A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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.
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 are made from fossil fuels which are from primordial plants. So still organic according to your definition. Just a few hundred million years since it was alive.
Interesting. Always thought chewing gum was more like when you made "plastic" out of the caesin in milk.
You can buy chewing gum made from natural materials but it's not the norm. Most chewing gum is made from mineral oil.
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.
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.
Plastic gotta be this age's lead/quicksilver.
It is. Along with PFAS.
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
"this is not what we meant by brain plasticity"
Maybe they can recycle me into a plastic spoon then.
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.
There are ways to turn human remains into a juwel. Now human plastic spoons would be something new to put on ones shelf.
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 🙃
Sometimes I feel like my brain is a plastic spoon already
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]
To add to this, the definition of microplastic is less than 5mm. So yes, 1mm microbeads are microplastics.
Millibeads
Centibeads🐛
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".
1x10^-6 m.
Oh I'd somehow forgotten this era
That shit was in everything non solid for like 2 years
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.
Just mineral or ground rocks work just as well. I hate my wife’s soft face scrub, i need that shit that feels like I’m scrubbing my face with sandpaper, to exfoliate well. They sell one that has ground up lava rock, i love that shit, and it makes me wonder why anyone ever thought plastic bits was a good idea
They probably had some extra plastic to offload lol.
“What do we do with all these old bottles sir?”
But lava rock grinds are not part of the industrial waste stream repurposed for profit. This is innovation!
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.
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.
This stuff still exists in my country, and the expensive toothpaste my mother bought is one of them 🙂
Please, do name and shame.
You know that old saying: If it's stupid but it works it's not stupid? This is the proof that it is incorrect.
