It's official.
  • erlend_sh@lemmy.world
    401·
    11 months ago

    Studies have identified some of the main sources of microplastics as:

    • plastic-coated fertilisers
    • plastic film used as mulch in agriculture

    WTF?

    • plastics recycling.

    Uuuuh…

  • Jack@lemmy.caEnglish
    38·
    11 months ago

    Biggest sources:

    • 7.6 Mt from macro plastics breaking down
    • 1.3 Mt from paint
    • 1.0 Mt from tyres

    10-40 Mt released into environment/year, and increasing.

        • CleoTheWizard@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          11 months ago

          Also depends on where you’re measuring. They make up a ton of the plastics in stormwater runoff for example. Sometimes up to 95% from what I found. And that stormwater often ends up in our drinking water.

      • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.world
        2·
        11 months ago

        You only think that way because the material for a tire is all in one place and easy to see.

        Paint on the other hand is effectively invisible when we ‘inventory’ a space mentally.

        So a tire in the middle of your living room seems like a lot of rubber but all the paint over every inch of the wall in the same room doesnt, even if the room is big enough for the paint to fill the volume of the tire.

  • bassomitron@lemmy.worldEnglish
    232·
    11 months ago

    The UN’s Global Plastics Treaty is certainly a step in the right direction. I’m not sure what can actually be done about the problem, especially with how pervasive synthetic materials are throughout the world. And what is medicine supposed to do? Plastics revolutionized sanitation, particularly in the medical field. Very complicated issue to resolve.

    • Resonosity@lemmy.world
      1·
      11 months ago

      Plastics are also used extensively in the electricity sector as insulation for conductors, support structures, etc.

      We need our vendors of these products to start addressing this issue, and unfortunately I don’t think this is going to come from the consumer end. Maybe for alternative insulating liquids for transformers and whatnot like with Cargill FR3 or Shell MIDEL products, but clearly more needs to be done. Schneider Electric is a good example of a company leading the way

  • Regna@lemmy.world
    161·
    11 months ago

    The article was very well written. Unfortunately, 90% of the people I’d forward it to would be TLDR…

      • runeko@programming.dev
        61·
        11 months ago

        Now sit down and eat your plasti-corn. There are children in other countries that have to eat normal corn.

    • NostraDavid@programming.dev
      2·
      11 months ago

      Controlled Release Fertilizers (CRF) are coated with a tiny layer of polymer which allow to release nutrients in a very timely and targeted way to various crops (trees, flowers, some cash crops) and used in closed environments such as potting plants or greenhouses.

      So it has its use. Guess we’ll need to find an alternative to using polymers now (among a ton of other work).

    • Fedizen@lemmy.world
      2·
      11 months ago

      PLA I think just breaks down into lactic acid eventually, but the ABS probably isnt so good

      • go $fsck yourself@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        It only breaks down under industrial environments. It’s not as “biodegradable” as claimed. I use PETG because I can recycle it with normal plastics recycling.

        • Fedizen@lemmy.world
          1·
          11 months ago

          It breaks down in high heat, high water environments, aka thermophilic composting. This makes it ideal for agricultural and food waste. You’re right though it doesn’t recycle well.

  • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.world
    66·
    11 months ago

    I fucking hate lemmy now, you are just reddit with a sense of undeserved elitism.

    This is a serious as fuck problem and all that anyone replies with are jokes and shitposts.

    This is fucking /c/science, not /c/sciencememes

    But none of you care especially the mods, so I’m just blocking every one of you.

    edit: There’s an entire subthread here that is nothing but masturbation jokes, which of course the mods ignore.

    Fuck lemmy and its shitstain mod team same as the reddit mods but with worse hygiene. At least on reddit they keep /r/science clean

    • skye@lemmy.world
      3·
      11 months ago

      scrolling in the comment section of this news article, i’ve only seen people either being concerner/shocked, and some sarcastically talking about recycling or something. Nothing about masturbation.

      And if your criticism of lemmy is that it’s being reddit with elitism, then why try to gatekeep the way people are going to react to an article on c/science? Are we all supposed to have degrees in chemistry or biology before making a comment?

      Believe it or not people take heavy news a million different ways and react differently. People ending up making a masturbation joke after discussing microplastics in testicles (i assume this is what happened) harm nothing and no one.

      • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.world
        13·
        11 months ago

        I’ve already blocked them so I can’t link though I reported it too so maybe some mod woke their lazy ass up and deleted it as they should have.