Today I Learned (TIL)

A wise man once told me that perfect is the enemy of good.

Boil your water if it's worth the effort for you. Otherwise don't. For many of us, it's a small effort for small gains.

Ugh.

• fluids should be around two 3rds of what you consume every day by weight. Reducing microplastics in there by 80% is a huge improvement, not at all comparable to your dieting allegory
• for the same reason, the microplastics we breathe in are unfortunate, hopefully some day eradicated, but negligible compared to what we consume
• it's not my fault your country still allows lead based solder and you don't know what a tea pot is. Hot tip: You can boil your water every day in it.
• Again, people can care about 2 things at once. Just because I don't have any idea how to deal with the great pacific garbage patch doesn't mean I might as well eat the plastic wrapper with my food inside it.

Plastic does deteriorat or disintegrat, but it only does so into smaller and smaller pieces of its self.

Things like a plastic bottle will break into smaller parts of the bottle and linger around for hundreds or thousands of years but the bottle "shape" will not be recognised in this sense.

Unfortunately plastics like organic materials don't breakdown and get absorbed the same way back into nature. Our streets would look a lot cleaner IMO if all our litter broke down quicker. Ie less plastic rappers flying around and chip bags.

Fun fact, when we freeze a bottle of water it too slowly deteriorates and disintegrates. That plastic is then transferred into the water contained in the bottle. Doing this multiple times can show the wear and tear overtime.

Even at microscopic levels things like toothbrushes brissle do show signs of wear and tear, as all products do.

My example of toothbrushes is more on how interwoven our plastic dependency is in our day to day lives. We may be ingesting plastics without even realistically knowing where from.

For example in our foods. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/22/health/plastics-food-wellness-scn/index.html#:~:text=Apples%20and%20carrots%20were%20the,also%20the%20least%20contaminated%20vegetable.

“People don’t think of plastics as shedding but they do,”

“In almost the same way we’re constantly shedding skin cells, plastics are constantly shedding little bits that break off, such as when you open that plastic container for your store-bought salad or a cheese that’s wrapped in plastic.”

It's MICRO plastic, literally too small for you to see. If you look at a new tooth brush under a microscope compared to a used one there are very clear signs of wear.

Electron microscope view: https://www.medicaldaily.com/pulse/after-you-brush-your-teeth-3-months-what-your-toothbrush-looks-why-you-need-replace-361258