Wasn’t it also found to be able to pass through the blood-brain barrier?
Yeah, we’ve really done a fantastic job fucking the world up in the last century. It’s truly incredible that in the blink of an eye, we’ve managed to doom most of the life that exists on our planet.
Wait until we black out the sun to stop the machines that are trying to stop us for plaguing everything.
We all knew Agent Smith was 100% right
I saw today that they have found that over 80% of the microplastics in the ocean are from automobile tires.
Microplastic a found in FUCKING CLOUDS!! That nonsense is absolutely everywhere, and will be there forever. And wherever you go, it’s going to follow you. Rubbish
I heard about this a few days ago. It’s depressing.
Ah, Japan, the place that wraps individual carrots and other food items in plastic.
Go and live in a remote cave somewhere maybe? Oh no, wait, that’s fucked too
😃 scientists genetically engineer a new bacteria that can digest plastics
😨 the bacteria escaped containment and is spreading prodigiously
There ARE bacteria that can digest certain plastics.
“plastic” is just a catch-all term for polymers, but there are different kinds made of different materials. Your phone case isn’t the same plastic as a milk jug. (abs/PETG vs HDPE, their long science names don’t really matter it’s just to show the difference)
Over the decades, certain kinds of bacteria have been shown to eat certain plastics in the right conditions.
Unfortunately, it’s those “right conditions” that make large scale plastic disposal via bacteria not feasible right now.
I’m sure someone is barreling toward discovering a “this thing eats almost all polymers in normal outside temperatures” to make their company more profitable, while ignoring the fact that if it breaks out of their containment areas, “bacteria that can eat all your plastic things in a few weeks breaks containment, billions in damages already” could potentially hit the headlines within a month.
Yeah, that’s DoOmPoStInG but it’s a potential thing that could happen, and people are actively TRYING to make some of those things happen already, so it’s within possibility.
We low-level accidentally Day the Earth Stood Still remake Gort ourselves, basically?
My biggest fear with plastic-eating bacteria is with electrical insulation or pipes. Like, okay, I can deal with the idea that my computer mouse might slowly break down overtime as a result of bacteria chewing on it. However, the last thing I want is a surprise house fire or surprise flood because bacteria have been chewing on the insulation or pipes in the walls.
I’ve been reading the wikipedia article, not through all of it yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics
Some highlights:
Bottled water has much higher microplastics content than tap water.
Coral can ingest microplastics
Waste water treatment plants filter out most (but not all) microbeads into sludge. Some places use that sludge as fertilizer for farms.
Microplastics are in stuff you would not guess. Paper coffee cups have a plastic liner. Clothes put off large amounts of microplastics when washed. Tires put off microplastics. Some exfoliants and other cosmetics contain microplastics as microbeads.
Deep layer ocean sediment surveys in China (2020) show the presence of plastics in deposition layers far older than the invention of plastics
wtfff
Maybe there’s plastics stuck to the things we detect plastics with?
I should really give the scientist some credit, but I think this is a funnier outcome
Or there was plastic stuck to the machines used to sample and it contaminated the area during sampling. Or there was plastic in the lab during testing. Though potentially those should have been ruled out by testing a blank sample and a control sample of just the ‘empty’ sampling equipment.
I feel like there could be a few rational explanations to that, but I want someone smarter than me to tell me what exactly they could be…
clothes
I’m guessing this is referring to synthetic fibers like acryllic and polyester?
AFAIK, those ‘fleece’ type materials are directly made from recycled PET (like water bottles).
