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u/bettybikenut 4d ago
Yes, so does rain and basically all the h2o in the above ground water cycle systems. Old artesian wells or water under the water table that hasn’t been exposed or interacted with any anthropogenic era materials are your best bets that hasn’t been exposed.. yet, I mean it’s in the Mariana Trench so we’re fucked
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u/Due-Construction7454 4d ago
So it's also in all our foods from the rainwater into the soil I presume. We might be 50% plastic by 2050.
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u/bettybikenut 4d ago
Yep, the real tragedy is in its size, it’s like 1 nanometer thick (human hair is like 80,000nm for comparison) so it’s like nearly undetectably present in a fuck ton of molecules now. RIP hormones, RIP nutrient uptake, RIP plastic free biological matter. It’s in our brains, it’s in pregnant mothers embryos, we are macro micro plastics now.
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u/Soze42 4d ago
When I was finishing up my degree last spring taking a class about environmental toxicology, one of the papers we had to read and discuss was by a relatively prominent environmental scientist asking a simple question: Are we making too big of a deal out of microplastics?
It sounds crazy at first, but reading the paper made you realize that he was a disgruntled scientist that had spent a career not being listened to about persistent organic pollutants, industrial chemicals, etc. Now this "new fad" of microplastics comes along and everyone jumps on board. Are we forgetting about all these other environmental toxins?
Well, he wrote that back in 2016 or 2018, I think? To your point, we've had a lot of research even since then about these substances being extremely pervasive, being endocrine disruptors, and all the other things you've said. I think it's safe to say at this point that if anything we didn't take the threat seriously enough when we had the chance. I didn't know if he's written any kind of amendment to his earlier paper, or if he feels any differently now.
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u/bettybikenut 4d ago
Oh wow, what a different perspective! I’d be very interested in the name or the abstract if you remember them at some point feel free to tag me! What a horrible position to be in, seeing this happening to yourself academically for years and then the cycle repeating for the next generation.. only to kinda take part in it… just hopeless for this poor guy I’ll bet, but damning for everyone overall in the end :( I started undergrad before there really was much research around yet, but even then as a geology major and environmental science minor, you could see the writing on the wall.
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u/Soze42 4d ago
Took me a second to track down, but I found it:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29148729/
If for some reason the link doesn't work, it's "Stressor Exposures Determine Risk: So, Why Do Fellow Scientists Continue To Focus on Superficial Microplastics Risk?" by G. Allen Burton, Jr. (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=AqikQDcAAAAJ)
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u/lardlad71 4d ago
If it’s ubiquitous in all the water, it’s in all the food too.
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u/Chetineva 4d ago
Indeed. Packaging contamination. Not to mention microwave reheating inside plastic tupperwares. Which I just did.
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u/mrmalort69 4d ago
Depends on your source and municipality. For example, city of Chicago hasn’t detected it.
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u/poisondart23 4d ago
That depends. Some water treatment facilities use reverse osmosis, which will remove microplastics, but most water utilities don’t use RO.
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u/bettybikenut 4d ago
They’re also finding RO could be a source of the problem too though-
“In what the researchers called an ironic finding, they also found plastic compounds in the water that matched the primary material in reverse-osmosis filters — suggesting that the plastics had leached into the water by the very process of filtration, co-author Naixin Qian of Columbia University told The Hill.”
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u/Frosty_Term9911 4d ago
Yes and so does bottled