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The presence of microplastics in commercial salts from different countries
- mirimir 10y agoI guess that's reassuring. But I wonder how much salt is mined. Only one sample was plastic-free. But maybe it's mostly commingled. If one were really interested, one could look at plastic content vs Cl-36 (nuclear fallout) level.
- microcolonel 10y agoI don't know about their selection, but most table salt here is pumped out of the ground in Windsor. When I want coarse salt I just mix some table salt with water and dry it like seawater. > The size of the smallest particle was 160 μm and the largest sized 980 μm. This was shocking to me, that they could miss a millimetre-scale particle of plastic in salt seems bonkers. I mean, you can more or less just filter things that size!
- mentalpiracy 10y agoJust to clarify for you, their selection study was purely sea and lake salts.
- microcolonel 10y agoThey really ought to have put that in the title. They could have easily said "the presence of microplastics in saltwater salts from different countries".
- mentalpiracy 10y agoPossibly so, but this is filed as environmental monitoring, so I think most people in the field this article is written for wouldn't have your same uncertainty. Salt derived from underground sources wouldn't be at risk of microplastics contamination.
- mirimir 10y agoWell, but there might be other sources for plastic contamination, as they discuss. And there "is" nothing in the article with evidence for origin. Or even a statement like "We tested samples of lake and sea salt." Only those two lake salts are mentioned specifically. Maybe it's just an oversight, but it could also be just their assumptions. Maybe it's really "We tested samples of salt that were presumably produced from lake water and seawater."
- mirimir 10y agoOK, so I just went back and read carefully about that point. I don't think that they actually say clearly that they looked only at sea and lake salt. They talk about contamination pathways for sea and lake salt. And they mention lake salt from Malaysia and Iran. But Methods has: > A total of 17 brands of salt from Australia, France, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Portugal, and South Africa were purchased from a Malaysian market.
- mentalpiracy 10y agoVery first paragraph of the introduction. > Accordingly, it is expected that products originating from the contaminated water bodies are also loaded with MPs. This sentence is the entire premise of the study. Testing non-waterbody-derived salts would not provide any valid data in pursuit of that hypothesis. Furthermore the entire body of the abstract, introduction, and discussion discusses marine microparticles, impacts on aquatic health, and whatnot.
- wodenokoto 10y agoIt would give us a baseline. E.g, does the salt get contaminated with MP through production and packaging?
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoThat confirms that they assume all their table salt is from water. I have only skimmed the article, so I may be missing something, but the only origin information I saw was country of origin and that they "were purchased from a Malaysian market". If the researchers actually confirmed that each brand came from water and not a mine, they don't mention that that I can see. If I've missed something, please let me know.
- pilsetnieks 10y agoTo be honest, I wonder if "purchased from a Malaysian market" might not be a factor here, and if the products are truly from Australia, France, Japan, New Zealand, Portugal, etc.
- mentalpiracy 10y agoSorry for double comment, just wanted to mention a thought about the filtration: You can filter them - and they certainly do - but with sea and lake salts the filtration is mainly to screen out sediments such as sand grains and bits of shell. Naturally, the filtering is a costly process and the filters need to be discarded after a certain level - I imagine there is a cost-control factor here, where screening at a 1mm threshold catches 99.9% of sediments to make the product reach a certain purity level and more thresholds are not worth the money. Further screening is probably not cost effective - and seeing from the results of the study, plastic microparticles are not a source of concern.
- microcolonel 10y agoMaybe centrifuges would be a good candidate to augment/replace filtration.
- jrapdx3 10y agoI thought of that too, but the expense of operation is very likely not worth it to the producers. The low level of plastic contamination would not seem likely to produce health hazards.
- rleigh 10y agoNot at industrial scale for fine plastic particulates. It's OK for continuous removal of denser coarse particles > 1mm but wouldn't be good for separating plastics with approximately neutral density since it wouldn't separate efficiently. Big industrial centrifuges are static (no moving parts) and operate purely by high speed liquid flow in a spiral path (like spinning a bucket of sand and water where the heavy particles collect in the centre). In the brewing industry we use Kieselguhr (perlite) filtration with filters like this: https://www.ryebeckltd.com/current-equipment/schenk-kieselguhr-filter https://www.ryebeckltd.com/current-equipment/schenk-kieselgu.... These can sterile filter particles as small as 1 micron and are density-independent. These work by having a steel plate with fine slots upon which you deposit a coarse bed of filter material, and then you dose kieselguhr into the liquid flow passing through, and this gradually builds up on top of the coarse bed to create an ultrafine filter. The ultrafine filter increases in depth over time, and this prevents blinding (blocking) of the filter as filtered particulates accumulate. While used to remove yeast and other particulates in brewing to create "bright" beer, it can be applied to most liquid filtration problems, and at high flow rates (30000 litres/hr); and you can run multiple filters in parallel to further increase the flow rates. We also used kieselguhr in research labs for fine filtration--just add the powder to regular filter paper.
- mirimir 10y agoWell, they could dissolve, filter and evaporate. But that would be energy expensive. I'm guessing that they crush and fractionate by size. Air flow separation could do it, but nobody cares enough.
- wodenokoto 10y agoI sometimes buy "himalayan salt" which are coarse salt in almost pebble sizes (presumably from the himalaya) and I actually found a pebble in a package once. Well above 2 square millimetres.
- mchannon 10y agoThis bit of genius branding is also highly misleading. Himalayan salt (found frequently in warehouse clubs) is a product of Pakistan and is produced >100 mi from the nearest portion of the Himalayas. I still use and enjoy some on occasion.
- peterwwillis 10y agoSalt production: http://www.saltinstitute.org/salt-101/production-industry/ http://www.saltinstitute.org/salt-101/production-industry/ A lot of the salt (~80%) produced in the US goes to road salt and chemical industries. For roads it's better if it's in rock form, so a lot (if not most) is mined. For chemical industry they can often re-use brining wells to hold other things later, so the great majority of chemical salt is brined. Salt mines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_mining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_mining Of all the salt production methods, non-brine mined salts have the least toxic or harmful byproducts - at the source. But they still go through processing plants to sift, grind and package the salt, and not every processing plant has the same quality standards. If you wanted to get really picky about it you should choose a mined, non-brine, non-processed, non-refined salt produced at a facility that follows modern standards. The easiest to identify would be "himalayan" salt, but many countries have ancient lake/sea beds and mine and produce salt in the same way. In general, you can't tell how salt was produced unless the company very explicitly tells you. Even kosher and sea salt sometimes is processed or refined with additives or in a way that could introduce MPs. (In case it helps, only some places like Australia and the mediterranean have the right environment to solar-evaporate sea salt at a commercial scale)
- craigds 10y agoCrazy X axes on those graphs.
- vmarsy 10y ago> The abundance of MPs per salt sample ranged from 0 per kg in the salt sample # France-F (i.e. Country of origin: France, brand F) to 10 in the salt sample # Portugal-N I guess I'll keep buying the French Gros Sel de Guérande from world market, plus the fact that it tastes really good when sprinkled on meat :)
- FoeNyx 10y agoIt tastes good indeed, but in figure 3, France had 5 other brands containing some plastic polymers and/or pigment particles ... I now wonder from which brand is that F sample (clue : apparently packaged in a Glass container) Anyway the conclusion rather place the problem, not on the consumption of those salts, but in the gradual accumulation in products from the aquatic environments.
- matt4077 10y agoI happen to be trading in a fair bit of Fleur de Sel from Guérande, and can assure you that any difference between Portugal and our product can only be either chance, or almost deliberate efforts to sabotage the Portuguese product. They both start with the same "raw material": water of the Northern Atlantic, which I would think is mixed enough not be significantly different in these two locations. Guérande is probably one of the largest locations for sea salt, but the processes are far away from industrial scale. They manually remove contamination that they see, but I've found a few fish in the salt. Contamination at the millimetre-scale is tested for, but there are no filtration processes in place to reduce them.
- abeppu 10y agoDoes it seem really low that they only extracted 72 particles? In their methods section they mention using 1kg of salt from each of the 17 brands. Skimming FDA guidelines for defects in food, I see "action levels" like "average of 2 or more rodent hairs per 50g" for ground pepper, or "average of 1 or more whole insects per 50 grams" for cornmeal. 72 particles in 17 kg of salt sounds really shockingly clean given all the stuff in the oceans.
- gruez 10y ago>"average of 1 or more whole insects per 50 grams" for cornmeal so you can have 9 whole insects in a pound of cornmeal and still be in the clear?
- azinman2 10y agoMakes it difficult to truly be vegetarian...
- washadjeffmad 10y agoNot really, because of high internal industry standards. The FDA guideline is a federal minimum baseline for quality to establish fitness against varying state standards during interstate commerce. It's partly to deter and punish dealing in adulterated bulk or raw domestic products, partly for consumer protection, and partly a way to protect everyone along the supply chain where state laws might fail.
- jessaustin 10y agoI've found lots of insects in both cornmeal and wheat flour. It has never really been a problem. When I find them I sift them out.
- coldpie 10y agoMy policy is, ignorance is bliss :-)
- 10y ago
- martyvis 10y agoFrom the introduction "Microplastics might be of health concern since they have been shown to carry hazardous chemicals and microorganisms.". So it is still a might whether it is a concern. We all eat, drink and breathe "chemicals" everyday. Everything from dihydrogen monoxide (http;//dhmo.org ) to Julius Caesar's urine (http://redneckmath.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/drinking-caesars-urine.html?m=1 http://redneckmath.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/drinking-caesars-... ) to things like particulate carbon, lead, virii, bacteria and more things that actually are known to be bad. Our bodies are amazingly good at filtering or otherwise ignoring such attacks. Any idea whether we will know whether microplastics actually are bad, or just a visible distraction?
- zbyte64 10y agoOur bodies are good at filtering because those of our ancestors that couldn't, didn't reproduce. We could become equally good at handling lead if we just removed those pesky regulations.
- true_religion 10y agoHis two most prominent example are DHMO and Ceasers' Urine, both commonly known as "water". Yes, we are very good at "filtering" water, and have even managed to evolve to use this potentially harmful chemical as a biological cooling mechanism (sweat). Who knows what we'd be able to do with lead in our systems? I'm betting on protection against pesky UV radiation, or maybe kryptonite.
- pharrington 10y agoMy totally naive understanding of evolutionary biology makes me think we'd have to be much simpler and/or much lower energy consuming organisms to evolve considerably higher radiation tolerance.
- jknoepfler 10y agoThe conclusion of the article: "The results of this study did not show a significant load of MPs larger than 149 μm in salts originating from 8 different countries and, therefore, negligible health risks associated with the consumption of salts. The increasing trend of plastic use and disposal50, however, might lead to the gradual accumulation of MPs in the oceans and lakes and, therefore, in products from the aquatic environments. This should necessitate the regular quantification and characterization of MPs in various sea products." Is interesting to me, because I feel like this is where environments politics properly starts. Should the US federal government (insert your home gov't, or the EU, or whatever) fund regular monitoring for micro plastic levels? Maybe! it's a hard cost/benefit question that involves weighing priorities and careful thinking. But that's the kind of question we should be asking when it comes to environmental politics, not "should the EPA exist," or "is climate change real?"
- TaylorAlexander 10y ago"Politics" in practice is a way to give the people something to argue about that is related to, but fundamentally separate from, the real decisions being made. It's best if we're arguing about useless memes while real decisions are made or else we might question those decisions.
- btown 10y agoObviously every state should build their own parallel monitoring program with its own duplicated bureaucracy and time spent developing regulations. Because obviously people in New York and people in Alabama have different levels of plastic tolerance. Heck, I hear people in Alaska like plastic in their fish! Why are we taking away their rights?
- twobyfour 10y agoFurthermore, what happens when the wind blows pollution from one state across state lines into another? Does Louisiana get a say in what Iowa dumps into the Mississippi? And gee, it's not like anything dumped into the ocean in one place ever comes out in another, does it?
- 10y ago
- sengork 10y agoTesting himalayan pink salt within this study would have been good for comparison (sea vs non-sea source of salt).
- ribs 10y agoI think it's all sea salt, just varying by how recently it was in the sea.
- astrodust 10y agoYeah, all salt is sea salt. If it's up in the mountains it just means it was laid down a long time ago. That salt should be free of microplastics, but hell, you never know what's what these days. Some of the most polluted areas in the world are off of Antarctica.
- bricss 10y agoYou will be probably surprised how many plastics you can find inside a shrimps or any other sea creatures guts.
- astrodust 10y agoSome seagulls are 50% plastic by weight.
- rodionos 10y agoBased on the chart at the bottom: salt from Australia and Portugal has the highest content of plastics.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoLet me understand: this substance in the salt came from the sea, where it came from drains that contained flushed facial scrubs. So this stuff that is made to rub on your face by the hundreds of thousands or millions is present in salt by ones and twos per pound? Did I read that right? This is significant how?
- astrodust 10y agoYou read it wrong or you didn't even read it. The article is talking about particles far tinier than the kind in those facial scrubs. The origin of these microplastics is likely "biodegradable" plastic material which rather than reverting to some harmless form, simply breaks up in to trillions of microscopic pieces.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago149um or larger is right in the ballpark for 'micro beads' which are anything smaller than 2mm. Of course I read it (thanks for the slam though!) As for 'reverting to some harmless form' that's exactly what is taking place. Particles the same size (or exactly the same particles) as micro-beads in face wash (which have been tested and proven safe) are present in microscopic quantities. So what? Again I ask, how is this significant?