Microplastics Revealed in the Placentas of Unborn Babies (theguardian.com) 138
Microplastic particles have been revealed in the placentas of unborn babies for the first time, which the researchers said was "a matter of great concern." From a report: The health impact of microplastics in the body is as yet unknown. But the scientists said they could carry chemicals that could cause long-term damage or upset the foetus's developing immune system. The particles are likely to have been consumed or breathed in by the mothers. The particles were found in the placentas from four healthy women who had normal pregnancies and births. Microplastics were detected on both the foetal and maternal sides of the placenta and in the membrane within which the foetus develops. A dozen plastic particles were found. Only about 4% of each placenta was analysed, however, suggesting the total number of microplastics was much higher. All the particles analysed were plastics that had been dyed blue, red, orange or pink and may have originally come from packaging, paints or cosmetics and personal care products. The microplastics were mostly 10 microns in size (0.01mm), meaning they are small enough to be carried in the bloodstream. The particles may have entered the babies' bodies, but the researchers were unable to assess this.
Neutrogena, you're worth it (Score:2)
Re: Neutrogena, you're worth it (Score:2)
My worth ... it?
I think I accidentially the whole.
Along with cesium, antidepressants, pesticides, .. (Score:3)
... and all the other trash that criminal believe they can offload in our backyard and stuff into the products we buy.
"Hey, that's just the way it is. It's just business. What's your problem, freak?" -- Text on PR ads, read through the glasses from "They Live". ;)
Re:Along with cesium, antidepressants, pesticides, (Score:5, Interesting)
The best part of the trick is that they marry environmental damage to religious and political ideology, so that you get a whole lot of people who are in fact going to be directly harmed by their products to defend them vociferously, and declare anyone who even dares suggest that some of the things the corporations do might be harmful as "libtards" and "eco-fascists". It's the magic of Olde Time Religion, that once you've convinced people that Jesus wants us to ingest plastics, well, there it is, and besides the Rapture is coming, so who gives a fuck.
I swear, American Evangelism has become as toxic an ideology as Marxism ever was, and the corporate interests have figured out that American Evangelists, next to libertarians, are the most gullible and easily manipulated people on the planet. You can literally feed these people any line of bullshit, and so long as you add a "hallelujah" to the end of it, they'll suck it up. Libertarians are a little different, since their god is the "invisible hand of the free market", but it all amounts to the same thing, some kindly protector deity wants some folks to make boatloads of cash.
Goldwater on Evangelicals (Score:4)
Their own party knew the problems they'd cause.
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Tell me, do you think people trying to stop the dumping of toxic chemicals in waterways are evangelicals?
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The problem with American Evangelism is that, while America's founding ideals are praiseworthy, there is a reason why someone famous once said, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." It's very difficult to get Christians strong in their faith to agree that Jesus wants us to ingest plastics, but it is a bit easier with nominal Christians, especially those who want to turn Christianity into some sort of political cult. If you aren't actually a Christian, it can be difficult to tell the difference.
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Why? Be specific. Jesus had nothing at all to say about plastics of any nature.
You're simply throwing straw around.
And constructing a bullshit podium.
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Best thing to do for Christians is just stay out of politics entirely. Jesus told his followers his that his Kingdom was not part of the world. When he comes back, then his Kingdom will take over the planet. Until then, it doesn't make much difference what the current governments do so it doesn't really make much sense to support this or that policy or this or that politician.
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How the fuck are libertarians gullible. Fuck off with even putting Evangelicals. And Libertarians in the same sentence? Considering how opposite evangelicals are to the concept of freedom, there is no way it could even be grammatically correct to construct a sentence with both of those words in it.
Re:Along with cesium, antidepressants, pesticides, (Score:4, Interesting)
Except Libertarians' view of freedom is itself practically a theological position. It makes no allowances at all for the public good. Once a Libertarian has decided masks are some violation of his inalienable rights, then there's no convincing them that wearing a mask in public is neither a significant infringement on civil liberties, or that even if it was, that it is a reasonable infringement to protect society.
I'm sorry, I view Libertarians to be essentially zealots, they just have a different god.
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+Insightful
Toxins for Toxic Religious People = fair (Score:2)
Sounds fair to me except all the innocents that are so often harmed by these toxic people.
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I agree. They share too many characteristics with the Taliban.
I'd argue evangelicals are only Christian in name. They follow the Old Testament (OT) more than the New Testament (NT). OT was more about rules while NT is more about what's in your heart, less rule-based. For example, as characterized in the NT, I don't think Jesus would care that much that a person were LGBTQ if they were caring and helped spread the gospel. The OT way wo
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The Framers of the US constitution knew all too well that the intersection of religion and politics was fraught with danger. The Test Acts were still in place in England at the time of the American Revolution, and persecution and marginalization of Catholics was baked into the English constitution. The Thirty Years War was just 150 years prior to the War of Independence, and the horrors of armies marching under religious banners was still something to be feared. The US, at least with the ratification of the
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I swear, American Evangelism has become as toxic an ideology as Marxism ever was, and the corporate interests have figured out that American Evangelists, next to libertarians, are the most gullible and easily manipulated people on the planet.
.
People in the US [religionnews.com] that describe their religious affiliation as "none" outnumber evangelicals. Evangelicalism in the US is dying, while socialism/Marxism is getting more and more popular.
The real threat to the US is politics, not religion.
Baby Plas (Score:2)
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It worked out well for "Baby Plas".
I'm sure that's the little sister to "Bobby Tables" and "Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory."
'Twas (the night before)... (Score:2)
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It's funny, my teenaged nephew recommended that movie, but I never did see it. I'm too old, I guess...
Unborn babies (Score:2)
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Shouldn't we say "fetii" btw?
Cheaper for Coca-Cola (Score:2)
It was much cheaper for Coca Cola (and Pepsi, and others) to go with plastic, then stay with glass. When glass bottles were used, they had to be returned for cleaning. Which was a small burden for the customer, but a big burden for the factory.
Now everyone gets a plastic bottle, pays 5c for recycling "deposit" (which is actually a fee), and throws it into the trash when done. If lucky it will end up in landfill, unlucky, it will go into water streams, and kill some fish in the oceans.
Yes, glass might not be
Meh (Score:3)
Humans evolved in an environment with particulates. Dust, ash, soot, sand, grit, microfauna, whatever - our bodies are really actually well designed to cope and eject these.
Since microplastics are a common feature of our environment today, I'm not surprised that they're present. But someone needs to show me that they're more harmful than ALL THE OTHER natural particulates before I'm going to wet my panties in fear.
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There are lots of naturally occurring particles and fibres that are probably more harmful than microplastics. Asbestos is a prime example. And no, our lungs cannot get rid of the fibres, although the mineral is naturally occuring. The mentality you present concerning microplastics has some drawbacks: First, the long term effects are often hard to figure out, so that what may appear harmless in small doses and dismissible as a source of concern today, it may be harmful in a decade or so after it has accumula
I suspect bad test (Score:2)
Toxic Air, Water, Land, Products... Are Good? (Score:2)
Milton Friedman Preached Profitable Prosperity Economics and proselytized Politicians, Economists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Nations... To A Dogma Of "Greed Is Good." Free Market Manifesto and #AllOfUS. http://www.umich.edu/~thecore/... [umich.edu]
https://nytimes.com/2020/09/11... [nytimes.com]
Personal Phantasy and Wealth Accumulation define power, myth, dogma, history.... All of human history [China, Greece, Egypt, Rome, Germany, Japan... Christians, Muslims... USA, USSR, EU...], "POWER" is defined by agitprop history, peerage pol
Microsoft Revealed in the Placentas of Unborn (Score:2)
Confirmation bias?
human poop too (Score:2)
Re:Ban them (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Ban them (Score:5, Informative)
"Primary microplastics are small pieces of plastic that are purposefully manufactured"
Read up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Ban them (Score:4, Interesting)
They are used heavily in cosmetics for exfoliation, for example. There are natural alternatives but they cost slightly more.
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Only if you get ones which are specifically marketed as "natural". You can get exfoliating scrubs by St. Ives for cheap.
I used to use the blue corn scrub from The Body Works, but their parent company did away with it a few years ago and the replacements suck. Blue Corn had walnut shells in it which I liked because of its grittiness. St. Ives also uses ground up walnut shel
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I'm going to look for walnut ones, thanks for the tip.
Re:Ban them (Score:5, Informative)
That's nice, but nothing in the summary, TFA, or the underlying study claims that these were limited to primary microplastics. Especially since TFA references inhalation exposure.
Primary microplastics may be evil, but your fleece [outsideonline.com] touted as being made from recycled plastic bottles isn't to be cheered either. Mechanical washing and drying does exactly what the GP post suggests, generating microplastic fragments that are distributed in the waste water and air from your laundry room.
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"Primary microplastics are small pieces of plastic that are purposefully manufactured"
Read up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Actually you're both right.
Read up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Though I'm not sure why I post your link back at you given the GP's definition of plastic is literally right underneath yours on your very link.
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Microplastics are naturally grown. They were just grown tens of millions of years ago in the form of dinosaurs.
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You should lead by example, then.
Throw away your phone(s), computer(s), car(s), house(s), and any and all items you own that contain any synthetic materials whatsoever.
This should also include cessation of utilizing any services that employ synthetics as well, otherwise you're just a hypocrite.
We'll be looking forward to your subsequent posts sent to Slashdot scratched onto sheets of raw bark, delivered by oxen messenger.
Assuming, that is, that some otherwise easily-treatable disease or illness do
Re: Ban them (Score:5, Insightful)
No we won't. What a load of bullshit.
We'll just go back to using what we used for the 99.9999% of the time that humans existed.
Hell, people here in Germany already start to.
Glas containers, porcelain, metal, wood, textile bags, etc.
Also gets rid of the throwaway culture in the process.
Imagine how nice your electronics and gadgets would be, if they were made out of those things. Wooden back on a gadget. Your cookies coming wrapped in nice cloth, waxcloth and structured aluminium foil. Flour and rice from the "tap" right into your porcelain jar, power drill in a full metal housing, insulation made out of plant material before it became oil.
Face it: Plastics made us thrashy, and we're not even saving money since it goes to the trash quickly anyway.
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Enjoy your Internet run by buildings full of abacuses.
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Plastics also makes terrible semiconductors.
That isn't true. They're no use for integrated circuits, but plastic semiconductors are totally a thing. They're particularly useful for making sensors which don't react with the chemicals that you're trying to measure properties of.
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I'm openly mocking you for saying stupid shit, but you're too dense to see that, apparently.
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Now do circuit boards. Then monitors and LEDs. Your "green" lighting? Gone.
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Going back to a time when people had to have 10 kids in the hope 1 or 2 would make it past age 10?
Back to when the most advanced countries of the world had worse living conditions (and 3x the infant mortality) of the least advanced countries of the world today?
Going back to a time when tribal war was the norm, and peace the exception?
You seem to think cloth can be made on an industrial scale without advanced technology and materials. You are shielded from what it takes to live your luxury and faux-sustainab
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That's a bit much. Lopping off 2 billion would be a good number. We can see how things work out and if more needs done.
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I take it you're not up for being example volunteer #1 ?
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If we reduce the number of children being born the number of total people will go down in a natural process. It will take a fair amount of time to reduce the count by 2 billion, but no need to resort to anything drastic.
We could also implement reducing the number of children women have. No more than two, unless they happen to have triplets/quads/quints. Once you have two, you're done.
And to prevent someone like the con artist going around and having five kids with three different women, once the man has
Re: Ban them (Score:2)
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If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
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Oh, well, clearly we just need to reduce the human population on this planet by 90% and return to an agrarian/subsistence civilization, similar to the Amish. I'm sure everyone will be more than happy to line up at the disintegration booths to help get that started.
Nice straw man buddy ... nobody's talking about a return to the 16th century, just getting rid of single use plastics. Now stop making an ass of yourself in public.
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No, we simply need to educate the women of the world properly - the rest will (theory) work itself out.
PS: Forget the sarcasm tag?
Re: Ban them (Score:4, Interesting)
The more durable (woven cotton bag) needs 200 uses to make up for a disposable plastic bag
I have seen the factoid that a cloth bag needs to be used N times for many different values of N, but never with any citation of a primary source.
Your link says N=200 and claims that, according to a primary source, manufacturing a cotton bag causes 600 lbs of CO2 emissions. But the primary source doesn't say that, and the number is clearly absurd.
If I google, I can find breakeven reuse values as low as 4 and as high as 7100.
Re: Ban them (Score:2)
Re: Ban them (Score:4, Informative)
A quick online search yields a 1000 bag roll of single-use grocery bags for $20. So 2 cents each.
I bought my cloth bags at Walmart for 50 cents each.
So that is a ratio of 25 to 1. I go shopping every two weeks and have had my bags for a few years. Single-use bags were banned in my city (San Jose) in 2012. I only recall replacing my bags once since then. So the bags are a win for me.
The original justification for the bag-ban was not global warming or reducing resource consumption, but preventing litter, especially reducing ocean pollution where the bags are ingested by sea life.
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Price is a decent proxy for the amount of energy it takes to manufacture something: if a cotton bag costs $1, it can't [1] have had more than $1 worth of energy expended on it over the full length of its manufacturing chain. That's about 5 kWh, or 2.5 pounds of CO2 (in the US).
1: yes, I know, subsidies. Add those if you must.
Re: Ban them (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re: Unborn babies? (Score:2, Interesting)
They were found to be present before birth. Not enterin aftr birth.
Key difference. But keep on being a dick.
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These are the placentas of unborn babies, and not the placentas of the pregnant mothers. The unborn babies themselves are pregnant.
(Go ahead, just down-mod me. You know you want to.)
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A placenta is built by the baby, using their own DNA. Pregnant mothers do not have a placenta.
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A placenta is built by the baby, using their own DNA.
DNA is not a means to claim ownership.
A baby's DNA itself is coming from the parents. A baby can also not built anything on its own, but it requires the mother to provide the "building material".
The baby itself doesn't keep the placenta after birth either.
So if you want to make this about ownership, then the baby is at best a worker in mother's factory and the baby itself is owned by the mother.
It's actually even worse. When for instance a doctor takes a DNA sample from your body then it can be depending on
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You're trying to take this somewhere bizarre. This is not about ownership any more than about which possessive pronoun makes sense. If you have to draw a hard line on which body the placenta is part of, it's going to be the baby. There's actually no reason to argue this other than the fact that you called it out as incorrect and found out you're wrong.
it requires the mother to provide the "building material".
Yeah...you can't work if you don't eat. You might as well argue that the placenta belongs to the steak sandwich the mother ate.
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You're trying to take this somewhere bizarre.
No, you have difficulties with it and therefore do you see it as bizarre. You want, and for selfish reasons, to assign ownership to the baby, because you found it carries the baby's DNA. It is because of your epiphany that you want to give ownership here and also want it to be true. Only this doesn't make it true and DNA does not give ownership. One can easily argue the opposite, and because of the placenta being outside the baby's body, that it is not owned by the baby. You will find a lot of mothers who w
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Oh, you're absolutely right. You won't find unborn babies talking about much of anything.
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Exactly.
If we were to adopt your idea of "DNA claims ownership" then you'd still have to explain how it comes that the DNA predates the baby and yet the baby gets to own the DNA, and why perhaps it isn't the DNA that gets to own the baby. The placenta also predates the baby, and in cases of twins can there be two babies but only one placenta. Does ownership here somehow fall to the later first-born child?
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Woosh so hard
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Oh, I got that, I just ignored it to keep the dialogue up. Can I assume you're done now or is there more you want to talk about, son?
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There was no dialogue.
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Do you see the comments above? That's called a dialogue.
By now, and have a happy holiday!
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In short, putting your DNA or name onto something doesn't make it yours.
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You're confusing existence with ownership.
A name or a DNA or other identifier can allow one to identify ownership. You can claim a piece of land or buy it from your town and put a sign on it with your name. The name is then the identifier, the claim is with the town. You can rent a piece of land and put your name on it, too. It then identifies you as the tenant, with the owner is somebody else.
People commonly like to believe of anything they touch and hold in their hand as "theirs".
Re: So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst part is where they justify any environmental destruction as being necessary for "jobs". This notion that protecting the environment (including our own bodies) is some zero sum game, where we should expect, if not outright welcome, raping and pillaging of the planet and everything on it, because of short term economic gain. It's a defense of a system that it is now becoming painfully clear is leading to unsustainable cycles all over the place; from economics, to environment, to climate and everything in between.
While there is no direct health threat yet identified with microplastics (the operative word being "yet"), there is strong evidence that microplastic particles can accumulate PCBs and other harmful chemicals. This should scare the shit out of everyone, not just because of all the organisms on the planet, but because of the potential long term health risks to humans.
If your standard of living is built on killing a lot of people in the medium and long term, then the best I can say is that you're basically mortgaging the future to pay for the now. It's ironic, because conservatives and libertarians are very big into demanding that we not saddle future generations with debts generated today, and yet that is exactly what they are advocating; fuck the Earth and everything on it now, and let future generations sort out the mess. Whether it's because they're out and out sociopaths who really don't care at all, or they're just blinded by ideology, it all amounts to the same thing; the only thing they can count is dollars and cents, they don't care about standards of living in the future. They want it all now, and fuck absolutely everything else.
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Yours is a very naive view of environmental conservation. The fact of the matter is you can't have 8 billion people living Western lifestyles and have any semblance of environmental sustainability. China's raping the planet as fast as it can and most Chinese are still poor by Western standards. Imagine when all of them drive a car.
Of course the alternative is to ask large portions of the human population to live how people lived 200 years-ago, Who's going to willingly live like that. At the same time increm
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The fact of the matter is you can't have 8 billion people living Western lifestyles and have any semblance of environmental sustainability.
At least you recognize that obvious fact.
Of course the alternative is to ask large portions of the human population to live how people lived 200 years-ago,
Uhh, no. That isn't the only alternative or even the obvious alternative. Living like they did 200 years ago is not some opposite of living Western lifestyles. The rich were extremely wasteful and destructive 200 years ago too. The Western lifestyle is, essentially, living like King Louis and other gluttonous bastards.
Imagine when all of them drive a car.
Yes, let's take the car as an example. Cars, or carriages, are status symbols more than they are utilitarian. They are opulence. Think about how much m
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Can you prove any nom-harm?
What is it with your psychopath-capitalists, acting like a mad elephant in a china shop and then demanding we show the china actually being broken for every cup and plate, before you admit any wrongdoing?
You think we have no brains, and expect us to act like goldfish and not see the predictable patterns, so you can keep rampaging and mass-murdering for profit like the lovechild of Phillip Morris and Rockefeller?
I bet you have not a single clue about the chemistry of plastics, or chemistry in general.
That's not the way science works. You can't prove that something is safe. You can only prove that you haven't seen evidence of harm yet. You could test a chemical for its effects on humans tens of thousands of times and see no harm during a Phase 3 study, and the first week after the product is released, someone could nearly die from anaphylaxis [sciencemag.org] because of some slight difference in that person's biology.
The burden of proof is upon the people making the claims that these things are dangerous, and not biol
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We have a number of very complex systems (the Earth and all the things living on it, including us) and are dumping vast amounts of microplastics into them. We don't yet know what the effects of this will be, but we have seen before that changes like this tend to have poor outcomes.
We also have an alternative, we can stop using microplastics in many things and reduce it in other areas. There is a small cost. So really it comes down to balancing the risk vs the cost. Will you pay 5 cents more for a bottle of
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Your comment is misleading. Microplastics in general are not a source material and it is thus impossible to 'stop using microplastics in many things'. We can stop using 'plastics' in clothes and tyres as these are the most important sources of microplastics. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
One of the ways to impact the amount of microplastics in the environment is thus to only buy/wear clothes made from natural fibers.
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Interesting you should mention tires. Apparently run off from used tires is the reason for mass die offs of fish in the American Northwest due to a chemical used in tire production to prevent cracking [opb.org]. When this chemical breaks down, it turns toxic to salmon.
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Call me a cynic, but I have a very strong suspicion that the science is wrong here. I'm under the impression that 6PPD in tire production dates back about three decades, and has been nearly ubiquitous in tire manufacturing for most of that time. Why is this die-off suddenly happening only in the last couple of years? That's basically four or five generations of salmon that have been exposed to this chemical without problems. What changed?
As I understand it, 6PPD is only a problem when it combines with
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We have a number of very complex systems (the Earth and all the things living on it, including us) and are dumping vast amounts of microplastics into them. We don't yet know what the effects of this will be, but we have seen before that changes like this tend to have poor outcomes.
Saying that we don't know the effect is a far cry from saying that something is harmful, though. We could dump billions of tons of gold particles, and it would bioaccumulate, but it probably wouldn't cause any real harm, but we could dump billions of tons of lead particles, and the carnage would be rapid.
We also have an alternative, we can stop using microplastics in many things and reduce it in other areas.
To a large extent, this has already happened. But most of the microplastics in our waterways come from clothing fibers, dislodged by washing them in washing machines. This is compounded by our obsession
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The burden of proof is upon the people making the claims that these things are dangerous, and not biologically inert, as is more likely the case.
YOU'RE IT! The burden of proof is on now you for claiming they are biologically inert.
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We're talking about petroleum-based microplastics here. If you truly think petroleum doesn't cause harm to injest, then I dare you to go drink a gallon of gasoline and report back.
We just had a story [slashdot.org] the other day about how damaged plastic pipes pollute our drinking water with volatile organic compounds such as benzene. Since we know benzene is unsafe, and that plastic decomposes into benzen
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We're talking about petroleum-based microplastics here. If you truly think petroleum doesn't cause harm to injest, then I dare you to go drink a gallon of gasoline and report back.
Comparing plastics to petroleum is like comparing carbon monoxide with carbon dioxide.
We just had a story [slashdot.org] the other day about how damaged plastic pipes pollute our drinking water with volatile organic compounds such as benzene. Since we know benzene is unsafe, and that plastic decomposes into benzene, then what makes you think injesting microplastics is safe?
Under intense heat. You left out the critical part. Plastic does not normally decompose into benzene. It has to be heated to the point where the bonds that hold the molecules together start to break.
If I take table salt and water and subject them to a large enough energy input, I'll get sodium hydroxide and chlorine gas. That doesn't mean we should stop drinking water or consuming salt.
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Comparing plastics to petroleum is like comparing carbon monoxide with carbon dioxide.
Just to correct myself, it's the other way around. Comparing plastics to liquid petroleum is like comparing carbon dioxide with carbon monoxide.
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Nice try but petroleum-based plastics and petroleum itself are both hydrocarbons with similar chemical bonds while carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide are completely different gases that are similar only at the atomic level.
Nice try again but polystyrene decomposes into benzene and other chemicals in temperatures as low as 30C [mdpi.com]. Did you really think that plastic never decomp
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Nice try but petroleum-based plastics and petroleum itself are both hydrocarbons with similar chemical bonds while carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide are completely different gases that are similar only at the atomic level.
You're completely missing the point, which is that two different chemicals with only very slightly different structure (one extra atom) can react radically differently in a biological environment. For example benzene is highly toxic, but make just a couple of tiny changes, and you have Tylenol. Benzene rings also occur in Aspirin, Ibuprofen, Naproxen, and so on.
Also, the difference between a liquid and a solid is huge in terms of the risk, because one is absorbed and distributed instantly, whereas the oth
Re: So what? (Score:2)
You could test a chemical for its effects on humans tens of thousands of times and see no harm during a Phase 3 study
So test it, ban it until you have.
What's with the "we keep choking on it as long as we can't prove it killed anybody"-attitide? No 1st world county exactly US dies that.
Re: So what? (Score:2)
*except
(Fscking auto-correction.)
Re: So what? (Score:2)
You can't prove that something is safe. You can only prove that you haven't seen evidence of harm yet.
Maybe I should be morr explicit for folks reading along: there's a difference between "no harm yet because I didn't bother to look for any" and "no harm yet although I've comber essentially every combination of likely, possible, and unlikely use cases, and then some".
The latter is what civilised societies do
The former is what US seems to be a fan of... *sigh*
Re: So what? (Score:2)
C4F8 will not react when inhaled. In that sense, it's inert. If you breathe it in in larger quantities than just a trace, you will suffocate. Do a handstand, and you'll be fine, it's so heavy, you'll just breathe it out. My point is, there's a difference between inert and not causing harm. Same with catalytic converters, they lose platinum to the environment. Why
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Can you prove any nom-harm?
Microparticles are not new. If people looked for sand in placentas then I'd bet they'd find it. Same for microscopic bits of any of a number of materials be they plant, animal, or mineral.
I'll hear the same things about radiation, because radiation is "bad". People forget that humans have been swimming in radiation since before humans were human. There's radiation in the dirt, there's radiation in the sunshine, it's everywhere. Do we have to prove radiation is harmful? Well, if we know that there is a
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Not the way logic works. You have to prove the need to curtail something with more than "eek!" All you have at the moment is "eek!"
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There probably is more radiactive potassium than plastics in there.
Shh. You'll scare the sheep.
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I don't think the results are about the quantity or any eminent danger. It's present. And the more of it there is in the environment then the more there will probably be accumulating in these places. So it could be a future concern. These results sort of prove it's worth investigating before the risk of microplastics becomes significant.
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It's scary because it crossed possibly the most discerning barrier in human biology. If the fetal side of a placenta isn't safe, then microplastics can probably lodge themselves in any of our tissues.
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Oh I know, just making a point.