Microplastics Found In Human Hearts For First Time, Showing Impact Of Pollution::A study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology for found microplastics in the hearts and blood of humans undergoing cardiac surgery.
This is our lead, isn’t it?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure there’s microplastics in human everything at this point. How is this a revelation?
Because it was found for the first time. I didn’t even need to read the article to answer your question.
Remember this story when the idea of using waste plastic in roads is discussed again. Just last week some company was trying to peddle that awful idea.
So, i was feeling pretty apocalyptic about this too - until it learned that “micro plastics” include any synthetic fibers like polyester. i mean, of course our clothing lint will get everywhere
We started mass production of plastic 90 years ago, and we’re choking on it. We need to stop all plastic production.
Please take a moment to think of everything in your life that is made of plastic, and then think of what could replace it.
we need to at least make a plastic that is sustainable, biodegradable, and with a shorter lifespan depending on the applications. for example, a water bottle could be made to last 6 months or so depending on the size, while a keyboard could be made to last decades before starting to break down. this would be quite hard to achieve, but if we want to keep all the commodities given to us by plastic, while also keeping our health, we have to invest some money into research.
IIRC They’ve found a microbe recently that will eat plastic within a couple years. Could be wrong though.
Either way I agree. Wish we would just go back to glass.
so can we just drink that?
Isn’t that the lore for the cat adventure game Stray? Some little bug thing was able to eat plastic, they deployed it but it got out of control and mutated to consume all kinds, now chunks of the city are cut off to prevent the spread.
Hope that doesn’t happen smile.
Edit: Afterthought, why does this alleged microbe consume plastic? What nutritional value does oil / hydrocarbons provide?
The problem is that many medical devices for the disabled and chronically ill are made of plastic. It’s why the disability community protested the plastic straw ban, since many of them require to use them to consume anything.
I genuinely emphasize with the people that rely on plastic materials to get through life, it’s tough in that situation. I think the solution for straws (since that’s a more simple solution) would be either something reusable like metal staws or something compostable like agave straws. Medical applications should replace with compostable plastics like hemp. My point is that stopping cold turkey with petroleum based plastics would be better than trying to slowly phase it out. The plastics cartel will do anything to slow down the phase out
Implantable devices can’t be compostable. Catheters and other things that will go inside your body cannot be compostable. That’s not the easy solution you think it is.
I know, and I don’t have any solid solutions. I’m a single person that never studied materials science. I’d love to have all the solutions, but I don’t. The plastic waste that comes to mind for me in a medical setting is the packaging for sterile products, which could definitely be made of industrially compostable materials. Implantable devices is far more complex, but biologically inert metals exist.
The packaging could not be either. Sterility has to be assured for the shelf life of the device. Those are typically years. These materials aren’t just cheap or convenient. They’ve been vetted over decades of research and testing.
Now this isn’t meant to rain on your parade. Just showing how even the best intentions can fall short. Tossing out solutions in areas you aren’t familiar with can just muddy discussions.
This is such an uninformed take. Plastics are literally everywhere in modern life. Not just the store bags or straws and lids, but objects in the home like appliances, buckles on backpacks, medical devices, items we launch into space. It’s not been shown to meaningfully decrease life expectancy and we may find ways to remove it from our bodies. Cold turkey and you essentially have no infrastructure to replace what is made with plastics.
There are places where it’s absolutely necessary, there are places where it’s inconvenient to get rid of but a good idea, and there are places where it’s absolutely stupid to use plastic.
So it’s an “uninformed take” when I know that 90% of plastics that make it to recycling plants aren’t recycled, and that petroleum plastics are part of the driving factors leading us towards climate chaos?
Climate chaos is not mostly driven by consumer plastics. Burning of fossil fuels to generate power is and has been the largest contributor followed by agriculture. Plastics don’t get recycled because.people don’t even have a fundamental understanding of how recycling works. That’s not the fault of the people, it’s their governments. You and I using a reusable bag and water bottle doesn’t make a dent in climate change. Until our energy shifts to nuclear we aren’t going to be in a better spot. Renewables can supplement but are far away from being a replacement.
Reduction of emissions can’t be the only thing we try. We have to do that and engineer ways to contain and scrub high pollution areas.
Even metals don’t get recycled like they should because they don’t get cleaned and dried.
We have to outengineer the problem at this point because we didn’t engineer a cleaner path fifty years ago when we had the opportunity.
Had we leaned more heavily into nuclear the world would be better off.
Pursuing a useable fusion solution should be the focus of the effort for humanity. That alone can provide us the energy needed to shutdown fossil fuels power plants.
But we decided years ago the nuclear is the boogey man because it is too difficult for the average citizen to comprehend.
You don’t even offer a viable solution. So yea, uninformed take. I’ll stand by it.
Sorry, I didn’t know I was tasked with singlehandedly solving our plastic problem. Either way, I did give a suggestion; replace all plastic with reusable objects made of reusable materials, or make them compostable.
The issue is you made a very extreme statement “We need to stop all plastic production” without actually knowing or understanding A) what plastics make up of the items we use in ALL sectors of our daily lives and B) how catastrophic it would be to stop all plastic production. Just like the knee-jerk reaction that caused plastic straws to be banned and replaced by paper straws in certain areas, and then we find out paper straws actually harm the environment more.
Like, your hot take sounds all good and noble like most virtue signaling statements do, but they also all don’t consider any of the realities or ramifications, just like yours.
Also, your fixable solution isn’t a solution at all. There’s many life-saving plastics that cant be made from reusable or compositabke plastics.
Yep, while you may think that you have a heart of gold or perhaps stone, your heart may actually have microplastics in it. And in this case, life in plastic is not fantastic, regardless of what the Barbie song by Aqua says.
After all, “Please fill my body with pieces of plastic” is probably not what you often say.
Yes, they used freaking laser beams to detect the presence of microplastics
They also found something bloody awful: nine types of microplastics in patients’ blood samples
Even things that may not obviously seem to have plastic, like various types of clothes, can have lots o’ plastic in them
But all of this may just be the tip of the plasticberg.
In fact, you may be like a walking credit card with the amount of plastic that you already have in you.
The issue is important and the data is scary, but this article reads like the work of a ten-year-old class clown giving an oral report during a sugar high.
Yeah sure why the fuck not. Toss it on the pile of everything thats fucking wrong.
I’ll decompose into a pile of bones and a little mound of plastic dust.
Materialism in the hearts of men
Link to the paper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c07179
The paper mentions controlling for accidental exposure during surgery, although it is also behind a paywall, so it’s not possible to tell whether they might have been more exposed to plastic because of whatever heart issues required surgery in the first place, or whether it is something that might also be in healthy humans.
On a side note, why is this in !technology, anyhow? It doesn’t seem all that tech-related, except maybe in terms of the plastic discussion.
