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> At present, no screening or filtering for microplastics takes place in any European wastewater treatment centres. This seems to be a hole that needs plugging

• kwhitefoot 7y ago
  > Regulations that prohibit the use of this stuff altogether would be even better A lot of microplastic is from textiles. If you ban all sources of microplastics you'll be back to wearing only wool, cotton, silk, linen, and leather. A lot of the remainder is from plastic single use containers. Instead of banning them they could simply be returned to the shop from which they were bought for recycling as is done for most drinks containers (both plastic and aluminium) here in Norway. Banning plastic bottles would mean a substantial increase in energy use because the alternative is glass which is much heavier and more costly to recycle. Perhaps we could switch to aluminium for more containers. It fashionable now to complain about the deliberately created microplastics like those used in cosmetics but the vast bulk come from wear and tear on what are now effectively traditional materials.
  • em-bee 7y ago
    > If you ban all sources of microplastics you'll be back to wearing only wool, cotton, silk, linen, and leather. what would be wrong with that? i'd be all for it. it's also possible to make plastic containers and bottles reusable.
• _edo 7y ago
  This stuck out as strange to me since they defined microplastics as <5mm. If you run water through sand it would filter things this large, and that's a common wastewater treatment practice.
• annogram 7y ago
  I think it's messed up that soaps shampoos and other items are even allowed to contain micro plastics when we know the damage they cause.