Is this going to be one of those things where in a 100 years people laugh at us for putting everything in plastic like we look back at romans etc using lead and mercury for stuff
I don't think so, plastic wrapping is a massive boost for keeping food hygienic in transport and both to avoid waste and reduce pathogen contamination. Probably a much bigger benefit than the microplastic contamination.
It might be they will be like "shame they didn't have this awesome new material that has 0 environmental/health impact that we have today" though.
There are no clear substitutes for plastic in a lot of applications even when you disregard price.
We will see. It's microplastics in semen and brains that may be seen as negligent pollution. Our generations haven't inherited much active pollution, futures have more opportunity for it.
The future is not known. Let's see. We obviously didn't all die of food poisoning before the invention of plastic.
I'm curious what paper packaging you have in mind, that isn't also lined with plastics. Maybe we could use more wax lined items? I don't know. But it is down right comical how people will avoid some macro plastic things only to be using something that has micro plastic by design.
I think that if people are trying to avoid plastics but unknowingly using them anyway due to misleading design or greenwashing then their heart is in the right place and we shouldn't sneer at them. At least they're conscious of the problems and trying to do better. Call out the companies who are doing this. Don't blame people for being confused by something designed to be as confusing as possible.
Totally fair. My exposure has been large on folks that virtue signal that they avoid plastic things. To the point that they are largely sneering at people that don't make the same choices they do.
To your point, though, we could use less sneering overall.
Waxes are pretty similar to plastics and can be produced by similar processes from the things. The main difference is that they're a lot more biodegradable.
If you watched their actual choices, when confronted with shiny transparent-and-or-colorful familiar plastic vs. paper replacements...yeah.
(And as soon as you have paper packaging, the big companies want to "improve" it with 57 varieties of chemicals & coatings & treatments & crap. Not to say that manufacturing paper is anything resembling clean & green, either.)
> I don't think so, plastic wrapping is a massive boost for keeping food hygienic in transport and both to avoid waste and reduce pathogen contamination. Probably a much bigger benefit than the microplastic contamination.
One can make even grander claims about having plumbing vs. the effects of lead poisoning.
"Plastic is bad" is the current fad. There is nothing clear about it. Sure Macroplastic causes well documented damage. I don't know of any proven effects of Microplastics in large animals/humans. The argument seems to be more "it can't be good".
I'm not at all invested in plastic and I'm all for protecting our environment, but I sense some sort of mass hysteria going on here again.
Good that people are documenting the spread of man-made stuff and look for negative effects, no need for the permanent fearmongering.
Also plastics are very different, some are rather bad (pvc,epoxy) others quite harmless (pe,pp).
I remember, about 1968-1972, my parents replacing the dishes we ate off of. The old ones were some kind of glazed pottery-type stuff. I didn't at all understand at the time, but I'm fairly sure now that they replaced them because of concern for lead in the glaze.
Also, as a reminder, leaded gas (avgas) is still used all over the United States pumping lead into the environment. If you live near an airport you are especially at increased risk of lead exposure in the environment.
This is just for general aviation though. Jet fuel has no lead in it. Not that this means it’s healthy, just that jet exhaust pollution does not include appreciable amounts of lead.
Generally speaking, it's better to cover up asbestos than it is to remove it. Remediation attempts can easily go wrong, moving the asbestos from "hidden and staying put under tiles" to "free floating dust in the air and your lungs". One of my parents' friends got mesothelioma from doing just that.
The time it takes us from finding out something is dangerous to finally doing something about it is astonishingly long. Lead, Asbestos, CFCs, PFAS, etc
And we have a President currently trying to bring back clean, beautiful asbestos (it's still used in a few places actually). A wonder material, good for protecting against hot stuff.
We live in an older house in the US. We got a note in the mail from the city that pipe from the main to the house might be lead. They looked at building plans/ permits. The length is (15ft) so the impact is minimal if it’s actually lead. The piping inside is copper and pvc for drains. But we had the water tested anyway. Lead isn’t good for you.
Its not really common either. much as been replaced. In areas where it is common the pipes are often old enough that the lead is covered with limescale sealing it off from the water (lead pipes would now be many decades old), and I have read that water supplies in some areas have additives to seal off lead too. You can also have your supply tested (free AFAIK).
WIth the right mix of minerals in water it's generally safe, but like in Flint municipalities can screw up that content of ions/minerals in water and leach it out (remove the protective patina)
Old lead pipes had hard untreated water flowing through them. The lead pipes would internally (normally) be coated with salts, and the lead did not (normally) leach into water. But soft water does not have calcium or magnesium in high enough quantities. Also, even with hard water, pressure changes could loosen the scale deposits.
Microplastic risk is not anywhere close to lead, we should not even be discussing these two things in the same paragraph.
Lead is bad because it mimics calcium and iron in our body, binding to proteins, sneaking into bones, causes anemia, disrupts brain function...
Plastic is inert, it is made of long chains of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. These long chains do not break down easily. Microplastic, while it does not pass through the body, and can accumulate in organs, its impact is still under study. We aren't ingesting high doses.
BUT, bad pipes may leach other stuff. Some additives in certain plastics seem to mimic hormones and potentially disrupt them. Some additives are carcinogenic. (but only in high doses I guess). Certified modern pipes are safer.
Yes, depending on alkalinity and so forth --- see Flint, Michigan in the news a while back, or on-going efforts to remove solder containing lead from the plumbing aisle.
Yes, the only reason we are ok with some old lead pipes left is because they're coated in scale build up. As long as that's not disturbed it's not dangerous anymore.
Yeah, though I’m much more concerned about those that are not so obviously bad, that we still don’t know how terrible they are. You know, the unknown unknows.
They'll laugh at us for trusting any information we get from social media, too. It's the epistemological equivalent of licking the floor of a public restroom.
Are... you under the impression that people who actually study history mock the Romans for their... use of lead? You need to read more actual sources than the hindustanitimes.com listicles if you're coming to this impression.
And ironically the best way to get the plastics out of our systems is blood letting. So in the future, we are the backwards ones, and the modern peoples use leeches to make themselves healthy.
I would like to thank the activists at r/asbestosremovalmemes for normalizing eating it, first step in normalizing it and making sure everyone will be entitled to compensation.
I'd say they did things that were harmful that they did not know they were harmful. Unless they did it in the face of clear evidence of the harm, what is there to mock?
I expect the people in 100 years from now will laugh at us for doing all of the things that we absolutely know are harming the environment right now. Perhaps they will even laugh at us for hand wringing about plastics on the possibility that they might be harmful while doing next to nothing about the things we do actually have evidence for,
Apparently, the smarter or more informed ones did know, or at least suspect, that lead is bad for you. There are writings from the time which mention this. Also, led pipes were not as bad as some imagine, since they would, after a while, become protected from leaching by a layer of calcium deposits.
Having your opinion rejected does not necessarily mean that your opinion is the correct one, sure there are many people shunned from discourse that are in some way correct, just as there are lots of people who are shunned for being quite in the wrong. Sadly we can't rely on public opinion, no matter which way, to judge the worth of an idea.
I have to add that I hear this premise expressed quite often from people peddling low-evidence medical advice and not-quite-believable conspiracy, who try to give credence to their theory by pointing out that the people-you-don't-like disagree with them, no matter what the grounds of disagreement actually are.
(I've seen people refer to this thought pattern as the "Galileo fallacy", although we also shouldn't let these named fallacies turn us away from actual interesting ideas just because the public disagrees, too. It's a balance.)
That's strange. I usually hear this expressed by people who have personally had their views censored out of the public sphere by some authority who was actively marketing the opposite view.
I usually hear what you've expressed from people who are glad that other people were censored: a vague argument for the existence of the possibility of censorship that isn't meant as political suppression, one which usually relies on accusing any possibly censored hypothetical person of likely being crazy, stupid, or a foreign spy.
Rather than an argument, it's an encouragement to use those priors when calculating the odds of the next "conspiracy theory" being censored off the internet actually being true. Remember, arrested people are usually guilty, because most of the guilty people I know about were arrested...
It is optimistic to think they will "laugh" about the environments harm. That would mean they would not suffer a lot of the consequences of said harm. Let's hope it will not be that bad to become fanatical about it.
I would be less inclined to laugh at Romans, since my grandparents still used lead in plenty of dangerous applications. Why do we need to go any further back than 100-years?
It is often the case that something with desired good effects also has undesirable bad side effects, but the good effects and their value outweigh the bad effects.
I don't know if the Romans made tradeoffs like this; they were well aware of its chronic toxicity which resulted in plumbism. But you have to remember that we're talking about a diverse ancient empire. People today know that stuffing your face with garbage food and in large amounts is bad for you, and the speed of communication and scope of regulation are might higher, but the "practice" is widespread anyway.
I mean laugh out of context I dont think anyones specifically laughing at something they didnt know but in the context of smuggness of what we know now
We wont do a damn thing about the dangers of micro plastic now until it gets incredibly bad that we cant ignore it.
Id say they would actually laugh at us for that though in the future
It remains underexplored, but there's many papers released and many studies being done to try and confirm. A big one is hormonal; BPA is a xenoestrogen, emulating the effects of estrogen on human bodies, with studies showing links between it and reduced fertility. There's been ~19000 studies on it so far, most since the 2000s (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=bisphenol+a).
It seems like there are issues with determining what harmful levels are.
The BPA wikipedia article says the primary source of human exposure is from canned food. That seems like it could be solved with a specific fix. It is not stated, but I would assume that the exposure from particles distributed in the environment would be insignificant if there is a known primary source that humans frequently interact with.
And there are so many alternatives and we don't know if they aren't even worse than BPA. Also unless you get bottle water/soda/etc in glass you are gonna get it there too, even aluminum cans are lined with the stuff.
It might be they will be like "shame they didn't have this awesome new material that has 0 environmental/health impact that we have today" though.
There are no clear substitutes for plastic in a lot of applications even when you disregard price.