I am busy and don’t have time to research all of the ways corporations have poisoned us.
What are some good rules on how to avoid microplastics?
Eat local foods? Avoid processed foods? Walk/bike? Use dry soaps? Don’t use any take away containers? Avoid walking near busy roads? Use cotton/wool for all clothing?
Short term: grow your own food.
long term: politicsThe micro plastics are in the soil. If you live urban or suburban, your soil is likely more contaminated with micro plastics than food grown on a rural farm.
You can’t buy and optionally clean a bag of dirt?
The plastic particles are small enough to enter the cells of your body. No filter can let dirt through and block micro plastics.
Maybe stop thinking in absolutes and see if blocking 99% makes a difference? You gotta be smarter than to think in black and white
I don’t think you understand how small the particles are. You can’t filter micro plastics out of soil because the micro plastics are the same size as the soil particles. Take a bucket of sand and dye half red. How are you going to filter it?
There are methods to destroy micro plastics like raising the temp. But that will kill the bacteria in the soil making it sterile.
They’re there in varying sizes. We’re not looking for perfection. We’re looking for ‘good enough’. And if the place you live is so polluted that you can’t even grab some dirt out of your yard without poisoning your plants… I think you have to get out of there
I don’t think you understand the physics of the problem. Have you played connect 4, the game with the checkers that you drop down a slot?
Imagine the black checkers are dirt particles and the red checkers are microplastic. The game set with the slots is the filter the particles drop through. Play a game and then open the slider at the bottom to dump the checkers. Do the red checkers stay in the game set while only the black fall out? Of course not, because they are the same size.
There is no possibile way to filter the plastic because it is the same size as the dirt in all its different sizes. There are large and small dirt particles. There are large and small micro plastics. If you remove 1% of the microplastic you remove 1% of the dirt, so the remaining dirt is just as contaminated. You didn’t filter it, you only removed an equal amount of dirt and plastic.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2215016121003095
Can’t wait for the Water World future, these bags of dirt are gonna be worth a fortune.
Now that’s something to stockpile then
I’ve found bits of plastic trash in almost all of the potting soil I’ve bought. I’m at the point where I think a heavily filtered hydroponic setup is one of the only ways to really minimize microplastics.
probz a good idea to buy elsewhere then
Hydroponics are done with plastic components. I’ve never heard of hydroponics done with glass.
That’s the neat part, you can’t
Clothing and textiles from natural fibres. No rubber tires as they are major shedders of micro plastics.
They’re in he air, the water, the food, your brain, apparently. Your reproductive fluids…there’s literally no escape. We signed this pact with satan when capitalism determined that profit is the only thing that matters.
The first step we could take? Bringing the exploitative and murderous system of capitalism to its knees. So we can promptly shoot it in the back of the head. Then, maaaybe our children’s children’s children would have an option to avoid microplastics.
Short answer: very simple
Avoid plastic
You buy bottled water?
That has Microplastics.
You buy or store food in plastic?
Microplastics…
Use plastic straws?
Welp, Microplastics
Etc…
Basically it’s difficult to avoid it since we use plastic almost everywhere daily, but not impossible.
All the plastic objects you listed are the long term cause of micro plastics. You don’t get micro plastics from the plastic wrap on food or plastic straws. Micro plastics come from the straws thrown away that slowly break down into micro plastics over decades.
So avoid plastic to help the environment, but that won’t change your micro plastics injested right now. It’s in the food itself.
You can’t completely avoid them, but avoiding plastic food/drink containers is an easy thing to do. Good for the environment too, not just your health.
Removed by mod
Just embrace them
The main ways you’re exposed to microplastics is through ingestion and breathing it in.
To limit ingestion, yes the main thing to do is to avoid food and drink that comes in plastic containers. Reducing your consumption of processed foods will help with this. Eating mostly produce is a simpler way to approach this. Even though produce may often be transported in plastic, if you wash it before consumption you’ll have done pretty well. Ideally you would also have a reverse osmosis filter at home, as your water probably has microplastics as well (but less than bottled water!).
To limit breathing it in, yes avoid frequent exposure to busy roads. They are often full of tire dust that is getting kicked up. This is cumulative, though. Walking by a busy street once is no big deal. Walking along one twice a day may add up.
Overall, however, to address microplastics we will have to control the production of plastics and the use of plastics in the first place. For example, there would be a lot less tire dust if we used more rail to get around. And there would be less need for bottled water if water fountains were ubiquitous and so were standardized stainless steel water bottles. In addition, we could use biodegradable plastics for more packaging so that they don’t accumulate in bodies or the environment.
But this last point, despite being the only real solution, will literally require the overthrow of capitalism. I’m for this and am happy to talk about it more, but it is a lot.
“Plastic came out of the Earth; the Earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place: it wanted plastic for itself, didn’t know how to make it, needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old philosophical question: “Why are we here?” Plastic, assholes!”
George Carlin.
Carlin the King.
It’s too late to avoid them. Microplastics are being found literally everywhere on the planet.
I read an article not that long ago that stated that they’re in men’s testicles and women’s ovaries. In other words, they have become a part of your physical body and will become a part of the bodies of the next generation (likely several generations). They’re unavoidable.
Become a communist and start advocating for workers to run the economy because we wouldn’t fuck ourselves over like capitalists will.
