Realistically, the best thing you can do to reduce your microplastics intake seems to be to avoid microwaving in plastic bowls and to avoid using plastic bottles for soft drinks and water. (Though cans actually use a thin film of plastic inside too.. so, maybe just avoid packaged water?)
Beyond your personal intake though there's bigger fish.
Car tyres are the #1 source for microplastics entering rivers, and it's not even close (they're thought to be the source of up to 85% of all environmental microplastics).
Those particulates don't just vanish, they end up in the soil and the waterways and it ends up inside you, no matter what you do.
Some people use plastic cutting-trays / knives / forks /spoons / cups / jugs, which also are some things to avoid.
I would also avoid all nonstick pans and utensils, as they're lined with PFAS which is worse than plastic, and slowly it will break off into the food. Beware the industry shills on this forum, as they will have you ignore the fact that ingesting PFAS is well known to result in higher blood levels of PFAS.
Fully agree with you, however eating small bits of PFAS from pans seems to be pretty non toxic.
Even in the recent Veritasium video about it they said that unless the chemical was heated to above ~300 degress C if will pass through the human digestive system without causing any harm.
Didnt know that we reached that level of degredation already! :-D
Another example comes to my mind: In lot of European conutries, at "cheese corner/bar" in the supermarket, every time a piece of cheese is cut, they are removing the foil, cutting the cheese, and then re-packing it in new foil after that - and this for every chees bar in every supermarket: How much kilometers does just one branch waste per year?
Yes I just mean the more expensive tea on the shelf. On cheaper SKUs they're trying to cut cost so they use normal tea bags. The plastic sachets were a trend for a couple years but hopefully most brands have switched away.
That study is interesting because they used SEM to image the plastic afterward, and you can see how the plastic surface has literally been torn up on a microscopic level simply by touching hot water.
Plastic has a low-energy surface, which means it doesn't take much energy to tear it apart. Even Brownian motion is enough, which is pretty wild.
> Or is there really a difference in the quality/taste of the expensive ones?
If we are still talking about tea, then of course there are huge differences. And the best tea is not packaged in individual tea bags (also it's not sold in supermarkets unless it's a country with a very high tea culture).
So at the low end you would have tea that is grown with lots of chemicals, plucked by machines or by badly paid workers, industrially processed in high quantities, sold as bulk on international markets. While on the highest end you would have artisanal small-batch tea with no chemicals involved, possibly grown in some special way like the tea bushes shaded from the sun or hundred years old tea trees in forested areas, processed by hand so the leaves are not broken etc... And all of this is reflected in the taste.
And to add - tea is graded at source, and buyers purchase based on grade. So a low quality tea bag will have tea that is objectively worse than a high quality one, while the best tea is never near a bag.
The article focuses on the airways. The commenter probably takes more hollistic approach and you are gonna eat way more palstic in yoir life than you breathe in.
the article lists several things including textiles, plastic packaging, and avoiding tyre particles. I led with containers/bottles because that's where the most concentrated single exposures seem to be (microwaving in plastic, bottled water), but you're right that textiles are up there too, especially for airborne microfibres.
The exposure from food packaging is many times more prominent than polyester, which slows down leeching over time.
Also, stop using dishwashing pods and laundry pods with the dissolvable plastic layer encasing them. Use powder or liquid detergent instead. If you can't find it in store, look for it online, because it definitely is in stock.
There’s a big difference between nanoplastics/chemical leeching (which is what happens with heated food containers) and microplastics of the sort that break off from clothing other plastic materials (which is what the article is talking about). Both are significant issues though.
> Car tyres are the #1 source for microplastics entering rivers, and it's not even close (they're thought to be the source of up to 85% of all environmental microplastics).
Do EVs create more microplastics than ICE vehicles then?
So I boil my water (hoping it does something to all the mirco plastics, maybe make them lump together). Only just now did I think to check 'is my metal kettle lined with plastics'. And guess what...
I wonder when and if microplastics will get it's Asbestos moment. Obviously they are not as carcinogenic, but it seems we don't have the full picture, and microplastics are present at an insanely higher degree than asbestos where.
Probably never. I think it's been at least a decade since the fear over them became mainstream. Yeah, it's possible these things can take time to show up but considering the scale of their presence and how long we have been using them, we would have at least seen some definite relationship between them and some serious health concern. Look at the article itself, the health impact is conveniently buried in the last section, and it just repeats over and over how they can found everywhere in the body but nothing on what can possible happen.
So much of the scare revolves around the same framing, "microplastic" have been found in breast milk/blood whatever, but never seen one mentioning what it can possibly cause. Is it too hard to fathom that the answer is "nothing"?
Not as long as there are powerful car lobbies and the main source of microplastic will remain car tires.
Instead, you have articles like this trying to tell people to look away from that main source of problem, and blame, say, indoors or food preparation, and skip details like how the homes with the most microplastic in them are… close to the highway.
Given the fact that they are so ubiquitous and yet no causal relation between microplastics and any health issue whatsoever has been identified in any rigorous study until today [1], I'd say a lot of this reporting is fear mongering by the eco/organic industry, aimed at gullible people who know very little about science. Not as insane and unphysical as electro smog, but definitely nowhere near asbestos. The linked article even goes into detail how warped the perceptions are among the general population and how doctors should educate people better, because there are real risks from other things out there. If you're really concerned about health effects of common pollutants, there are much bigger risks with actual proven causal effects in everyday compounds.
Half the microplastics in our body is from cars. So move to a car-free city district or remote cabin (and then driving train+bike so not to contribute to the problem?).
Saying HEPA filters remove "99%" of microplastic is pretty misleading.
Most of the mass in airborne particles is in the larger sizes of visible dust. However these particles will "fall out" before they reach the air purifier.
The best advice isn't "use only HEPA" or (an odd one, from this article) "use filters with multiple stages," it's to have an air purifier where the Clean Air Delivery Rate (CADR) is matched to room size. For filtering large dust you need a lot of air flow, aim for 6-8 Air Changes per Hour (ACH).
Also the CADR on the box is always on the highest fan speed, which is always way too loud for constant use in an occupied room. So ideally you want to size the air purifiers assuming a fan speed generating 45 decibels or less. HouseFresh is an excellent review site that publishes these numbers.
Most people dramatically undersize their air purifiers, or run them on a very low fan setting, and then they throw up their hands and say that air purifiers don't work.
What amazes me about the plastic health debacle is that any rational decision making process would have identified these compounds as entirely novel, with no evolutionary correlate. The precautionary principle should have applied; the burden should have been on corporations to prove these compounds safe. Instead, they were incorrectly assumed to be safe, deployed at scale, and now the burden is on us to deal with the impacts.
This was an experiment run without consent, and without accountability. Much like our experiment with atmospheric CO2, these companies are making profits by dumping the liabilities onto the public.
I wonder if this means that going to the gym is a huge source of exposure then. Enclosed environment with rubber mat flooring and weights constantly banging against it..
I'm all for improving indoor air quality (IAQ), but microplastics are a very minor concern compared to other pollutants (VOCs, CO2, etc.). Filtered outdoor air exchange is the best fix for most of them.
Indoor air has way less particulates than outside air. I'll take polipropylene dust over rubber and silicw dust and chimney and tailpipe exhaust any day of the week.
If anyone is looking into getting an air filter I recommend winix it was tested by project farm and scored the highest. also I am the owner of two and they've been working great for 4 years now I run them using auto and never worry about them again, the automatic sleep mode is bliss.
replacements are cheap on aliexpress coming at around $30 (per year). You don't need true hepa replacements, you can skip carbon filters if you don't have odor problems or have lots of ventilation.
the filters are pitch black every time I replace them so they're definitely doing something.
I do however recommend skipping all of that and just getting a box fan with a lower-tier merv filter since at the end of the day airflow matters the most and it turns itself back on if the power goes out plus it gives you the ability to tie it into home automation.
95 comments
Beyond your personal intake though there's bigger fish.
Car tyres are the #1 source for microplastics entering rivers, and it's not even close (they're thought to be the source of up to 85% of all environmental microplastics).
Those particulates don't just vanish, they end up in the soil and the waterways and it ends up inside you, no matter what you do.
For instance the same thing happens with plastic tea bags in hot water: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004565352...
I would also avoid all nonstick pans and utensils, as they're lined with PFAS which is worse than plastic, and slowly it will break off into the food. Beware the industry shills on this forum, as they will have you ignore the fact that ingesting PFAS is well known to result in higher blood levels of PFAS.
Even in the recent Veritasium video about it they said that unless the chemical was heated to above ~300 degress C if will pass through the human digestive system without causing any harm.
https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY
There are _plastic_ tea bags? Really?
Didnt know that we reached that level of degredation already! :-D
Another example comes to my mind: In lot of European conutries, at "cheese corner/bar" in the supermarket, every time a piece of cheese is cut, they are removing the foil, cutting the cheese, and then re-packing it in new foil after that - and this for every chees bar in every supermarket: How much kilometers does just one branch waste per year?
That study is interesting because they used SEM to image the plastic afterward, and you can see how the plastic surface has literally been torn up on a microscopic level simply by touching hot water.
Plastic has a low-energy surface, which means it doesn't take much energy to tear it apart. Even Brownian motion is enough, which is pretty wild.
Is there any real difference between the more expensive shelf places ("on eye height") than the more cheap one?
Id suspect its just intelligent re-labelling/re-packing for different brands?
Or is there really a difference in the quality/taste of the expensive ones?
In my country, it doesnt matter if i spend 2 bucks or 5 bucks in the supermarket
> Or is there really a difference in the quality/taste of the expensive ones?
If we are still talking about tea, then of course there are huge differences. And the best tea is not packaged in individual tea bags (also it's not sold in supermarkets unless it's a country with a very high tea culture).
So at the low end you would have tea that is grown with lots of chemicals, plucked by machines or by badly paid workers, industrially processed in high quantities, sold as bulk on international markets. While on the highest end you would have artisanal small-batch tea with no chemicals involved, possibly grown in some special way like the tea bushes shaded from the sun or hundred years old tea trees in forested areas, processed by hand so the leaves are not broken etc... And all of this is reflected in the taste.
The exposure from food packaging is many times more prominent than polyester, which slows down leeching over time.
Also, stop using dishwashing pods and laundry pods with the dissolvable plastic layer encasing them. Use powder or liquid detergent instead. If you can't find it in store, look for it online, because it definitely is in stock.
> Car tyres are the #1 source for microplastics entering rivers, and it's not even close (they're thought to be the source of up to 85% of all environmental microplastics).
Do EVs create more microplastics than ICE vehicles then?
The modern world is exhausting sometimes.
So much of the scare revolves around the same framing, "microplastic" have been found in breast milk/blood whatever, but never seen one mentioning what it can possibly cause. Is it too hard to fathom that the answer is "nothing"?
Instead, you have articles like this trying to tell people to look away from that main source of problem, and blame, say, indoors or food preparation, and skip details like how the homes with the most microplastic in them are… close to the highway.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12620896/
source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12989-022-00453-2
So, it's having an effect of some kind.
Saying HEPA filters remove "99%" of microplastic is pretty misleading.
Most of the mass in airborne particles is in the larger sizes of visible dust. However these particles will "fall out" before they reach the air purifier.
The best advice isn't "use only HEPA" or (an odd one, from this article) "use filters with multiple stages," it's to have an air purifier where the Clean Air Delivery Rate (CADR) is matched to room size. For filtering large dust you need a lot of air flow, aim for 6-8 Air Changes per Hour (ACH).
Also the CADR on the box is always on the highest fan speed, which is always way too loud for constant use in an occupied room. So ideally you want to size the air purifiers assuming a fan speed generating 45 decibels or less. HouseFresh is an excellent review site that publishes these numbers.
Most people dramatically undersize their air purifiers, or run them on a very low fan setting, and then they throw up their hands and say that air purifiers don't work.
This was an experiment run without consent, and without accountability. Much like our experiment with atmospheric CO2, these companies are making profits by dumping the liabilities onto the public.
replacements are cheap on aliexpress coming at around $30 (per year). You don't need true hepa replacements, you can skip carbon filters if you don't have odor problems or have lots of ventilation.
the filters are pitch black every time I replace them so they're definitely doing something.
I do however recommend skipping all of that and just getting a box fan with a lower-tier merv filter since at the end of the day airflow matters the most and it turns itself back on if the power goes out plus it gives you the ability to tie it into home automation.