[faitswulff]

10mg per year is potentially a much bigger problem due to biological magnification - i.e. everything below us in the food chain is exposed to the same 10mg per year, so we accumulate the sum of whatever our food sources have consumed.

[howlin]

Which is a great reason to eat as low on the food chain as you can.

[waheoo]

So steak ok?

[scottlocklin]

You aren't absorbing 10g, 10mg or 1mg of plastic in your lungs every year. Most of it is falling on the ground and being turned into dirt.

It's gross and people should do something about it, but it is a neurotic worry rather than a real problem. Most accounts (including this one) even have the temerity to try to link plastic bottles to it (which, also gross, are not a problem as far as plastic fibers in the environment goes) because it freaks people out; so they buy a metal drinking container they shove in their plastic hoodies, which will eventually become a few pounds of environmental plastic fiber pollution.

[Hnrobert42]

It seems you have anger towards a group of people you have defined as bad. That seems to be clouding your judgement. For example, you somehow have convinced yourself that the use of metal water bottles is bad if used by synthetic fabric hoodie wearers in SF.

First, everyone wears synthetics, not just in SF.

Second, less plastic is less plastic.

[scottlocklin]

Thanks for the psychoanalysis, pal. How many polyester garments do you own?

[Hnrobert42]

A fair number of synthetic undergarments. I live in Vietnam, so breathable, wicking clothes are important. I have tried rayon, but I am not impressed. I tried wool boxer briefs, but they were comically small. After reading your post, I did order another two pair of wool shorts. We’ll see how they do.

For the record, I also use a metal water bottle.

[titzer]

Plastic bottles float. They float far and wide. There are billions of them in the oceans, right now, as we speak. Now imagine a plastic water bottle versus this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m9EyXLDlu0

A 15 meter wave breaking in 1-2 meter deep water above an absolutely razor-sharp reef. A plastic water bottle--or really anything at all, will be absolutely obliterated by this. The oceans are full of a microplastic soup that is the ground-up dust from our massive garbage problem. That is now raining back on us. It's not hoodies, dude.

I'd like you to explain how these microplastics are being turned into "dirt". Do you have a specific chemical process in mind? Because I don't. Microplastic is alien to the biosphere. Nothing, short of some lab experiments, nothing processes microplastics. It just gets ground up smaller and smaller and bleached and flaked by UV. It will be around for centuries. It's not biologically inert, either. It's been show to be an endocrine disruptor and kill microorganisms. It hits the bottom of the foodchain. It attracts other pollutants and concentrates them, filling a role as a kind of carrier of poisons that absolutely do kill life of all kinds. It's bad shit.

You have a lot of anger in your comment. It's not neurotic to study carefully what our massive carelessness is doing to this planet. Rather, it is depressing to see how flippant and dismissive some people are because they are uncomfortable seeing the cost our economies are exacting on our home planet.

[weaksauce]

> It's gross and people should do something about it, but it is a neurotic worry rather than a real problem.

I wonder if it is going to be more like lead where at the time it was thought to be benignish and as the evidence mounted it was clear just how destructive it was.

[14]

Or maybe it will show that humans can manage the plastic over their life times but maybe insects can not. It certainly seems to coincide with the declining bug population and increasing plastic use.

[weaksauce]

I guess time will tell... that's an interesting theory.

[mc32]

Indeed I’ve noted a trend the last few years of “tech”-(article of clothing): tech chinos, tech sweatpants, etc.

All synthetic, all imbued with who knows what kind of chemicals. Then add all the Patagonia & the The North Faces that everyone is hip with...

[elevenoh]

And we wonder why the tech 'soy boy' label stuck ;)