Used to?
Chalk one up for the good old US of A. Gotta take our wins where we can get em.
I used to use a facial scrub with the plastic beads. I look back and it’s like what the fuck, but at the time it was fine. Sorry world.
dam us government trying to prevent colorful toothpaste
Chuckles, I am in danger
Don’t like thinking about how much of that probably made it to my brain, organs, and muscles :)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1
This study released last year based on samples from cadavers suggests there’s enough in your brain to make a plastic spoon
Damn… yeah those samples suggest ~6–8mg of plastic per gram of sample tissue in the brains from 2024 😟 That would be like 10 grams in an entire adult brain if the distribution is even.
“Thankfully” it looks like the brain has the highest concentration of all studied organs 🙃
we could make 8 billion spoons with the right recovery recycling operations?
fuck yeah
people passing close to a crematorium:
someone is burning plastic
Maybe they can recycle me into a plastic spoon then.
There are ways to turn human remains into a juwel. Now human plastic spoons would be something new to put on ones shelf.
Turn my micro plastics into one of the old mc donalds coke spoons when I die and have everyone at my funeral use it to take a bump of my ashes.
“this is not what we meant by brain plasticity”
Sometimes I feel like my brain is a plastic spoon already
You don’t like glitter in your brain?
Reasons we need more oversight and regulations for these corporate snake oil salesmen. This shit should be a crime against humanity and every damn company that put that shit into their products should be abolished.
And every single person who was part of the decision should be punished.
Call me crass, but we should tie them to a tree and pour molten plastic down their throat.
we need more oversight and regulations
I think that ship has sailed
Reguwhat now?
Inalways thought that those were like the crunchy exterior of chewing gum, but as little glitter pellet things
Chewing gum is plastic
https://www.vice.com/en/article/rethink-chewing-gum-habit-essentially-plastic/
yummy
The shell as well? Thought it was some kind of carbohydrate
You know that old saying: If it’s stupid but it works it’s not stupid? This is the proof that it is incorrect.
Wtf is this meme border?
It’s that bullshit when they take a vertically oriented picture/video, stretch it and blur it to a 4:3 ratio, and center the content over it.
Imo a waste of bandwidth and computer power for people who can’t cope with the idea of vertical content on a horizontal screen, on a platform primarily accessed by phones anyway.
bordering on insanity
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.
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 is an organic material, trees are mostly plastic (lignin, a phenolic polymer, cellulose a polysaccharide polymer, hemicellulose an heteropolysaccharide and suberin a polyester-like polymer).
The problem we’re having is a naturalistic fallacy crossed with the unpleasant fact that almost everything we touch sheds dust and powder absolutely everywhere. This along with spores and yeast and other dusts constantly enter our bodies.
Plastic is only of note because we made it.
Any problems beyond that is speculative and will requires ginormous gobs of grant money to actually answer with anything than precautionary principle-based FUD.
Hydrocarbon based plastic absolutely isnt natural, there are many different kinds of plastic in existence but overwhelmingly stuff from the last 50 years has been the
inorganic hydrocarbonnon biodegradable hydrocarbon type which doesn’t break down and is likely a endocrinologal distruptor & a carcinogen.inorganic hydrocarbon
Had just woken up my mistake! Hadn’t gotten to the coffee yet xd.
inorganic hydrocarbon
Hydrocarbons are, by definition, organic compounds made exclusively of carbon and hydrogen.
Do you know of any hydrocarbon that do not contain hydrogen nor carbon and that are relevant to this discussion ?
Care to not nitpick a slip of the mind (that’s already been pointed out and corrected) literally just after I had woken up and address the actual point?
current plastics not biodegradable is the same problem that trees had for 300 million years. I think it’s a matter of time before some yeast evolves the ability to eat plastic. Then all plastic will start to mold and rot like all other organic matter.
as for being “endocrinologal distruptor & a carcinogen”, yes so is a lot of other stuff, probably stuff in wood, again, like turpentine
We’re not going to ban all plastics until some company has a proprietary alternative that they can force us to buy by making all other products illegal to produce. But that new alternative doesn’t exist yet.
My advice, don’t eat electrical junction boxes
Ty for the response. I do agree we will likely wind up with some sort of plastic eating organism at some point, problem is how many centuries will that take. Might be a opportunity to apply gene editing at some point in the medium term future.
Fair point on turps but turps and other compounds from wood dont tend to linger in the enviroment for as long as plastic does currently.
Unfortunately any solutions will be taken by porkies and as you say regulatory captured into making our lives more expensive rather than for the betterment of humanity, should be govt ran labs looking into this sort of stuff not corpos with dollar signs in their eyes. Having saidthat some early stage alternatives such as a seaweed based biodegradable plastic could help hugely in the single use plastic department.
you get nitpiked because you are nitpiking a perfectly formulated argument
i assumed it was just glass or similar, maybe the same material as those moisture-absorbing silica packets
There are probably some with sand and other hard minerals, I think Dove had some soaps with aluminum oxide in it?
i’ve definitely seen things like that, i think mostly “artisanal” soaps with like ground coconut shell or something, but the thing is that it tends to look like shit.
I would much rather use that bar of soap than the mysterious liquid gels full of dyes and other junk. If natural tones are somehow gross and icky but a blood red goo that faintly smells of petro chemicals is fine then maybe we really are doomed as a species.
You go back a century or so, that bar of soap would likely have been considered a luxury product.
i don’t think soap with grit added would have ever been considered a luxury product, low-quality soap still looks way prettier
The grit exfoliates and makes your skin softer by removing dead skin. Definitely luxurious before soaps were more common.
Soaps like Lava and Gojo have pumice in them. Because sometimes your hands need an 80 grit washing.
For real though, Gojo soap seems to work the best for getting rid of grease and oil from machines. My guess is regular soaps don’t do a great job at carrying away the oil residue, but Gojo soap just sands down your top skin layer to remove it.
The pumice action definitely helps but I’m pretty sure gojo is also full of added chemicals to help the soap lift oils more effectively.
I kinda like the orange smell, too.
Yeah, it’s sooooo funny… it’s heeeeeeel-larious! I don’t know about you, but I for one can’t stop laughing!
The way language is used or abused creates patterns in the mind.
I strongly suspect that this way of using language is not healthy at all, for an individual nor for a community.Funny has apparently been used to describe something suspicious for more than 200 years. So say it with a wild west accent.
Haha, my poorly googled current events assignment is highly relevant after all these years! Take that you dork try hards!
This stuff still exists in my country, and the expensive toothpaste my mother bought is one of them 🙂
And now its on your balls. That’s the tragedy.
Please, do name and shame.
Oh I’d somehow forgotten this era
That shit was in everything non solid for like 2 years
I still use a few profucts with a similar concept, though the beads are of cellulose or similar fiber as opposed to plastic. I’m not aware if they’re problematic or not, so I thought I’d comment in the hope that perhaps someone who feels strongly about these things might educate me if they are indeed bad for you or the environment or something.
It’s not what microplasitcs are! Does anyone knows what micro is at this point?
Microbeads are manufactured solid plastic particles of less than one millimeter in their largest dimension.[1] They are most frequently made of polyethylene but can be of other petrochemical plastics such as polypropylene and polystyrene. They are used in exfoliating personal care products, toothpastes, and in biomedical and health-science research.[2]
Millibeads
Centibeads🐛
To add to this, the definition of microplastic is less than 5mm. So yes, 1mm microbeads are microplastics.
1x10^-6 m.
If these aren’t microplastics, what are?
“Micro” just means “small” in this case and doesn’t mean “microscopic” or have anything to do with “micrometer”.
The definition of “microplastic” according to NOAA: “Microplastics are small plastic pieces less than five millimeters long”.
The problem with that, is that if you include everything “small” in the definition, the word loses all it’s meaning, feeble as it is already.
The word microplastic was introduced to describe not just any small piece of trash, but specifically that very small, invisible, pieces of plastics that are, as it turned out, everywhere, in the air, in the water, in our food, in our blood, even in space. If you add just small pieces of rubbish to it, we remove all the sense from the word, and will need another one.
a micron in size?
That’s not micro though?
No, but these beads pretty much go straight into the local waterways where they can very quickly break down into micro plastics. All so a human didn’t have to use a tool like a brush or a loofa to scrub themselves. Convenience at any cost.
The brushes and loofas also contribute to micro plastic pollution.
Tbh many brushes and loofahs are plastic and erode into microplastic too.
But they become micro as part of abrasion with your teeth.
Up to 5mm is still considered microplastics.
Big airsoft lobbying?
Seriously? That’s a lot of mm…
my microwave has been lying to me!?
