It's official.
  • erlend_sh@lemmy.world
    132·
    1 month 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
    111·
    1 month 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·
          1 month 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.

      • Wiz@midwest.socialEnglish
        2·
        1 month ago

        Still both from automobile infrastructure. /c/fuckcars bleeding into every Lemmy…

      • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 month 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.

  • Bob@feddit.nl
    101·
    1 month ago

    I find little shards of plastic in the vegetables from the supplier at work quite often. Sometimes I plate a dish and spot a bit of blue where it shouldn’t be.

    • NostraDavid@programming.dev
      2·
      1 month 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).

      • runeko@programming.dev
        2·
        1 month ago

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

  • bassomitron@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    1 month 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.

    • Gerudo@lemm.ee
      72·
      1 month ago

      There are certain industries, like medical, that would probably be one of the last, if ever, to do away with plastic, simply due to the upsides. The only option we have as a species is to create a truly biodegradable, non-toxic, easily obtainable and cheap to produce alternative.

      Haha who am I kidding, we are fucked, plastic manufacturers go brrrrrrrrr.

      • absGeekNZ@lemmy.nzEnglish
        31·
        1 month ago

        Medical and electrical insulation. Two places where plastics are better than the alternatives.

          • Resonosity@lemmy.world
            1·
            1 month ago

            Steel decays via rusting as its outer coating is sacrificed to corrosion. Civil features decay as erosion degrades it over time. Wooden power poles decay as their treatment degrades and fungi/insects attack them. Outdoor wiring decays if in direct sunlight due to any sunlight resistive coating degrading over time to UV radiation. Oil used as lubricant in motor vehicles and as insulating fluid in electrical equipment degrades over time due to thermal cycling, oxidation, and moisture.

            The point I’m making is that things degrade naturally. Plastic is no exception, although engineers have been able to make certain decisions with it such that constructions can last for decades.

            If we can make plastic by default biodegrade naturally, and at a much faster time scale than today’s oxo-degradable and biodegradable alternatives, then it still allows for scientists and engineers to select for plastics that have been specifically engineered for the application via coatings and whatnot, comparable to steel and wood.

            It’s possible to do so. We just need to flip the script and make biodegradation the norm and not the exception

          • Daemon Silverstein@thelemmy.clubEnglish
            1·
            1 month ago

            Yeah, for things that are supposed to endure, biodegradability is indeed problematic. However, using plastics for things such as wiring insulation would be still a potential source of microplastics even in a world where all plastic was abandoned in favor of fungi and paper packing materials. Ain’t no easy solution, unfortunately.

    • Resonosity@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 month 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

  • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
    3·
    1 month ago

    I like how we’ve gone from looking at the huge garbage patches in our oceans to the amount of microplastic in a drop of water. I don’t see it as a material issue, you pick a material and with enough quantity it will pollute. It is a consumer society issue. But maybe it will be easier to change consumer society by dangling the microplastic threat effect so the actual cause can be treated - wait, the psychopaths in CEO positions would lose money then, never mind.