7,000 Microplastics Studies Show We Have One Really Big Problem

We're all trillionaires! 🎉

• plastic film used as mulch in agriculture

Wtf. Where and why?!

Yep

Plastic was never meant to be recycled.

Have you seen the process used in plastic recycling? The plastic is literally triturated into tiny bits before being heated up for the next stages.

Edit: why the downvotes? I'm just trying to give some context on why plastic recycling is a great source of microplastics

Other great source of plastics are synthetic fabrics. It releases a lot of micro particles in the water during washing and drying cycles.

Do our testicles all melt together?

I'm kinda surprised that more comes from paint than tires.

Plastics industry: "See?! We told you plastic decomposes and doesn't just stay in landfills forever. Happy now?"

There are certain industries, like medical, that would probably be one of the last, if ever, to do away with plastic, simply due to the upsides. The only option we have as a species is to create a truly biodegradable, non-toxic, easily obtainable and cheap to produce alternative.

Haha who am I kidding, we are fucked, plastic manufacturers go brrrrrrrrr.

Plastics are also used extensively in the electricity sector as insulation for conductors, support structures, etc.

We need our vendors of these products to start addressing this issue, and unfortunately I don't think this is going to come from the consumer end. Maybe for alternative insulating liquids for transformers and whatnot like with Cargill FR3 or Shell MIDEL products, but clearly more needs to be done. Schneider Electric is a good example of a company leading the way

Plastic will probably only make us infertile while climate change will kill us AND already stop us from reproducing (or do you feel a kid born today has a good perspective on it's future?).

Don't forget Antimicrobial resistance (AMR)!

to grow plastic infused plants, of course

Controlled Release Fertilizers (CRF) are coated with a tiny layer of polymer which allow to release nutrients in a very timely and targeted way to various crops (trees, flowers, some cash crops) and used in closed environments such as potting plants or greenhouses.

So it has its use. Guess we'll need to find an alternative to using polymers now (among a ton of other work).

The 7000 papers were really well written. Unfortunately, 90% of the people I’d forward them to would be article…

Rather than take a defeatist veiw from this line if thinking, it will do well for your mental health to first spend more time, energy and thoughts on things you can control. Not just things related to environmentalism, but broadly reduce energy, engagement and focus from the things you don't have significant control over and direct them to those things you do have control. It's good to get a broad picture and observe the world around you outside of your control in small doses, but it's easy to over indulge in an unfocused survey of problems in the world, especially on social media. (I include Lemmy communities in the social media category).

Furthermore, when you do engage with these problems, do so with more narrow focus and in more depth with an eye towards understanding the level of impact the problem has and what organizations or policy positions you can support to amplify your limited influence over the issues that causee the problem. In this way you can mitigate the feelings of helplessness and sense of there being many existential and imminent problems you need to contend with but cannot remedy. You can turn seemingly untouchable solutions into real possibilities without overwhelming your emotional capacity by working with others.

In regards to humans, progress is being made. In coming years, expect greater clarity about effects on our bodies such as:

• inflammation
• oxidative stress (an imbalance of free radicals and antioxidants that damages cells)
• immune responses
• genotoxicity – damage to the genetic information in a cell that causes mutations, which can lead to cancer.

TL;DR yes, cancer. It also fucks with wildlife (blocking intestines, giving off poison)

Good chance it probably is, possibly increase chance for asthma, chance for heart attack, another is it probably makes us infertile probably a good thing depending how you think of it.

It’s making men infertile. theres even a shortage of viable sperm today around the world

We just need to turn up the UV lights voltage and melt the plastic out. Is that something we could look into?

We are the plastic eating bacteria.

If we knew of bacteria that cleanly ate plastic, we probably wouldn't be riddled with micro plastics 😉

People having a laugh isn’t the problem.

There is a real problem with the thread format of social media however.

My proof is I can’t find the “in this discussion relevant” thread of masturbation jokes because time has moved on and so did the discussion. [Edit: your comment is only 1h old, so not sure whats up]

We need a much better way to organize our speech and discussions because a single scroll page sorted by time, or contextless votes ain’t doing it.

I actually noticed that some of my comments are reacted very different towards depending on the time of day, what side of planet earth is awake at the time.

There is an argument to be had that certain troll farms love to drown discussions in shitposts and maybe we should be more mindful of the patterns.

But to say we should crack down on any form of jokes, which are an important part of our human expression that goes too far, thats what i disliked about r/science

scrolling in the comment section of this news article, i've only seen people either being concerner/shocked, and some sarcastically talking about recycling or something. Nothing about masturbation.

And if your criticism of lemmy is that it's being reddit with elitism, then why try to gatekeep the way people are going to react to an article on c/science? Are we all supposed to have degrees in chemistry or biology before making a comment?

Believe it or not people take heavy news a million different ways and react differently. People ending up making a masturbation joke after discussing microplastics in testicles (i assume this is what happened) harm nothing and no one.

Doors over there. Feel free to leave.

While a problem yes, miniscule compared to industrial waste

Pretty bad, especially with people sanding down productions and stuff.

Not significantly contributing to the global problem, but you might inhale some. Don’t sand your prints for sure.

PLA I think just breaks down into lactic acid eventually, but the ABS probably isnt so good