this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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doomer

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[–] grandepequeno@hexbear.net 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Does anyone have a long ass video on what this microplastics shit is? Anytime I hear about it I'm like "ok so what?"

[–] KuroXppi@hexbear.net 28 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I don't have a video, but from what I understand is they are small plastics (as the name suggests) smaller than 1mm. Larger plastics pass through your digestive system and are excreted, but smaller ones can pass into the body's internal bloodstream and accumulate in internal organs.

The body cannot cleanse them as they are inert. Scientists are researching their relationship with degradation of bodily functions resulting in infertility, inflammation and other diseases.

This is an issue that will worsen over time as plastic production continues unabated. Because humans are at the top of the food chain, as plastics accumulate in our environment, they will increase in over time in the foods we consume (bioaccumulation, think of plankton absorbing plastics, that are eaten by krill and build up in the crustacean's body, then the krill is eaten by a minnow and because one minnow eats many krill, the proportion of microplastic increases as you move up the trophic chain. That minnow is eaten by a tuna, that is then eaten by a human. That person human will ingest more microplastics.

This is in addition to the plastic present in water, vegetables and grains through contamination of ground and rain water, which isn't removed by basic water treatment. Or the plastics that fray from synthetic clothing, especially under friction and heat such as during washing, and are inhaled.

Recycling of plastics is also a complete non-starter because the the plastic degrades in quality with each reuse before it joins the rest of the rubbish in landfill.

At what point the quantity of plastics in the brain, in particular, causes it to totally stop working goodness knows. A recent report says that the average USA adult has a plastic spoon (that's the spoon itself, not the measurement of the bowl of the spoon)'s worth of plastics in the brain. The longer you can delay this the better. Probably.

[–] mrfugu@hexbear.net 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My whole thing is, the term “plastic” can refer to a ton of different materials and while most are stable to the point of non-reactivity, most of these materials are essentially organic substances (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc). I never see anyone talk about methods or standard deviations or anything like that it’s just “there’s a spoon in your brain!” Is there? it’s LDPE specifically? Styrene? PVC? what are we talking about?

[–] WrongOnTheInternet@hexbear.net 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Mostly polyethylene

I'm not fully convinced that py-GC/MS is great for plastics quantitation but there you go

[–] mrfugu@hexbear.net 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh cool the most basic hydrocarbon chain lol. No I too have doubts on quantifying plastics with GC/MS. I don’t run tests like that but I do work with the results/analytical and unreactive plastic compounds like this are almost never detected with confidence.

The data is good to see though where did you get this?

[–] WrongOnTheInternet@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] mrfugu@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago

Nice! After doing some research it seems the general consensus is that LDIR is better for detecting and distinguishing plastics, but only detects down to a radius of ~5um. In this paper they opted to use py-GC/MS in order to document smaller particles.

The problem with pyrolysis however is that by busting everything up it’s more likely that polyethylene can be confused with other hydrocarbons. In the paper it seems their only confirmation is that the data matches up with other labs that have run the same py-GC/MS tests. The paper also mentioned someone using electron microscopy to see microplastics in brain tissue, describing them as “nanoscale shard-like fragments.” However there’s no source for it and I can’t find it.

I did find this article comparing microplastic detection methods I thought was pretty interesting. A few years old tho.