Every generation alive has microplastics in them
and probably will for at least a few generations unless we can do some major filtering of all mediums
Can someone tell me what microplastics do to the body? I’m almost too afraid to ask at this point.
Veritasium has a video about it on YouTube.
It’s very informative and may just give you the fix you’re looking for
That’s the neat thing: nobody can. It’s incredibly hard to devise a study that can show anything about it. There is no way to get a human without microplastics in them to get a control group, and by this point as far as I know there is no plausible theory to get a specific study.
Everyone kinda suspects that it can’t be good for you, simultaneously there is zero actual evidence that something is ever happening. We don’t know, and that’s very frustrating.It seems like they’d be fairly inert. Although that’s certainly no guarantee that they’re not really bad for you. Much like inert gas, the danger could well be them replacing or getting in the way of something else.
IIRC the one thing we are sure of is that they don’t break down, nor do they get out. So you better hope they don’t do anything bad on top of that
Probably do the same thing most of the junk humans dump into the environment. Reduce average lifespan, cause diseases and reduced fertility.
Bah. I dont care about lead, microplastics or even covid.
Chernobyl and mad cow-disease are my jam.
Don’t forget the nanoplastics! These are even more hazardous!
Except that microplastics have been a major problematic thing since basically plastic become a popular thing, we just didn’t know it yet back then. It’s not like millenials invented plastic or popularized its use.
The amount of it in our environment has been ever increasing though. There’s more of it in the oceans, the soil, the rivers, the plants. The whole food chain and ecosystems are contaminated more than ever before.
At what point does it become macroplastic? kiloplastic for the Europeans.
Bold of you to think that the microplastic is going to go away after one generation…
Who said that? Lead poisoning is still rampant in some communities.
I think the question is, why are you bringing up millennials when the issue of microplastics did not start with them, nor will it end with them.
I mean most others will skip out on the toothpaste variant, but yeah, it’s out there like that kraftwerk song.
Boomers had/have microplastics and lead poisoning. This is not a conspiracy, it is just a fact.
Did someone say it was a conspiracy?
The pipes in the US still contain plenty of lead. Also, Covid brain damage. Tons of it.
Most lead intoxication in boomers comes from leaded gasoline, lead in other presentations is less bio-available
Everyone has microplastics, even newborn babies, and we have no sign of decrease in its use.
We must become one with the plastic. It’s the only way.
Luckily, for the younger generations, we’ll probably just get cancer instead of becoming massive malleable assholes
Yeah and also for Gen X, Gen Z, Gen Alpha. We all still alive and everybody gets microplastic in their balls and brains. Its for all ages
Right? Haha 😂 Oh did we suddenly clean up the entire Earth from free roaming microplastics?
why the alpabet suddenly changes after Z? it should either be “omega & alpha” or “z & a”
Same reason we started with X, millennials actually got a name, and then went back to Z. Somebody with a head full of lead came up with it.
Millenials are also called Gen Y. Millenials just happens to have sticked more. And Gen Z is also called Zoomers.
Well zoomer comes from the z. Does it not?
It also comes from ‘boomer’, some names tend to stick.
brain full of lead and microplastic
They’re just place holders until the generation gets a shared experience to refer to. Millennials saw the millennium. Boomers were products of the baby boom but they also saw their economy boom. Gen X are missing, their letter was fitting.
My prediction is one of them will become gen algorithm, as they never knew a time when their media wasn’t decided for them. Maybe, gen android, few of them know how to use a file system after Chromebooks became ubiquitous. Or they’ll be the second greatest generation due to ww3. This stuff is entirely unpredictable.
GenX are also known as the invisible or forgotten generation, for the same reason.
What name does GenZ get? Born just in time to be power users, born too late to have any power to stop the enshitification. Same non-existent economic prospects as GenX.
They really aren’t power users though. Tech is a) generally more reliable and b) so locked-down that so many young people never learned how to troubleshoot
The earlier half of GenZ typically grew up with mass adoption of computers and phones all over the place so we got to learn how to fix XP every 5 minutes and get cracked games working.
Gen Z is already named “Zoomers”, but it’s not sticking as much as “Gen Z”.
I dunno, the second silent generation? Born into hard times, don’t know any better. Defined by their fiscally conservative ways and “none of my business” outlook?
They haven’t been too silent though, and more power to 'em. The un-silent generation? Seems a bit disrespectful to riff off of their great/grandparents though.
Boomers were products of the baby boom but they also saw their economy boom.
I though boomers were the producers of the baby boom
No, the products. World War 2 ended in 1945, and then EVERYBODY FUCKED and 80 years later we’re still cleaning up the mess.
Maybe. Their generation starts 1946 so I thought they were the product. One way or the other they are involved in a baby boom.
You are correct. After WW2 ended there was a “boom” of babies being born.
Generation Omega sounds like some real dystopian plot
Or a 1970s political thriller.
Waiting for uprising of the Sigma.
Millennials? More like GenX. We’ve been eating out of microwaved tupperware since the sixties.
So have the millennials who were breast fed.
And formula fed
Mmmm, tasty math.
The worst part: postpartum women have lower levels of microplastics than other adults.
I was reading somewhere you can lower the level of PFAS in your blood by donating it.
So you’re saying the baby took some of the plastic out of them, that’s horribly depressing at least they got 10 to 15 point IQ boost in return
Might be that. Although your body goes into absolute overdrive during pregnancy, and it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that some of the immune system reactions that kick in manage to eject some level of plastic microparticulates
Seems Like something people should be definitely looking into to find out why, with the state of science in America It’s probably not going to be here
Most likely its the same reason blood donation lowers microplastic levels in blood. Production of new cells that aren’t tainted with it. A woman’s blood volume increases by 40% during pregnancy. Of course ill freely admit thats just a hypothesis and you’re probably right, there would be benefit into studying it.
I’ve thought more about it. I bet there’s fucking loads in the placenta.
That was my question too, I wonder if there is a reliable way to measure where it all went, or if it’s just diluted in the increased blood volume.
There’s also the possibility that with are more careful with their intake during pregnancy, but that could be controlled for in survey data.
It looks like the cumulative total of plastics produced by the 80’s was around 2-3
trillionbillion tons, whereas now it’s probably more like 20-30B.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/global-plastics-production.png
Boomers also have them, or do you think they intentionally target millennials?
I still licked lead pain in the craddle, ate too many food preservatives and artificial colorants, ate too much red meat, too much fat, got micro plastics poisoning…
And all I have to tell is bad breath, flatulence that could strip paint off the walls and a stupid sense of humour.
Honestly I don’t think we’re socially responsible enough to end something like lead poisoning these days.
You’d have people saying they like the lead and deliberately putting more of it in. Pussy-ass liberals trying to take their god given lead away…
Imagine trying to stop the hole in the ozone today. We’d have people spraying CFCs in the air just to spite the effort.
As someone just old enough to remember, we did have that with CFCs. Might not have been super mainstream, and nobody who would have done it out of spite really had the disposable income to actually do it.
I grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian “cult” and I remember the adults around me “joking” about it all the time. I remember a Missionary to northern Canada visiting our church (in rural America) to try to raise support talking about the temperatures and joking that it’s so cold that he wanted to stand outside with an aerosol can in each hand to try to bring on some global warming, and that getting a laugh from the congregation. You might think that maybe it was a “harmless” joke that maybe as a child I didn’t pick up on the sarcasm, but there were absolutely adults there who fully believed that there was nothing humans could do to damage the earth, because God takes care of it. “And how dare the government and these evolutionists try to tell us how to live.”
for the past few months ive started to think we’re like a couple years away from putting lead back in the gasoline
Leaded gas is still used in small airplanes with internal combustion engines. If you live near a General Aviation airport you are being showered in lead so some rich guy can play pilot.
Trump deregulating gas and paint to put lead back in both would be so unsurprising it won’t even garner a reaction from me.
I’m all with you. But it feels like they did already.
Someone will call not wanting lead poisoning woke and that will be that.
If it was more in the zeitgeist, kids would be huffing it on tiktok.
There’s actually a lot of work going into documenting and replacing lead service lines in the US. EPA required every state to make sure every waterworks submitted an inventory by last October, with grant money through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to pay for it.
Is plastic really better? PVC, ABS,polyethylene and the rest get brittle after some time depending on conditions. All the degradation byproducts are in the water
