Stop driving? Most microplastic in water come from tires.
I've been trying to make small moves away from car infrastructure in my town and the response is, well, less than positive.
We already tacitly accept that cars are one of the biggest causes of death. Reducing car infrastructure to reduce microplastics, where we don't even really know the harm, seems far far more challenging.
And also synthetic clothes. According to the study they found more plastic fibres than plastic particles in many samples.
These get released when you launder your clothes, ending up in the drain water and ultimately the ocean.
Solution? Buy clothes with natural fibres (cotton, wool, etc) instead of plastics. And wash your clothes in a modern washing machine with a microfibre filter on its drain outlet.
Assuming you dump the sludge in the bin when you clean the filter then it’s much better than going into the ocean.
Depending on your location, they’ll either get destroyed by incineration or put in landfill where they’ll do less harm and hopefully break down after a few centuries.
Of course, if you clean the filter by flushing the sludge down the sink then you didn’t solve anything.
The risk is runoff into the ocean or insertion into the water table through seepage within the dump into the soil. Furthermore incineration doesn't atomize these plastics; the smoke plumage may become a part of rain clouds which either recirculates the contaminants into the water cycle, and thus either in the local environment or into the ocean, again.
Obviously these are geography-relative concerns. But they aren't rare.
> About 34% of the emitted coarse TWPs (tire wear particles) and 30% of the emitted coarse BWPs (brake wear particles) (100 kt yr−1 and 40 kt yr−1 respectively) were deposited in the World Ocean. These amounts are of similar magnitude as the total estimated direct and riverine transport of TWPs and fibres to the ocean (64 kt yr−1).
Water pollution from brake and tire dust, (and oil drippings,) is well proven. If you build infrastructure to handle runoff from roads, you need to mitigate pollution in that runoff too.
> Most microplastic in water comes from washing machines. Synthetic fibers from clothes.
I know less about that but from what I've skimmed it appears to be true too.
What town is that? It seems like the success of diversifying away from cars depends on the place and how it grew. LA, for example, grew at the time of peak automobile infrastructure investment and it's basically unrecoverable at this point. There are probably other reasons why places like LA are so locked in to cars now, but that's the one that seems obvious to me.
It's a town with one of the highest percentages of bike commuters in the state, actually.
However there's also a regressive aspect that refuses to make any accommodations for anything except cars, and these people have veto power over non-car infrastructure. There is no built-in veto power for new car infrastructure, and in fact existing law requires car infrastructure as a base for any sort of building, for example parking minimums.
Most of the city was built 1960-1980, so based on car designs. But it's small enough that small amounts of change would eliminate car dependence.
>Tire factories start with bulk raw materials such as synthetic rubber (60% -70% of total rubber in the tire industry[2][3]), carbon black, and chemicals and produce numerous specialized components that are assembled and cured.
Looks like most of the rubber used these days is synthetic[1], usually made of styrene and butadiene which could easily degrade into base monomers or at least shorter chains.
Car and light truck tires are apparently only about 19% rubber.[1] More than half of a tire's composition is synthetic polymers, fillers, and textiles (e.g. polyester, rayon, nylon).
You say "vast" but we have to outlaw non-car options and legislate that only car options are allowed for nearly all our land.
If we were to even legalize non-car options, we might discover what the market actually wants. And the necessity of those laws kind of shows that the non-car option must be legally suppressed to prevent its true market preference from being revealed.
To everyone who thinks that the "vast majority" of people prefer driving, I say: show the confidence of your convictions and make it legal to build other options.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but birth rates are already pretty low, and, worse than failing to deal with the problem, some people think that is a good thing.
If you donate blood as soon as possible from your last blood donation (per federal regulations), you can remove 50% of your microplastic content per year. Some studies have also shown that going to saunas/sweat lodges also lower your microplastic content.
I don't think becoming vegetarian helps. From the article:
> The study found evidence that food processing is a likely source of microplastic contamination, as highly processed protein products (like fish sticks, chicken nuggets, tofu, and plant-based burgers, among others) contained significantly more microplastics per gram than minimally processed products (items like packaged wild Alaska pollock, raw chicken breast, and others).
If you look at the actual data, tofu had the third lowest concentration of microplastic particles per gram (0.03, vs 0.02 for pork loin chop and 0.01 for whole chicken breast).
The press release does a disservice to the study by referring to the highly processed group as a whole and not excluding tofu. For reference, the breaded shrimp and fish sticks were measured to have 1.2 and 0.26 particles per gram.
Regardless if a processed food like tofu has minimal plastic concentration, I would assume minimally processed whole plant food like beans and nuts would also have low microplastic exposure. The study found little total plastic from packaging, their evidence pointed towards the processing.
Did you account for calories? Beef has ~3-4X the calories per gram of tofu.
I would guess plants have more microplastics as they just pull things out of the soil and store them (why many plants have a ton of heavy metals). Animals at least have some systems for filtering and processing unwanted items.
I've been trying to make small moves away from car infrastructure in my town and the response is, well, less than positive.
We already tacitly accept that cars are one of the biggest causes of death. Reducing car infrastructure to reduce microplastics, where we don't even really know the harm, seems far far more challenging.