If you can, there are some great borosilicate glass containers out there. I use them for everything. The ones I have seal well enough that I can fill it with soup and stick it in a backpack, ride somewhere and it's fine on the other side.
Thick enough to be basically unbreakable, microwavable, dishwasher-safe, etc. Don't need to worry about tomato staining either like on plastic. I've been thrilled with mine.
Yeah we’ve got ~20 or so of the Ikea ones and we do love them, but a few have chipped in that way.
They’re still amazing for the price though considering how thick they are and how heat/cold/etc resistant they are. Many other brands crack if dropped even a small distance, or shatter if pouring hot food directly in from the stove.
That's interesting. I have around 10-15 of those IKEA 365 glass containers with plastic lids and have never had them chip. I stick them in the dishwasher all the time.
I have had Lock&Lock ones, of almost exactly the same design, for about 10 years and they're only recently starting become significantly chipped, but I had an IKEA one get a small chip within months. Maybe it's how I stack then without lids (physically don't have cupboard space to store with lids on).
And that is fine.
We aren't going to be taking our spoons and forks and scraping the food from the plastic lip as we would with the container nor is the lid in contact with food should we warm it in the microware.
I love using these for things like casseroles. I can bake it directly in the container or even freeze a raw casserole and when ready, defrost and bake. One less dirty dish and no need to transfer and make sure it will fit.
Not a huge deal, but heads up from 3d ago that pyrex is now often tempered soda-lime glass & not borosilicate & is somewhat succeptible to thermal shock breakage. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36206565
PYREX all caps should be borosilicate still & mostly immune (within reason).
I learned this one on a very unhappy thanksgiving! It shattered so explosively that every single single food dish was contaminated with glass shards (and some of my blood).
Yes, but the vast majority of the container being glass still has advantages. For example, whenever heating it, you'd remove the lid and only be heating the glass.
Actually, on at least some of the range, Ikea advertise that the lid can be used as a splash guard in both microwave and conventional ovens (at least on my local Ikea website that's what it says), and has photos of the whole kaboodle in the oven: https://www.ikea.com/hu/hu/images/products/ikea-365-eteltaro...
I would have assumed (probably incorrectly) that the 'seal' which would come in contact with the glass & liquids would be a type of silicone lid, while it could be considered a type of plastic, if its a good food grade lid, I would imagine it's a bit better ?
Ironically though silicone is much harder to recycle though.
Not sure if you're serious or not, but plastic should not actually be put in the recycling bin. It almost never gets recycled, and if it does, it degrades quickly and becomes more toxic after recycling.
Plastic is garbage. If you live in a place that burns garbage for energy, that's the best fate for it.
Burning seems to be the only good idea over long-term. But someone on HN explained that there are some toxic byproducts to burning plastic. Dioxins for one. So we need some way to capture those waste and store it along with the nuclear waste lol.
We've got sets of Indian brass, Korean steel, and Japanese lacquered wood food containers that we use in addition to ceramics and glass. The glass chips, and once it does we tend to avoid using it for food.
Because all of these things last or compound over a lifetime, it's only expensive to be healthful if you wait.
I don't know if it's better for you than plastic or really anything about its chemical composition, but it's not plastic.
Edit: After reading more, there is an acrylic lacquer that was developed in the 1950s that contains plastics, but outside of that, normal or traditional lacquers are typically biological in origin.
My impression is that finishes free of petroleum products have become somewhat of a niche cottage industry these days.
So I wouldn't assume anything acquired finished by someone else is free of such things, regardless of whatever once-precise names they used to describe the finish.
Even when you try DIY-finish something with an eye towards food-safety it's rather challenging. E.g. the "Boiled Linseed Oil" you find on store shelves isn't actually boiled linseed oil, it's usually been adulterated with petroleum distillates and sometimes toxic "dryers" (cobalt comes to mind) to achieve the results boiling used to serve.
Here in CA the once common Turpentine which is literally distilled pine trees can't even be sold to the public due to VOCs. The stocked replacements are mostly petroleum distillates, labeled as known to cause cancer in the state.
Why would oil companies dispose of their toxic byproducts when they can sell them to companies who will poison the public with them? Since it makes them money and there's zero risk of legal repercussions for it, the only thing that would stop them is having morals and the oil industry certainly isn't burdened with those.
When you say "normal", does that mean "common"? As in, if I buy lacquered wood, can I expect it to be synthetic or biological? Is there a way to tell, or do you just have to trust the source?
By Normal, I mean "Non-Synthetic" as it regards to lacquers.
For the lacquer you buy in the stores, you will have to examine the contents to see if you have actual lacquer or synthetic petroleum lacquers.
As far as wood products, if it was made after the early-mid 80's, assume that if it was lacquered it was done so with a synthetic, or if it is some form of manufactured wood.
That resin comes from a tree that is the source of the name for urishiol - the chemical that makes poison ivy such a nasty experience.
It's probably better than plastic, but remember that coral snake venom and puffer fish toxin are 'all natural' and so the concept of all natural is utter and complete bullshit.
American cheese is different from other kinds of cheese. Canadian bacon is different from other types of bacon. English muffins are different from other types of muffins.
OP isn't trying to be "fancy", they're trying to communicate. This is a weird thing to get agitated about.
Nobody else knows what your country of origin status symbol words are supposed to mean, so using them to communicate has one clear motive and it isn't clarity
Slightly different experience, but my parents were like this always when growing up, it never was an issue but it was just a constant thing that I inherited.
Nowadays though I have the extreme where if my food is in plastic I don't feel the food is contaminated (until recently, but for different reasons), but like the plastic is forever smelling of the food and filthy.
My gf uses plastic lunchboxes and even reuses plastic bottles and I swear I can smell the things around the appartment. It's gross.
Polypropylene is probably the least nasty of the bunch.
Probably.
When the BPA scare came I saw so many people switching to a different kind of plastic instead of stainless steel or glass. I just could not understand what people were thinking.
We live somewhere humid and have very young kids, their playroom is covered with a very big one of those loom hooked ones, it’s awesome for that because it’s so soft. Spills tends to come out of it pretty easily, the wool seems to be at least mildly hydrophobic.
A good set of mason jars is great for lunches, for salads and pastas and the like. They seal better than tupper, they're microwave-safe, they're standardized so you can get replacement lids easily, and they're pretty rugged. I use metal when the kids are too young for glass.
I don't think someone trying to be totally healthy is going to be drinking Soda or any of these juices with their ridiculously high sugar content anyway.
1. Lots of drinks come in metal cans with BPA lining on the inside.
2. You can absolutely be reasonably healthy and drink some of these drinks, including the variants that are not sugar-free. I don’t think most people try to be perfectionistically healthy. But I think PFAs are not anywhere closer “reasonably healthy” to consume.
It's kinda like saying people can be reasonably healthy and still smoke some cigarettes. True enough, but if someone is trying to be healthy that's a pretty obvious change to make.
Wine would be a better analogy. It contains a large amount of a known carcinogen (alcohol), but plenty of people who try to be healthy don't feel particularly guilty about drinking some wine every now and then.
I don't know if it's a better analogy, but I agree that it's a good one. There are tons of things that won't outright kill you on first exposure, but are good candidates for minimizing if you want to improve your health.
I don't think I ever considered drinking from cans healthy, it is just a desperate move if no better option is present. Same beer tastes significantly worse compared to glass (but if you drink cheapest crap you probably don't notice nor care).
By "too young for glass", I'm assuming you mainly hint at weight – which happens to be basically the only, but quite significant downside to glass.
The material itself is already about 1.5× to 2× as dense as your average container plastic, plus since you're aiming for at least a decent strength, on top of that the wall thickness will probably be several times larger too.
Plain glass jars can break if dropped (or thrown) off the table. If I'm sure a jar is borosilicate then I might consider letting my child drink from it, otherwise it's not worth the risk.
This happened to us on vacation in Italy 2 weeks ago, my almost 2 years old daughter was drinking water from glass wine (since some better restaurants there don't give you any other type of glass regardless of drink).
We obviously freaked out and acted immediately, the staff was a bit concerned but it wasn't their child chewing glass shards. Daughter fortunately developed quite a skill or pushing stuff she doesn't like from her mouth using tongue, so she pushed out everything quickly, small cut in her inner mouth, 2 minutes of crying, us running around and that was it, with some evening worries (wife is a doctor but still...).
Not recommending this experience, better check what they give to your young ones (say below age of 3) beforehand, or just bring your own unbreakable one, even if (good) plastic.
Eating food out of a plastic container isn't going to increase your microplastics intake (by enough to matter). Those kinds of plastics are too stable to be a problem in that regards. Even if you left your food in them in the fridge for days.
The microplastics problem is a pollution problem. When you're done with any given plastic thing you throw it out. Some tiny percentage gets recycled, sure but for the most part nearly all plastics get trashed.
The trashed plastic breaks down into microplastics slowly over time and those microplastics are very mobile and easily wash or blow away if they're exposed to sun. This means they end up in rivers, lakes, streams, and large bodies of water (e.g. the ocean). From there they diffuse and get inadvertently eaten by sea creatures which are then eaten by larger sea creatures and ultimately end up concentrating inside the larger species that we eat.
It's not just the fish though; it ends up in our water supplies which are used to wash our other foods and ourselves. Basically, microplastics are currently so pervasive in our water supplies that every product made for human consumption that exists has microplastics in it.
The solution isn't to do away with plastics entirely it's to use different kinds of plastics that don't become long-lived microplastics. For example, polylactic acid (PLA). It's not suitable for all purposes but it's perfectly fine for something like a frozen food container or even the thin plastic film that seals it up.
The only reason we're not using such plastics (in the places where they can be used) is they're not as cheap as the bad stuff. We need regulations that require single-use products use plastics that don't break down into long-lived microplastics.
But yes, my intuition says that whatever you might eliminate by not storing food in plastic and other types of avoidance is just gonna be a tiny drop in the constant dose of plastic you're getting from everything you ingest.
I don't think this is the right way to frame this.
To me, this is a problem that needs broad solutions and some of those solutions are available immediately and some require broader changes, i.e. there are some things I can control and some things I can't.
Living your life in a way that is conscious of these risks and minimizes them when possible makes the avoidance of plastic an ongoing concern, and increases awareness of the issue in public consciousness.
I don't see how broader changes are possible without growing awareness, and often the best place to start is in one's own life.
If you were to examine the decision in a vacuum and discard all downstream effects, I think it's rational not to invest effort if it won't make a difference.
But I think this overly constrains the possible effects of making the changes that we can, and underestimates the value of instilling ideas in public consciousness.
When the risk is significant but there's no viable solution, it's also reasonable to ignore it. There's no way to fix the microplastic problem at the individual level so the best thing to do is to ignore it. Actively avoiding plastics will only cause hardships without any significant results in exposure.
in many cases it's the opposite: the more we've learned, the more we recognize that the body is able to tolerate small doses of many things in a way where the effects at larger doses don't scale down (IE, the linear no-threshold model is probably wrong in many cases, beyond radiation)
I'm not making claims about a specific harmful threshold, just pointing to the rationality of concern given the ubiquity of plastic and our increasing understanding of its harm.
Unless you're saying we understand the specific threshold for plastic and the risk of reaching that threshold can be reasonably extrapolated from typical levels of exposure, I think we're getting at different points.
The planet is absolutely tainted with nanoplastics at this point. They are already being sucked up into the atmosphere and being deposited on the tops of mountains. There's no escaping it.
BPA is a form of plastic, both in the pedantic sense (it's formed ... plastically... into its product shape) but more importantly in the colloquial sense, "synthetic, plasticky material" and in this general thread "synthetic material with harmful effects on health, probably through hormonal disruption".
So, yes, BPA is a resin, it's also a plastic, and it's also probably pretty bad, healthwise.
[0] Bisphenol A (BPA) is a chemical produced in large quantities for use primarily in the production of polycarbonate plastics.
Guess it is. Why is it a problem?
[1] Researchers have found that BPA exposure is linked to a number of health issues, partly because BPA mimics the structure and function of the hormone estrogen
Not to be wagging the finger, but instead of a snarky remark (ending in a question mark, so the reader can't conclude anything from it) a little Googling and posting a correction with the reasoning would be better.
It is a precursor to resins and plastics, the same way that water is a precursor to sea water but is not the same thing, even though sea water is 96% water by weight.
There's a delicate balance between adhering to empirical data and paranoia of something.
On the one hand, you can point at mountains of data that show for the most part, to our knowledge, many plastics are safe when used appropriately. Specific cases have shown otherwise (e.g. BPA use and hazards in certain plastic manufacturering is a well studied example). Then there's all the cases where we have little evidence it's harmful. Our ignorance of harm doesn't mean there isn't harm though.
Transition to paranoia. Everything we don't empirically know is a non-hazard and non-dangerous and should be avoided or leveraged very cautiously. We use materials that have been around for ages like wood and ceramics because we know most the hazards at this point and rely on the maturity to mitigate risk of the unknowns.
Somewhere in between we can try to reason about things, but frankly we don't know either way, so either extreme argument (avoid at all costs, use it because it's safe as far as we know) is rational.
The Roman's has no reason to think lead was hazardous until it was a bit too late. Marie Curie had no idea she was slowly killing herself. In some places where time isn't critical, we should probably lean towards the paranoia and tread cautiously. In times where time is important and progress should be made we should tread more toward risk taking and accept the unknowns while trying to manage risk as we go. No matter what risk exists. Lead propelled the Roman's in some aspects, then in some perspectives may have been one of their ultimate downfalls.
We threw away all our glass containers because they constantly chip. I'm more afraid of ingesting piece of sharp glass than nanoplastics.
I don't know why that keeps happenning, I guess dishwasher's high heat damages the glass or they keep bumping into each other.
That's weird, I pretty much exclusively use glass food storage and it's never chipped. And I just got some random ones off Amazon, not like they're some super high quality or anything
It may be how you load, I don't think that's a common issue. Microscopic bits of glass are basically sand though so I wouldn't worry unless there's a lot or it's getting airborne.
I've given up on teaching my partner how to load a dishwasher. She insists you can fit more into a load. We also have a bunch of chipped plates and mugs. Not on my watch of course.
Yeah, generally speaking unless it's a very large shard and cuts your esophagus, once it reaches your stomach, acids will knock the edges off and it'll pass without issue.
Gastric acid is basically hydrochloric acid, and rather less concentrated than the standard laboratory bench HCl, which stands peaceably for years in glass flasks. I would be wary of assuming that chemical attack will quickly blunt glass shards.
I remember being really scared about it and then I vaguely remember some doctor saying most stuff will go through stomach just fine, and that included glass.
Memory is fuzzy and I'm definitely not a doctor, so please double check.
I'm assuming if you are eating glass, it's a small enough piece that you won't notice, it can be big, you'll notice in your mouth.
> The pyrex (all lowercase) trademark is now used for kitchenware sold in the United States, South America, and Asia. In Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, a variation of the PYREX (all uppercase) trademark is licensed by International Cookware for bakeware that has been made of numerous materials including borosilicate and soda-lime glass, stoneware, metal, plus vitroceramic cookware.
I keep saying it but it would be phenomenal if glass container recycling became an earnest effort. I’m just not sure we actually have the infrastructure to support such an endeavor. Even something like carting a load of groceries out to your car and loading them up suddenly becomes quite a lift.
Convenient non-plastic solutions need to be developed. After learning about micro plastics and forever chemicals, I started to get paranoid of this stuff. Started cooking at home more and started removing plastic from my daily life. After my wife got pregnant, I keep telling her to avoid plastic, but she doesn't seem to take it seriously. She purchased plastic food containers, I tell her don't microwave food in it, but she does it anyway because the container is "microwave safe". She also wants to carry her own lunch but glass containers are heavy and she doesn't want to carry that. I keep reminding her that she shouldn't use it, especially while pregnant, but she says that I'm stressing her out with that. She said she's open to using non-plastic stuff but it needs to be as convenient as the plastic products she's using now. It's difficult to find proper replacements for stuff like plastic wraps, or lightweight glass food / beverage containers.
It sounds like you and your wife have different values. I see a lot of people that share her opinion. It's hard for me to not be mad at them since their lack of care is what enables companies to act like this in the first place and not lose customers
Make it easier for her by taking on the chores of washing them and preparing them. If you're insisting she do something differently, ask her if there is anything you could do to make it easier for her to do it -- since this is clearly a more important change for you than for her (at this time).
I did offer to do that but the main problem is she doesn't want to carry the items and it can be heavy for her with all the tools she carries (she's a piano technician). Really only solution would be finding lightweight alternatives, but haven't had luck with that.
Hard problem to solve. I wonder what the best effort-per-payoff is in this scenario. Perhaps cutting out plastic water bottles would be 90% of the benefit, and the plastic containers for food is 10% of the benefit but tremendously more effort -- I don't know (never did research on this).
To my understanding, they can't be microwaved so it defeats the main purpose my wife uses plastic wrap for (wrapping rice balls / covering food and heating them up)
It would be worth checking that the concentrations of microplastics used in this study are of a similar concentration to those found naturally. Otherwise the research is not very meaningful.
So this article was working with concentrations 10x larger on mice (usually worse ability to filter). Beyond that, they admitted that microplastics did not induce an effect which is most of the plastics found in the ocean, etc...
"1.67–2.08 ug/ml" is incorrect. Your link states "1.67–2.08 ug/L". In other words, the paper is about the effects of nanoplastic concentrations which are 10,000x greater than in tap water.
Many nasty chemicals are attracted to plastic particles. As bad as the plastics are, they may be carrying something nastier.
Get some nice PCBs stuck to plastic particles and they may not trip contamination sensors, but get deposited in your body where the PCBs become mobile again and end up in your system.
> After two months of daily ingestion of nanoplastics at the estimated human consumption dose, nanoplastic-exposed mice exhibited reduced cognition and short-term memory as assessed by standard neurological assessments such as the open-field test, novel object recognition assay, and the Morris water maze.
I'm a bit confused about whether it makes sense to feed the "estimated human consumption dose" of something to a mouse when a human weighs something like 2000 times as much.
It's still worthwhile to look at 10x and 100x concentrations since these things bioaccumulate. Whatever negative effects are happening at 1x should be studied as we crank that concentration up. Might be fine now, but in 100 years? We should probably have an idea how the harm/effects scale
I personally try to avoid canned drinks and foods to avoid metal poisoning. I typically buy two liter sodas in plastic bottles and avoid softer plastics. Styrofoam cups and other styrofoam food containers are awful. If you get hot food in a styrofoam go box, the box is often visibly marked by contact with hot food and you can smell it and taste it.
It's also potentially a reason to switch to an electric vehicle -- to avoid exposure to gas fumes while refueling your vehicle. (Or you can be "an extremist nutter" like me and give up your car entirely.)
Both of those things are straight-up improvements, even if they're not perfect. You can nit-pick every single thing all you want, but better is better.
And I will note that I drink a lot of tea and fruit juice, which also come in plastic bottles. Most drinks come in plastic or metal containers these days. Most of the time, I buy mine in plastic containers.
I wish it were different and I've lived without a car for more than a decade in the US. Try advocating for a less car dependent infrastructure in the US. It gets you mostly pissed on.
Individuals have limits on how much they can control given the larger context of the world they live in. Attacking my consumption of cola drinks as the focus willfully ignores my real point that styrofoam food containers are dramatically worse than plastic bottles.
Not complicated. US has normalized sugar addiction and obesity. Rest of the world sees this as fucking bizarre, like pretending that cigarettes are ok as long as you don't have cancer at the moment.
B. I have a genetic disorder. Diet coke contains extracts from the coca plant -- thus the name "Coca Cola" -- minus the hallucinogen cocaine. They have medicinal effects on the gut and lungs, both important systems significantly impacted by my genetic disorder.
C. Before someone else jumps up to tell me I'm evil incarnate, diet coke is the only thing I consume that contains sugar substitutes. I generally avoid them as well. And I drink no other cola drinks. Full stop.
I generally don't discuss this on HN. I don't intend to discuss it further in this thread. Note to self: I thought it was just a few of my relatives who were nutters who believe all sodas are the work of the devil and if you have any health issues and ever drink a single drop of cola, your health problems are entirely your fault for drinking colas. But, no, there are more people out there cast from the same mold.
Edit: comment not 100 percent accurate. I also drink ginger ale. Feeling like you need to defend your personal choices at gun point from judgy random internet strangers is not the best means to engage in meaningful discussion.
I live in a 100 year old building with lots of plumbing issues. I don't trust my tap water. I limit my consumption of it.
So, yes, I buy such drinks -- and consume them -- daily.
This is possibly a class issue. Lots of people in the world lack reliable access to clean water. There are entire charities devoted to trying to remedy that fact.
I didn't come here to ask a bunch of random internet strangers to tell me what a stupid fuck up they believe me to be for absolutely no reason and how easily they think they can solve my problems with a snap of their fingers.
I intended to make two points:
1. Given what a shit world we live in, harder plastic bottles are the lesser evil in many cases. They are much less poisonous than styrofoam containers, especially when hot consumables are put in styrofoam containers.
2. Gas fumes are a related threat, so the less exposure you have to gas fumes, the better.
That's a ridiculous analogy. What about suger-free sodas, or sparkling water without even artificial sweeteners? What about people who drink soda, but still don't go over the daily recommended sugar intake, and otherwise have healthy lifestyles?
I'd be willing to make two assumptions:
1. A gaping wound in your leg is probably less healthy than a moderately-high sugar consumption.
2. People who are concerned about nanoplastic intake are probably also concerned about deleterious health effects of things like sugar intake.
I think sparkling water is a great alternative, but I'm skeptical that all the fake sugars will turn out to be much better in the end. We seem to have a habit of replacing known bad things with things that we just haven't found out are bad yet.
If you're already in the middle of the healthy BMI range and not having trouble keeping a healthy weight, I don't think there's been a demonstrated harm.
> 1. A gaping wound in your leg is probably less healthy than a moderately-high sugar consumption.
I didn't saw they were equivalent, I just said they're similar. They're in fact two totally different categories of "unhealthy", which is why I used them. Because over a 20-year period, most stab wounds go away completely, while the effects of sugar intake tend to compound.
Why bamboo or wood spoons/utensils instead of stainless steel? I would imagine the wood will crack or break after a while, and is harder to clean properly.
You seem to imply that there is plastic in metal spoons since you avoid the material in your examples. I’m yet to open a drawer full of plastic spoons, most of them are stainless, why bring those up in your example in particular?
When I was young and poor I used to use a spatula to get the last 20 calories out of the can. Now I plop out whatever comes out and then rinse the remainder down the drain before dropping it into recycling. I figure some large fraction of the leachate stays near the lining (unless you shake vigorously, or the contents are highly liquid at room temperature)
There are a lot of interventions to avoid plastic and chemical exposure that greatly decrease your exposure with little effort (avoiding drinking from plastic water bottles) though there are others which seem productive but have marginal impact. Is there a website anywhere that gives a list of easy changes you can make in your life to avoid plastic exposure and with alternatives? I feel that the impact of environmental pollution in the world and tactics to avoid it is a big mirage of anxiety half-baked solutions.
Everyone is talking about food containers, what about textiles - we breathe in and swallow quite a lot of dust every day, mostly coming from them. Even if you're wearing pure cotton the others may not and the office carpets and furniture are all plastic, getting torn every day.
According to a report compiled by the EU, the largest group of primary sources consists of the small particles released from the washing waters of synthetic textiles, such as fleece clothing. Wear particles from tire and road materials are the second largest primary source. Together, these primary sources form 15–31% of the microplastics in the oceans, that is, less than one third.
Secondary sources include larger plastic items, such as bottles, bags and fishing nets that are ground into microplastics over time. These are estimated to form 69–81% of the sources of microplastics in the oceans, that is, at least two thirds.
The fleece loving hippies are killing us faster than the car fanatics are, but only just.
Food containers are also just..not the problem. No bulk plastic is. Even scraping the hell out of container isn't going to make particles in any quantity.
Microplastic in the environment comes from long term degradation of plastic when it washes into the ocean or waterways and breaks down from UV / radical exposure.
When I clean the lint out of my dryer, I can see a very faint cloud of particles.
Should I be worried about breathing those? I presume a portion of them are plastic from synthetic fibers. Should I be wearing a mask to load/unload the dryer?
> According to Chao Wang, an immunologist at Soochow University and coauthor of the study, feeding mice nanoplastics induced a greater overall immune response in their guts than feeding mice larger microplastics.
Treatments (in mice) are one thing but hazards (in mice) is a totally different thing. Most things that help a mouse don’t help us. Most things that harm a mouse do harm us.
Coca Cola is to plastic what oil is to Exxon, and what food is to Monsanto.
The CEO of coca cola and his team of scientist in 1978 are responsible for this.
Extremely intelligent but extremely unconscious.
They'd make their containers out of pickled baby faces, set up their factory next to a nuclear waste disposal site, and whip children who nod off during their 18 hour shifts if it saved one goddamn cent per bottle.
Yes, and as a model organism they're fantastic. But I feel any and all studies on mice need to have "on mice" always in any published study or news report about that study.
But it's one thing to pump a 100g/100g of micro plastics to bodyweight directly into the brain of a mouse and another to study mice in a mostly natural environment filled with plastic dust in similar proportions to what we find in our human lives..
Reminds me of those "mobile phone radiation is bad for you" studies. I read a few and calculated the energy they exposed those mice with in joules per kg, and it was like putting your head in a microwave oven for a few seconds. No wonder the mice had some issues afterwards...
I mean, I can understand doing those kinda of experiments in animals since it would be unethical to do them in humans (not going to discuss the implications of doing tests in animals either, let's just say that doing them in animals is less controversial). But as always the title omits this crucial point of information, mostly probably because this generate more clicks for the website, but I hate this trend so much.
That's a great question and thesis statement. I look forward to hearing the results from someone spending 4 years of their lives researching the answer.
I use bottled water (plastic) a lot since I travel a lot. I am not sure the level of nano plastic in the water I drink. Is there any plausible research on any of the bottled water products on this?
Because humanity and capitalism's incentives are just wrong. Bottling companies like Coca Cola and Snapple have long switched to plastic bottles, and externalized the cost to the environment.
My recommendation would be to tax negative externalities and redistribute all of it as a UBI to the people of the country. Simple and effective, but apparently the governments have been moving way too slowly.
What's worse is that the governments perpetuate a lie to the public, making them think they can individually make a difference. In the case of plastic the lie was "recycling", when in fact the plastics were simply shipped to China, who dumped them in landfills and rivers.
But the government tells the individual that they can't have a plastic straw or bag. It's all there to distract the individuals from banding together and demanding the costs be imposed on the corporations which put out metric tons every day. I write more about this phenomenon here: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
And it's not just the bottling companies. It's all the packaging. It's the clothes using synthetic fabrics like polyester, which generate microplastics flushed in every wash. And so on. Convenience is when you'd rather have a one-time-use spoon shipped from China, than wash and re-use a spoon. Your ancestors re-filled containers.
If we made it more costly for these companies, they'd long ago have researched biodegradable alternatives.
I've read that the majority of microplastics come from tire wear (national geographic quoted 28% of the total), and because there's no good alternative to wheel tires, it's unlikely we'll see a decrease of pollution here. So even if we found an alternative to bottles, plastic bags, clothing, etc, it still won't make a dent in pollution unless we convince the world to use a form of public transit that doesn't make use of plastic tires.
We could reduce human consumption of the particles if we only consumed lab-grown meat & hydroponically grown vegetables where the water is ultra-filtered before use.
> Suburbs don’t exist because of some big oil and auto company conspiracy. They exist because they give people an option they find more appealing vs urban areas.
No, modern car-dependent suburbs actually do exist because of oil and auto conspiracies. There exist options between high density and car-dependency. Surburbs can be walkable, and cities can have walkable low-density areas.
Your typical modern American suburb is homes that would be three family homes 60 years ago on land that would fit three of those homes let alone a normal size house. All of this is subsidized by tax write-offs and gasoline that is 50% discounted relative to the rest of the developed world.
Not much freedom of movement when everything even a neighbor is a 15 minute drive away either due to sprawl or trafic.
I also learned in a Not Just Bikes video that the US tire lobby prevents regulation on quieter car tires. I bet there are ways to make tires that shed fewer microplastics - it's just that we don't do it.
I did some more research, and it looks like tires are the 2nd largest part of the pie in terms of single origin. The largest is textiles which are 35%.
"A problem is a challenge with a least one workable solution. A dilemma is challenge with multiple choices, all equally bad."
If we eliminated all PFAS chemicals today, society would collapse. What's the point of eliminating PFAS chemicals to improve life expectancy if the very act of doing so would cause a famine?
What products use PFAS whose absence would cause society to collapse? If you look at the major sources of PFAS by 3M, it's not like these were essential products. Here's a random list from wisconsin.gov:
Cleaning products.
Water-resistant fabrics, such as rain jackets, umbrellas and tents.
Grease-resistant paper.
Nonstick cookware.
Personal care products, like shampoo, dental floss, nail polish, and eye makeup.
Stain-resistant coatings used on carpets, upholstery, and other fabrics.
There are probably no products for individual consumers that contain large amounts of PFAS and that are indispensable.
Small amounts of hard to replace PFAS may be contained in devices such as antenna connectors for devices with WiFi (which cannot cause pollution unless destroyed in an inappropriate way).
Nevertheless PFAS are absolutely irreplaceable in various chemical equipment used in chemical analyses and in various fabrication processes, for instance in the fabrication of all semiconductor devices (because no other substances have comparable corrosion resistance). PFAS would also be very difficult to replace in a few other applications, e.g. vacuum seals and insulators for high-frequency applications (as no other materials have a similar combination of low dielectric constant and low losses).
In all such industrial applications the risks of pollution are much smaller than in mass-market applications. However, it is likely that after PFAS will hopefully no longer be used for mass-market applications their price for professional applications might increase a lot, causing some price increases in other products, e.g. electronic devices.
I think the biggest material impact for any curb on plastics would largely be felt in medicine. Disposability is huge in preventing infection. Also, many medical implants rely on the combination of elasticity and strength found in plastics.
Medical use of plactic is a minuscule minority of plastic use. The vast majority of disposable, single-use plastic is not actually necessary. I'd be shocked if less than 90% of single-use disposable plastic was from food containers. Hell, I'd be pretty surprised if it were less than 99%.
By "biggest material impact", I didn't mean the sector that uses the most material. I meant it was the sector that would experience the biggest impact in a real material way, which would be hard to mitigate.
Obbiosl computing would be radically altered as well but I'm not actually sure how much that would matter. Other than during the 90s, there just simply isn't much evidence for all this extra computing having a significant effect on growth.
Just because you don't personally encounter it, doesn't mean it's non-essential.
Viton is essential in modern engines. Basically anywhere you are in contact with gasoline, you need fluoroelastomer.
The entire chemicals industry - everything from medicine to energy to commodity chemicals - would collapse overnight if you took away teflon, viton, and PVDF. That's not hyperbole, it's used everywhere and there are no drop in alternatives. Silicone can fit the bill for some purposes, but it has nowhere the compatibility and longevity of viton. We have no real non-fluoronated alternative to teflon.
Very little "rubber" is actual natural latex rubber. Balloons, certain hose, and some gloves are natural latex, as are about 40% of the material in tires. The rest is synthetic elastomer. EPDM and Buna-N/nitrile are probably the most common.
Teflon is not rubber, but viton is fluorinated elastomer, and it's used everywhere as well.
Phasing out PFAS over a 5-10 year period or imposing a steady-increasing tax on its usage (to the point that eventually it became an apocalyptically high tax) would drive supply chains to adapt and move to alternatives. Paper, wood, metal, glass, etc. are materials that have worked fine for hundreds of years.
Oh no, less waterproofing, what will we ever do? Guess we should keep this cancer material around.
Oh no, we lose some classes of medications, guess we should just poison the Earth and generations to come because losing lipitor and prozac is just unacceptable.
> IF we eliminated all PFAS chemicals today, society would collapse.
I think this is a failure of imagination. The modern world, largely as we appreciate it today, existed in 1940 in Europe and the U.S. That is well before the widespread deployment of plastics. It was a world in which everyone, including the very rich did with a little less but still, a fairly high quality of life.
The only question that separates then from today, is whether we can scale that kind of material to the much larger global middle class.
In 1940, (with the exception of primitive point-contact radar diodes) there was no production of semiconductor devices.
Without PFAS there would be no production of modern electronic devices, so no computers and no mobile phones.
Nevertheless, unlike with PFAS used in things like clothes, kitchenware or packing, when PFAS are used in industrial processes or in electronic equipment (as high-frequency electrical insulators or in optical devices) it is much easier to avoid any pollution.
> Without PFAS there would be no production of modern electronic devices, so no computers and no mobile phones.
Uh, yup. That in no way contradicts what I said.
> Nevertheless, unlike with PFAS used in things like clothes, kitchenware or packing, when PFAS are used in industrial processes or in electronic equipment (as high-frequency electrical insulators or in optical devices) it is much easier to avoid any pollution.
Yeah, I'm not arguing for a ban. I'm arguing that from a historical perspective, civilization in no way hinges on plastics. They are ubiquitous so an abrupt end of plastics would obviously be very disruptive. But there was a pretty decent life to be had before they became so and I imagine we could figure out how to do that again.
Synthetic chemistry in the 40s was like alchemy compared to the processes today. There are myriad chemical techniques and reactions that exist today, that didn't exist in the 40s, and you flat out can't do without fluoropolymers, because the reagents used are way too aggressive on virtually everything else.
I didn't say a damn thing about the state of chemistry in the 1940s. My point was that it's silly to claim the absence of PFAS or plastics would cause societal collapse when we have a ready image of our civilization without plastics.
Metal, wood, resins, etc were just far more ubiquitous, doing many of the jobs plastics do now. Lots of things were a bit more expensive because of this. But none the less, people lived pretty decent lives.
> But the government tells the individual that they can't have a plastic straw or bag
Policies exist to improve the situation, they just need to be fought for (against the bottling companies):
> According to the Container Recycling Institute (CRI), the average nationwide recycling rate for beverage containers is around 35%. By contrast, Oregon’s beverage container redemption rate is regularly in the 80-90% range
> My recommendation would be to tax negative externalities and redistribute all of it as a UBI to the people of the country. Simple and effective
Wouldn't you want to resolve the externalities with those funds instead of spending it, likely increasing consumer consumption and making the problem worse?
> If we made it more costly for these companies
Why wouldn't the costs flow to consumers? Firms recently seem to be able to set prices at what the market will bear.
Because we'd be indirectly subsidizing any competitor who puts out biodegradeable solutions, without directly picking winners and losers, just making it more costly to produce non-biodegradeable stuff. The alternatives can come out of the same department (e.g. of DuPont chemicals) and they wouldn't be hit with the same tax, so they'd be more competitive over time. The money is redistributed to the working class because otherwise you get this:
How do you accurately price externalities without resolving them? If you spend a billion a year cleaning up plastic it's pretty simple math to spread that out over the cost of plastic products. On the other hand if you don't actually do anything to resolve it you are just guessing on what that costs and could be way over or under.
This seems like "I want UBI" with a flimsy environmental justification.
You don’t need to accurately price them. You just gradually keep increasing the price year over year until the companies spin up R&D departments to switch to biodegradable sustainable alternatives, or their competitors do.
You have to hit those corps in their pocketbook and affect their bottom line before they act. It’s the only thing they understand.
As far as cleanup - forget it. We may be able to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but we won’t be able to remove microplastics around the world. It is urgent we stop creating MORE though. That means also mandating drainage systems that filter and trap these particles before they escape. We already mandate that for many forms of grease!
That's not really taxing externalities. Biodegradable solutions likely have externalities of their own at scale. In less words this solution is "tax corporations that make plastic a lot and distribute the funds to the citizens leaving the mess behind for future generations". It isn't as noble when put that way.
It you on the other hand took those funds and used them for environmental clean up, recycling programs, etc I'd be on board. Consumers should pay for the disposal of what they consumed.
This is highly reductive. Clothes are useful in ensuring I adhere to societal standards (and laws.) Keyboards help me earn my living (without which I wouldn't be able to eat.)
Pick your battles. First you don't want to be sick/die/cause your elder relative to die by infecting them. Then once you are not dead you don't want to get into your body substances that clearly have no business being there and can make you sick slower and less noticeably.
I'm guessing you would want to run a filter/wear a mask if there's a good reason and not do it when there isn't.
Its not so much about ingesting from wearing them - they are almost single-use and disposable - how many TRILLIONS of plastic masks have been thrown into the environment in the last 3 years.
Seriously - if I had enough tinfoil - I'd say that our entire dietary ecosystem is under attack, directly, in order to reduce the healthiness of our food supply. Plus the many many food processing/farm etc plants which caught fire in the last 18 months.
I do not think any air purifiers can fit inside your face mask. I assume in room air purifiers will capture some as they are particles like others that get caught in filters.
There's literally no evidence that they shed nano-plastic particles in regular use. Also they need to be disposable to be useful, they're filters which trap things you don't want in your lungs. Also, if you put them into the regular trash, they just go to a land fill, which is totally fine.
I don't think you understand how bad lead is for neural development. It's far worse than plastic. And with leaded gas, there was no escaping it. At least you can generally live a no-plastic or reduced-plastic lifestyle. We literally dosed an entire generation with aerosolized heavy metals.
That's not what's implied. Only thing that was said was that the average lifespan was 31. Could be any curve under that number, but it's bad however you cut it.
Isn't that average lifespan? There was a lot of death either in childbirth or during early childhood years. If you filter that data out a bit, adults lived a more comparable age. Still not as good as today, but not 31.
TBH I'm not sure the argument that only women and those under 5 were dying young in large numbers is a great rebuttal to the idea that we were better off in 1023.
That might explain why some modern children are so stupid. I have young relatives who are just gone. There’s nothing in their heads. It’s like watching a fly bash into a window.
It's fun to think about what society would be like if all those "kids these days" denigrations, which are thousands of years old, were objectively true. The ancient greeks must have had secret fusion reactors and AGI that our blithering idiot archaeologists have yet to uncover. Our hypersonic aircraft are no comparison to the sumerians' near-lightspeed craft. Humanity has been on a downhill trajectory since the phoenicians figured out gravity field manipulation. Secrets lost to time along with our IQ points.
Are you sure it's not just confirmation bias plus a bad perception of how smart you and your same-age friends were when you were young? Sounds like that to me.
Kids look normal to me, some of them probably smarter than I was back when I was as kid, others not so much, it's hard to say based on only a few observations but it's probably the same it's always been.
This is hugely anecdotal, I can find examples of both extremes and everything in the middle around me. I think its rather good/poor parenting, parents not having enough time to raise kids properly (hint: there is never 'too much' time you spend with kids, especially young), dumbing kids down with primitive addictive screen fun or social media.
Lacking a lot of social interaction can make otherwise smart kids appear... less smart, since they may be shy, lacking motivation or skill to express themselves so they can be interacted with on higher level.
Once you filter all of this (and probably much more), and still see a difference on massive scale, we can start having a case.
So do seed oils and other PUFAs and a thousand other things and if anyone would just listen to a podcast once in a while (like Peter Attia's) they'd learn a thing or two.
Sorry, but this just sounds so silly. If only I would take a little bit of time out of my day to pick one of the 45 new podcasts created that morning and learn from its reliable, well sourced arguments!
By your argument, HFCS is derived from corn, so it must also be healthy and fit for human consumption. Seed oils are heated at high levels, processed in a petroleum-based solvent such as hexane to maximize the amount of oil extracted from them, and even chemicals are used to deodorize and change the color of the oils. I don’t trust any ultraprocessed food, including seed oils. They are no different, just a cheap filler.
I love comments like these, it keeps reminding me how misinformed the dogmatic folks are in the nutrition community. I'll let you reconsider your question, and also link to you (one of) the double blind, randomized, controlled studies that shows replacing saturated fat with vegetable oil significantly reduced CVD outcomes https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/01.CIR.40.1S2.II-1 .
I love pompous comments like these. I'm not part of a "nutrition community" and I'm actually pretty open minded to these things. Hence why I asked. But you seem to be unable to have a civil conversation without being an asshole. Congrats.
Tell me again which seed oils have meaningful amounts of trans fat in them?
> I'm not part of a "nutrition community"
Your comment implies you're comfortable enough to give other people advice, eg "don't eat seed oils because the contain trans fat," even though they don't. I don't mind so much that people believe whatever they want, it's a problem when you misinform others about it.
The highly processed ones that are hydrogenated, such as cottonseed. Trans fat forms from that process.
I think the more worrying thing about vegetable/seed oils is the omega 6. A small amount is not an issue from my understanding. And in fact omega 6 can be healthy for some specific situations. But it’s the fact that these oils are used in just about all processed foods and restaurant cooking to the point where people are consuming more omega 6 than they should be and we’re seeing negative health effects as a result.
I'm not sure I can imagine something more painful than listening to people that I find absolutely uninteresting nerding out about microplastics for 3 hours but ok
Me when I was a kid in the 90s: mum is a f'ing idiot wtf is wrong with plastic this hippy shit is dumb
My mum 2020s: so plastic huh?
Me 2020s: ugh.