I remember when I found out that shit was plastic. I always assumed they were organic material of some kind, like the body scrubs with the crushed up walnut shell in it (which probably has fucking microplastic in it, too). So disgusting.
This is why we need to change how shit works. It shouldn’t go: company does some shit > fall out > government steps in. It should go: company has an idea > must get permission first from environmental agencies
Nah corporations really don’t give a shit at all, like all chewing gum is literally just plastic too and sheds tons of microplastics into your mouth as you chew it.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/rethink-chewing-gum-habit-essentially-plastic/
Plastic is an organic material though, so your assumption was correct.
Interesting. Always thought chewing gum was more like when you made “plastic” out of the caesin in milk.
You can buy chewing gum made from natural materials but it’s not the norm. Most chewing gum is made from mineral oil.
Also, chemically they are identical. Plastic made of a plant is still a plastic.
Nah it’s just rubbery dried chicle sap, no chemical refining like with oil
This is what it looks like
I can almost taste the six seconds the flavor added to that will last!
Five minutes of microplastics or a blink of flavor? Answer might just be no gum :(
Yeah no idea why this is so hard to achieve but it’s a very noticeable difference.
The difference is in the definition or organic. When the average person thinks organic, they mean something that is or used to be alive. When a scientist think organic, they’re talking about carbon compounds.
Plastic are made from fossil fuels which are from primordial plants. So still organic according to your definition. Just a few hundred million years since it was alive.
Plastic gotta be this age’s lead/quicksilver.
It is. Along with PFAS.
The PFAS/PFOA controversy, is mostly about banning these commodity products so that the proprietary, non-commodity alternatives by western companies can become the only high temperature dry lubricant on sale.
Maybe in another 60 years we’ll have the same controversy about them !
No it isnt, its about the production precursors being literal poison for anything they get into with no chance of breaking down. Its a unusually harmful and persistive compound.
And the current goal is to ban them all
https://www.wcl.org.uk/transitioning-to-a-pfas-free-economy.asp
Leaving us only able to buy the proprietary alternative of an oligopoly, instead of regulating the production of this commodity.
End result, we pay for it all and get a degradation in quality.
Hey friend you know the chemicals they make those things from are like WILDLY carconogenic right? And that PFAs and their cousins last forever and don’t break down in the environment?
These chemicals are being banned because humans got too good at making super stable fuck-you-big molecules that just so happen to be wildly incompatible with anything that has DNA. These chemicals are literally everywhere with water treatment facilities having acceptable limits 2ppb or less. Yea, B, Billon. The thing with that amount though, is even THAT isn’t safe, its just regulable. Here’s an oversimplified video on the subject by Veritasium, the clickbait headline is just that. I believe this is also on nebula if you’d prefer to avoid youtube.
They should stop dumping it in the rivers
You should really watch that video. It addresses that point exactly. In short, they mostly aren’t, that isn’t the problem.
Except plastic doesn’t really seem to do anything. It just “is there”. Unless you swallow enough of it to clog something, it doesn’t seem to do anything.
We’ve seens lots of “it might interefere with hormones”, but that part is always to be confirmed in the next research grant request and then we never hear about it again.
Plastics are a broad category. But specific plasticizers, like BPA, have been demonstrated to cause specific endocrine issues, up to and including a causal link to certain cancers, miscarriages, and other reproductive/immune issues. And it’s not just correlations being found, as the research is showing the mechanism of action by actually inducing the effects in vitro.
And so when a particular plasticizer has been shown to be harmful, the research goes into other chemically similar plasticizers to see whether they have biological effects, as well. BPS is another plasticizer that is being studied, as it is chemically similar to BPA.
So we haven’t shown that all microplastics are bad. I’m skeptical that these effects would extend to all plastics. But some common compounds that are present in many plastics are a cause for concern, and the difficulty in treating water or waste for microplastics in general means that some of those harmful compounds are present in lots of places where we’d rather not.
We moved from leaded gasoline to unleaded gasoline based on the specific dangers attributable to lead itself. We can do the same for the specific compounds in our plastics shown to be harmful. Maybe the end result is that we have a lot of safer plastics remaining. But your comment seems to suggest that we not even try.
I’m more concerned about useless and damaging, performative actions against plastic.
Of course what we need is plastic monomers that are neither carcinogenic nor hormone disrupters. We should stop dumping the stuff into the river. Poisonned blastic with bromine should be labelled in a was that makes it easy to identity. We should breed yeast that can east plastic and keep them in giesters.
I’m more concerned about useless and damaging, performative actions against plastic.
such as?
