a shortened lifespan.
I don't think alternative cloth strategy would necessarily be a life shortening change. Much of the fundamentals of today's synthetic cloth were established in the first half of the 20th century, with mostly evolutionary changes through smaller incremental investment ever since. It may well be the case that if we were as enthusiastic as we were about researching this as we were 100 years ago that we
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We don't need to go without plastic. We just need to not waste and liter it everywhere. The vast majority of the plastic we produce is doing nobody any real good -- like producing hundreds of little plastic bottles of water per year for people who could be reusing a single bottle that whole year with basically no inconvenience.
Just be careful not to ban those single use bottles entirely. There are people [wikipedia.org] that depend on them for survival.
Re: realistic solutions? (Score:2)
I thought nanotubes were the next evolution of microfibers? Graphene, bucky balls, hyperdiamonds
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>I think we could artificially create such wool. If it's the exact same molecules (including the natural protein folding!), and there's no residue due to the chemical process, it will have the exact same effects.
(I don't know if silk is a microfiber too...)
There is no shortage of real wool.
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We've lived without artificial microfibers for almost all of human history.
I hope you're not trolling. I'll take you seriously. You're not wrong: for most of human history, people wore skins and wool. It was heavy, hot, itchy, and difficult to clean. And expensive so most people owned maybe two sets of clothes (so you didn't need to wash nekkid). I have no desire to go back to that situation.
But I'm making an assumption here that microplastics come from fabric fibers. I don't actually think that's the case. My understanding is microplastic particles come from any sort of plastic a
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From the summary: "Microfibers, from sources like polyester clothing, made up 66 percent of the synthetic material in wet samples and 70 percent in dry samples. "
You could at least skim it.
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From the summary: "Microfibers, from sources like polyester clothing, made up 66 percent of the synthetic material in wet samples and 70 percent in dry samples. "
You could at least skim it.
What I'd like to know, and doesn't seem to be mentioned, is how much of those micofibres are actually a problem. Rayon is after all a synthetic that degrades naturally just fine, and even the toughest polyester (which is actually a large group of materials some of them natural and some of the synthetic ones bio-degredable) breaks down in ~40 years, which while terrible compared to most organics, is still great compared to most plastics, and thus not as much of a problem (which granted isn't the same as not
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So what you are saying is that we need to make air conditioning for all the other critters out there. Got it!
Re: realistic solutions? (Score:2)
Do you ask this to protect yourself or the environment?
For the indoor family, does it matter? We probably produce more from our clothing and carpet walks than what is outside coming in or circulates out internally.
For the environment, even if we capture it, our disposal infrastructure will just dump it into the environment at a different location. Which means it still gets to protected areas.
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Even if you never leave the house it will get into your food, even if you are vegan.
The best way to stop it is not capture, it's to stop producing it in the first place. Microplastics primarily come from two sources. They are used in some products such as personal hygiene washes to provide a little bit of exfoliation, and they are produced by dumping plastic into the ocean and rivers where erosion produces them.
The former is already becoming less common as companies look for alternatives due to the bad publ
Re: realistic solutions? (Score:2)
So they dont come from an aerosol during the manufacturing of larger plastics? Because a lot of things we use for multi use plastics would come in to play. Is there any risk from using lets say a plastic janitor mop buckets when you mop the floor are you introducing micro plastics into the water source that way?
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Buckets are probably fine, the kind of erosion in question takes a very long time in constantly moving currents.
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so basically this is the end result of a bio degredation of plastics, likely the thinnest varieties, assigned for single-use applications? At one time disposable water bottles were made of thicker plastics but they went to the super thin ones to break down faster. Dasani desided not to go that route and instead stayed with the stronger bottles, but make them out of 'plant plastics' now, are those creating identical fibers or do they behave differently? In that respect I recently saw, next to where you can
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Nope, it's the first step towards some sort of biodegradation. Mechanical abrasion of the fibres produces very short strands of un-stranded fibre (most fibres are many strands spun together - you do know that, don't you? The stages of "carding" and "spinning" which are parts of processing natural fibres also happen with artificial fibres, though typically they don't tangle the fibres beforehand, so carding is pretty trivial.). Those very s
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Feel free to live like a caveman any time. Hopefully a caveman with no internet.
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What options we have? Realistically we just muddle on and hope for the best. Between the bio-persistence of plastics, fluorinated compounds, PCBs, etc etc and peak-fucking-everything civilization is on a collision course with the reality of a limited Earth (long before global warming or ecological collapse does us in).
Lets pray for singularity to fix everything down the line. Singularity or collapse of industrial society with a depleted and polluted earth which only geological processes can fix up ... those
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Hmm, pre-industrial society...average life expectancy for men - 40 years. Women will live a bit longer, unless they die in childbirth. More children than not will die before adulthood....
Yeppers, that's the kind of world I want to live in....
Nah....
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We can muddle on beyond our lifetimes, so not a problem.
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What options we have?
Plenty. 1)Select fibers that degrade relatively quickly (i.e less nylon more rayon or short lived polyester. 2)accept GMO for improved fibers rather than non-biodegradable synthetics 3)change the way we handle waste disposal so the plastics actually get recycled, or at least compacted and buried rather than allowed to spread. etc... None of these are perfect solutions, but if we actually implemented them we'd eliminate nearly all the microfibres that are a problem. If there's still a serious problem after t
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That is writing cheques with your mouth that you hope your children - should you chose to have any - are going to pay for with their suffering. Do try to get your children's informed consent before abusing them like this. Probably a good idea to get it in writing.
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Do airconditioner filters, filter these out? what options do we have? some electrostatic device to attract them?
The best option is to severely limit the use of plastics by passing relevant laws and making manufacturers pay for the disposal costs and environmental and health effects of the plastic garbage they create instead of then simply offloading that on the environment and the taxpayer while deafening yourself to the loud and shrill sheiks of the plastic and oil industries.
Cause and Effect (Score:2)
So how do the microplastics get into the air? Through the burning of trash and disposing of trash into waterways. So, wouldn't you want to tax cities and companies who burn trash, and those who pollute waterways first? There isn't a lot of evidence that landfills or recycling are a major source of micro-plastic contamination. Wouldn't taxing the activities that create the pollution make more sense?
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The lint collector on my dryer would disagree. Read the labels on your clothes. Polyester, acrylic, polyethylene, the fleece I'm wearing right now is polyester with a top coat of cat hair, thanks cat.
Ironically, the biggest boosters of synthetic micro fibers in clothing are the outdoors industry. Look at REI's catalog. Not to mention the stretchy stuff the fanatic bikers wear.
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And there you put your finger on part of the problem. We use synthetics because the properties of natural fibers are sadly lacking, at least for some purposes. I stick to cotton as much as I can, but wool is hopelessly itchy, so I have none of that. Down is very expensive, and undoubtedly offends Vegans (not that I care) so the fills of my coats and sleeping bag are polyester. The clothesline as well as the other ropes are nylon, or possibly Dacron. Sails on the boat, polyester again. And all those fibers a
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Read the labels on your clothes.
It's all cotton, wool and linen. I don't like synthetic fiber. The only technical stuff I own is a raincoat and a ski jacket, and neither get washed, or are washable. I guess my underwear has elastic in it, and some shirts have plastic buttons, but that's it.
In any case, you may be right. It's possible microplastics are making it out of the lint trap. I'm not sure if it would be a *major* sources of microplastics in the environment.
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https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
I looked it up. 53.7 million tons of polyester fiber was produced in 2017. And that is just one of the synthetic fibers in production.
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https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
I looked it up. 53.7 million tons of polyester fiber was produced in 2017. And that is just one of the synthetic fibers in production.
No, that's a whole bunch of different fabrics some of which are biodegradable https://sewport.com/fabrics-di... [sewport.com] "synthetic fibre" doesn't automatically mean it's a pollution problem.
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You can apparently reduce your personal microfibre contribution by an order of magnitude or so by putting a lint filter on your washing machine. You've already got one on your dryer.
Most realistic is to ignore (Score:2)
Plastic is inert, and small changes to the environment made by microplastics will quickly be adapted for because of the scale on which the occur and the lifespan of organisms more directly affected.
Evolution: Believe in it,
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Plastic is not inert. Most plastics contain multiple chemical additives in addition to the base polymers, many of which are known endocrine disrupters.
Many of these chemicals easily leach from the plastic. Take a whiff of any new PVC shower curtain, for example.
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Does it need a solution? Has a problem with the micro particles been identified?
I can spray a literal ton of water on my lawn on a summer evening, and it will have evaporated by morning. They calculated that that 1,000 metric tonnes fell, trying to make it sound significant. But, notice how closely they had to search to even find traces of it. And it is spread out over an entire year.
Again, you're going to have to identify an actual measurable impact before I start running like my hair is on fire over t
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Have you done the test to see what percentage of your DNA comes from n1ggers?
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The typical result is 99.9%. And much of the rest is likely Neanderthal.
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It's almost as if you don't know how to type "effects of plastic on nature" in an Internet search box.
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Is it harmful? (Score:2)
Not clear. (Score:2)
What is aggravating is that many people - many here on Slashdot - have this attitude that environmentalism is some sort of liberal obsession. That environmentalism is just some sort of luxury that hippies want to force on all of us when the opposite is true.
Environmentalism is about our health and well-being. Air pollution alone causes over 5.5 millions death [bbc.com]
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This is a typical green verbal sleight of hand, which is why more and more people consider people like you obsessed. You start with a claim of "unforeseen effects", which is literal fear mongering. It's exactly the same as me claiming that that you having typed out this post "may have unforeseen effects on health on unborn children".
Both claims stand on exact same merits. That there's no solid evidence of connection being implied.
Which is why instead of talking about the subject, you immediately shift to "d
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We all know that even inert and non-toxic substances can have unforeseen effects once they reach a certain level of concentration in the environment. [phys.org]
So your answer is possibly?
This is an important question. You are right, environmentalism is important to our health. We only have so many resources. Should we focus more resources on reducing CO2 emissions, or micro-plastics? Or cleaning up super-fund sites? Or cleaning up trash in the oceans? Or protecting the coral reefs? If we reduce our use of plastics, we'll need to replace them with something. What if the only other alternatives are significantly worse for the environment? For instance, what if the b
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This has nothing to do with liberalism. I am a liberal, and have asked this question for years and rto date have not seen any answers to it...
We are seeing microplastics everywhere - in the air, in water, in fish, in animals... WHAT DOES THAT MEAN THOUGH? We simply do not know. Are microplastics causing real harm to ecosystems? We don't know, but on the surface it appears they are not. Are they causing toxicity? We don't know, but on the surface it appears they are not.
There is nowhere near enough research
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Quit going budget (Score:2)
A bit provincial and disproportionate (Score:1)
98 percent was *conservative*?? (Score:2)
Don't mind me, I am not a scientist, but I think I'll pick the dry bucket
Goal Achieved (Score:2)
This was always the end goal - at least according to George Carlin [goodreads.com]...
Earth + Plastic!
Do the math... (Score:4, Informative)
Area of the US is 9,834,000 square kilometers. This study was on 6% of that area, so 590,040 square kilometers.
There are 1000 metric tons a year falling on that area. That is 1,000,000 kg.
That means about (1,000,000 kg / 590,040 km^2) about 1.69 kg per square kilometer.
To break it down further, it comes to about 1.7 micrograms per square meter.
How much is that, really? Well, a single human hair, about 11cm long, weighs about 600 micrograms. Or about 354 times more mass than the plastics that fall on a single square meter of land throughout a year.
So instead of putting the headlines in terms of what people can understand (we have an amount of plastics, that - at current rates - will take a bit more than three and a half centuries to equal the mass of a single human hair per square meter) we have to go with things like "1000 tons rained!".
I'm actually surprised they believe they can accurately measure such a difference over just 14 months. What about other particulates and pollutants - or even oxidation of your collection tools? At the levels we're talking about, a bin that is 1 square meter, made from stainless steel, (density of iron oxide is around 5 grams per cc, and the thickness is typically 5 nm after a year's exposure) would yield about 25 micrograms of oxide on that 1 square meter after a year's exposure. Or about 15 times greater than the mass of plastic they measured. And plastics would oxidize even faster.
Re:Do the math CORRECTLY (Score:2)
It's best to use a program like GNU "units" to help you avoid mistakes like you made:
You're off by 3 orders of magnitude.
Maybe your condescending scorn would be more appropriately directed at your own self.
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That means about (1,000,000 kg / 590,040 km^2) about 1.69 kg per square kilometer.
To break it down further, it comes to about 1.7 micrograms per square meter.
How much is that, really? Well, a single human hair, about 11cm long, weighs about 600 micrograms. Or about 354 times more mass than the plastics that fall on a single square meter of land throughout a year.
Milligrams. So that's 3 hair's worth.
Nevertheless, thank you for answering the exact question I had. I'm always leery of those stories that hide the end result.
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Area of the US is 9,834,000 square kilometers. This study was on 6% of that area, so 590,040 square kilometers.
I think the real story here is that they made a bucket 6% the size of the USA. Why are people not talking about the size of the damn bucket! Or at least talking about your interesting version of logic (technically your math is right, however little sense it makes).
How small? (Score:2)
My main question is how small these particles get. The article says "less than 5mm", and 0-5mm is a pretty big range for this purpose. Maybe they meant nanometers? Inhaling 10 nanometer particles (PM10) all day can be pretty bad for your lungs.
Plastic Rain (Score:2)
Patagonia has to be seeing its franchise staple of fleece outerwear as a huge liability now.
Minor error in their reasoning (Score:2)
Unless they're hypothesizing that the wet bucket somehow collected plastic off the ground as raindrops nearby splashed, both buckets collected particles carried by the wind/em.. The dry bucket just collected particles floating in the air near the ground. The wet bucket collected particles from the entire air column above, hit by the water as the rain fell.
As Prince sung (Score:2)
Plastic rain, plastic rain...
Help FreeTheOcean.com/ (Score:1)