9 ms·

I don't like plastic in the air any more than anyone else does, but 1) stop wearing those stupid fucking polyester hoodies (and other artificial fibers; aka yo

I don't like plastic in the air any more than anyone else does, but 1) stop wearing those stupid fucking polyester hoodies (and other artificial fibers; aka your socks, gym shirts and underpants) -that's where most of it comes from. I'm looking at you, SF hacker nerds. 2) Even assuming the entire population of the Western US breathed all that plastic waste in and it was permanently deposited in the lungs: 1000e3 kg/ 100e6 people = 0.01kg or 10g plastic each person accumulated in their lungs. In a year. Pretty sure I have more shit in my lungs from being around diesel engines for a few days, or, like being around potheads.

faitswulff 6y ago
10mg per year is potentially a much bigger problem due to biological magnification - i.e. everything below us in the food chain is exposed to the same 10mg per year, so we accumulate the sum of whatever our food sources have consumed.
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  You aren't absorbing 10g, 10mg or 1mg of plastic in your lungs every year. Most of it is falling on the ground and being turned into dirt. It's gross and people should do something about it, but it is a neurotic worry rather than a real problem. Most accounts (including this one) even have the temerity to try to link plastic bottles to it (which, also gross, are not a problem as far as plastic fibers in the environment goes) because it freaks people out; so they buy a metal drinking container they shove in their plastic hoodies, which will eventually become a few pounds of environmental plastic fiber pollution.
  - weaksauce 6y ago
    > It's gross and people should do something about it, but it is a neurotic worry rather than a real problem. I wonder if it is going to be more like lead where at the time it was thought to be benignish and as the evidence mounted it was clear just how destructive it was.
    - 14 6y ago
      Or maybe it will show that humans can manage the plastic over their life times but maybe insects can not. It certainly seems to coincide with the declining bug population and increasing plastic use.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - weaksauce 6y ago
        I guess time will tell... that's an interesting theory.
  - Hnrobert42 6y ago
    It seems you have anger towards a group of people you have defined as bad. That seems to be clouding your judgement. For example, you somehow have convinced yourself that the use of metal water bottles is bad if used by synthetic fabric hoodie wearers in SF. First, everyone wears synthetics, not just in SF. Second, less plastic is less plastic.
    - scottlocklin 6y ago
      Thanks for the psychoanalysis, pal. How many polyester garments do you own?
      - Hnrobert42 6y ago
        A fair number of synthetic undergarments. I live in Vietnam, so breathable, wicking clothes are important. I have tried rayon, but I am not impressed. I tried wool boxer briefs, but they were comically small. After reading your post, I did order another two pair of wool shorts. We’ll see how they do. For the record, I also use a metal water bottle.
  - mc32 6y ago
    Indeed I’ve noted a trend the last few years of “tech”-(article of clothing): tech chinos, tech sweatpants, etc. All synthetic, all imbued with who knows what kind of chemicals. Then add all the Patagonia & the The North Faces that everyone is hip with...
    - elevenoh 6y ago
      And we wonder why the tech 'soy boy' label stuck ;)
  - titzer 6y ago
    Plastic bottles float. They float far and wide. There are billions of them in the oceans, right now, as we speak. Now imagine a plastic water bottle versus this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m9EyXLDlu0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m9EyXLDlu0 A 15 meter wave breaking in 1-2 meter deep water above an absolutely razor-sharp reef. A plastic water bottle--or really anything at all, will be absolutely obliterated by this. The oceans are full of a microplastic soup that is the ground-up dust from our massive garbage problem. That is now raining back on us. It's not hoodies, dude. I'd like you to explain how these microplastics are being turned into "dirt". Do you have a specific chemical process in mind? Because I don't. Microplastic is alien to the biosphere. Nothing, short of some lab experiments, nothing processes microplastics. It just gets ground up smaller and smaller and bleached and flaked by UV. It will be around for centuries. It's not biologically inert, either. It's been show to be an endocrine disruptor and kill microorganisms. It hits the bottom of the foodchain. It attracts other pollutants and concentrates them, filling a role as a kind of carrier of poisons that absolutely do kill life of all kinds. It's bad shit. You have a lot of anger in your comment. It's not neurotic to study carefully what our massive carelessness is doing to this planet. Rather, it is depressing to see how flippant and dismissive some people are because they are uncomfortable seeing the cost our economies are exacting on our home planet.
- howlin 6y ago
  Which is a great reason to eat as low on the food chain as you can.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    So steak ok?
jayd16 6y ago
> I'm looking at you, SF hacker nerds. I just wear what they hand out.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  'vendorwear'
  - bartread 6y ago
    A long while ago I started refusing the offer of vendorware at conferences and events, and recycled everything I did have. I never wore it and it just creates waste and clutters my drawers.
briefcomment 6y ago
Praying for cotton and wool to become stylish. And I hope we get creative with natural fibers like linen, beech fiber, spider silk, et.
- 1over137 6y ago
  and hemp, one of the best fabrics for many reasons.
- theplague42 6y ago
  Cotton and wool are totally in style, not sure why they wouldn't be? I'm slowly eliminating polyesters from my wardrobe. If you like the feel, you can do rayon or other processed natural fibers.
  - techntoke 6y ago
    Rayon is still incredibly toxic to produce because of the process.
    - kortex 6y ago
      How so? Carbon disulfide is rather nasty, but it's straightforward to recover most of it. TLV is 10 ppm, while the effluent air from Teepak is 100 ppm [0], meaning you could spend hours a day with just over a 10:1 dilution of the factory exhaust. And there are lots of efforts to get those emissions way lower. If it means less microplastics, I'm all for it. [0] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5518183 https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5518183
      - joveian 6y ago
        Tencel brand is a closed-loop version of the lyocell rayon process.
- eru 6y ago
  I thought cotton was pretty much the default fibre?
bartread 6y ago
> 1) stop wearing those stupid fucking polyester hoodies (and other artificial fibers; aka your socks, gym shirts and underpants) -that's where most of it comes from. I'm looking at you, SF hacker nerds. Other benefits of not wearing clothes made out of plastic or primarily plastic (into which I am lumping all human made fibres), particularly anything that touches your skin directly, and particularly in areas prone to perspire, include that you'll smell a lot nicer.
undersuit 6y ago
Stop wearing them and landfill them because we don't have much better plastic remediation options?
- elric 6y ago
  Buying fewer of them will result in fewer being made, which should result in fewer being landfilled, surely? I don't know what the state of plastic recycling is these days, but it used to be terrible but with promising prospects.
monadic2 6y ago
What’s your point? I’m hoping this is not yet another contrarian remark without an end.
beamatronic 6y ago
I read this in Jotaro Kujo’s voice
jbay808 6y ago
This is obviously a huge overestimate. But go actually weigh out 10 grams of flour on your kitchen scale. Do you really think you have more diesel exhaust in your lungs than that?
- dungdongdang 6y ago
  Weight from a full Year? Absolutely. Volume - probably not. It won't take up even close to as much space as the flour. That diesel exhaust also weighs much more than the hydro(1)carbon(12) chains flour is made from, simply because things like N(14)O(16) and metals in the particulate matter are much, much heavier.
  - wcoenen 6y ago
    Diesel exhaust soot density is in the 1 to 2 g/cm3 range. Flour is about 0.6 g/cm3. So the soot is indeed a bit heavier. But you can adjust the amount of flour you weigh out to visualize the volume, and it still seems like a lot. The point your parent comment was making still seems valid to me. I could not immediately find a reference for typical soot exposure.
    - dungdongdang 6y ago
      volume of 4mg of flour vs the 10 proposed is not "a bit heavier" - it's quite a bit less flour. A single puff of a cigarette I believe deposits about 6-20mg (depending on study) of crap into your lungs. I'm guessing about 10-15 puffs per cig. so, 10mg/puff * 10 puffs/cig * 20cigs = 2g per pack of cigs. so the comment is saying 4-5 packs of cigs worth of soot, over a Year. that's literally nothing.
      - monadic2 6y ago
        Well, it’s not literally nothing, it’s literally a massive amount of pollution. Puffing on cigarettes is literally inhaling pollution without air so I’m fairly certain you were never intending to engage in good faith in the first place.
GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
Most consumer plastic ends up in a landfill and typically don't leech microplastics in to the watertable. Fishing nets on the other hand? Top polluter in the ocean https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacific-garbage-patch-plastics-environment/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacifi...
- titzer 6y ago
  This is true. It's also true that far more than 99% of bullets fired in wars don't hit people.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    .. and then people spend the next century slowly cleaning up toxic lead and leftover explosives, like the "iron harvest" of WW1 battlefields.
    - DrScump 6y ago
      Military small arms ammunition must be jacketed, per the Hague Convention.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  I don't know about the oceans proper or the rest of the "western US" that we seek to address in our parent article, but I was specifically told the biggest source of microplastics in Califonia's coastal waster was car tires. https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/us/microplastic-pollution-car-tire-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/us/microplastic-pollution-car... And that synthetic fibers were only #2.
  - GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
    Ocean pollution, especially in fishing areas is especially detrimental due to biomagnification. Unfortunately the more I learn about micro-plastics, the more bleak my outlook gets.
jnurmine 6y ago
With all this talk about microplastics in the environment, I was a bit surprised to learn that water cleaning facilities use e.g. "moving bed biofilm reactors" such as "Bioportz" which are small, round, hollow plastic things in moving water. When seeing those move about and bump onto each other, my immediate thought was to wonder if any environmental microplastic comes off from those through abrasion/wear.
- learn_more 6y ago
  I wonder how much the biofilm on the surface manages to prevent erosion of the substrate.
elevenoh 6y ago
>Pretty sure I have more shit in my lungs from being around diesel engines for a few days, or, like being around potheads. Character of shit in the lungs > quantity. Making assumptions here, but prefer to have cannabis combustion byproducts over plastic.
longtom 6y ago
> stop wearing those stupid fucking polyester hoodies According to this chart, the main sources of pollution are by far wear and tear from car tyres and road surfaces. Synthetic clothing comes last. https://i.imgur.com/KmbY72h.jpg https://i.imgur.com/KmbY72h.jpg That being said, one should never forget secondary effects of reducing consumption which is economic stagnation, which in turn leads to inequality and social unrest. At the same time, it is not really proven microplastics are particularly harmful. Its benefits may outweigh some harm to organisms when it only shortens live expectancy by a few years. That being said, it is of course always worthwhile to remove pollutants where adverse effects are obvious and where alternatives are available.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  63% from cars (tyres, road surfaces, paint marks) [0]. No one yet know has bad it is. Plus living near the road causes * cancer, asthma, reduced lung growth in children [1] * dementia, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis [2] Killing millions worldwide [3] and injuring millions just in USA [4] That's inequality. [0] https://www.celticwater.co.uk/bloghow-does-plastic-get-into-the-ocean-plastic-pollution-from-roads/ https://www.celticwater.co.uk/bloghow-does-plastic-get-into-... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/25/living-near-busy-road-stunts-childrens-lung-growth-study-says https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/25/living-n... [2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200123152616.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200123152616.h... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
  - hedora 6y ago
    I can’t find it any more, but there used to be a fine grained map of the bay area’s air pollution. It it basically the inverse of per capita income.
    - sergeykish 6y ago
elric 6y ago
Recycles fabrics, like fleece made from PET, leeches ridiculously large quantities of microplastics every time you wash them. Wool, cotton, linen and hemp fibers seem like the way to go to me. Synthetics have their place and their uses, but there is such a thing as "too much of a good thing". And I'm sure people will start whinging about how much water it takes to grow cotton, but they will conveniently forget to mention all the shit caused by synthetics.
- 488643689 6y ago
  Also synthetic fibers are mostly used in "fast fashion", out side of functional fabrics. I am a trans woman and when I switched the fashion sections I was shocked by the amount of low quality plastic shit marketed at girls/women. Pullovers made from 100% polyester jeez... The fashion industry is one of the worst offenders in terms of environmental and climate damage. Fashion...
titzer 6y ago
By mass, 8 million tons of plastic garbage is estimated to be entering the oceans every year. The oceans, with their hundreds of thousands of miles of shoreline and reef breaks, are the world's broadest, most powerful erosive force. The oceans grind up our plastic garbage into micro and nanoplastics and clearly that is now being swept up into the hydro cycle and rained back on Earth. This is not that hard to grasp. Yes, artificial fibers are bad. They cause lots of microplastic problems in local water sources. I agree we should stop wearing them. But this problem is huge and global. The risk to human health from microplastics seems lower than some other types of pollution. But microplastics are persistent pollutants that don't go away after a year or two or five; they might survive centuries. They sicken and kill aquatic life, over and over. They are poison pills that never stop being poisonous. It's truly bad shit. We need to think about whether we want to address this problem at a global scale or not. If not, then we are accepting a big loss of biological life due to our utter carelessness.
sergeykish 6y ago
I imagine you already do not drive car, wear only rawhide sole shoes and use eco packaging - to prevent all the bigger real pollution sources by longtom.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
Don't forget plastic sneakers, which create microplastic every time you take a step.

faitswulff 6y ago

10mg per year is potentially a much bigger problem due to biological magnification - i.e. everything below us in the food chain is exposed to the same 10mg per year, so we accumulate the sum of whatever our food sources have consumed.

scottlocklin 6y ago
You aren't absorbing 10g, 10mg or 1mg of plastic in your lungs every year. Most of it is falling on the ground and being turned into dirt. It's gross and people should do something about it, but it is a neurotic worry rather than a real problem. Most accounts (including this one) even have the temerity to try to link plastic bottles to it (which, also gross, are not a problem as far as plastic fibers in the environment goes) because it freaks people out; so they buy a metal drinking container they shove in their plastic hoodies, which will eventually become a few pounds of environmental plastic fiber pollution.
- weaksauce 6y ago
  > It's gross and people should do something about it, but it is a neurotic worry rather than a real problem. I wonder if it is going to be more like lead where at the time it was thought to be benignish and as the evidence mounted it was clear just how destructive it was.
  - 14 6y ago
    Or maybe it will show that humans can manage the plastic over their life times but maybe insects can not. It certainly seems to coincide with the declining bug population and increasing plastic use.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - weaksauce 6y ago
      I guess time will tell... that's an interesting theory.
- Hnrobert42 6y ago
  It seems you have anger towards a group of people you have defined as bad. That seems to be clouding your judgement. For example, you somehow have convinced yourself that the use of metal water bottles is bad if used by synthetic fabric hoodie wearers in SF. First, everyone wears synthetics, not just in SF. Second, less plastic is less plastic.
  - scottlocklin 6y ago
    Thanks for the psychoanalysis, pal. How many polyester garments do you own?
    - Hnrobert42 6y ago
      A fair number of synthetic undergarments. I live in Vietnam, so breathable, wicking clothes are important. I have tried rayon, but I am not impressed. I tried wool boxer briefs, but they were comically small. After reading your post, I did order another two pair of wool shorts. We’ll see how they do. For the record, I also use a metal water bottle.
- mc32 6y ago
  Indeed I’ve noted a trend the last few years of “tech”-(article of clothing): tech chinos, tech sweatpants, etc. All synthetic, all imbued with who knows what kind of chemicals. Then add all the Patagonia & the The North Faces that everyone is hip with...
  - elevenoh 6y ago
    And we wonder why the tech 'soy boy' label stuck ;)
- titzer 6y ago
  Plastic bottles float. They float far and wide. There are billions of them in the oceans, right now, as we speak. Now imagine a plastic water bottle versus this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m9EyXLDlu0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m9EyXLDlu0 A 15 meter wave breaking in 1-2 meter deep water above an absolutely razor-sharp reef. A plastic water bottle--or really anything at all, will be absolutely obliterated by this. The oceans are full of a microplastic soup that is the ground-up dust from our massive garbage problem. That is now raining back on us. It's not hoodies, dude. I'd like you to explain how these microplastics are being turned into "dirt". Do you have a specific chemical process in mind? Because I don't. Microplastic is alien to the biosphere. Nothing, short of some lab experiments, nothing processes microplastics. It just gets ground up smaller and smaller and bleached and flaked by UV. It will be around for centuries. It's not biologically inert, either. It's been show to be an endocrine disruptor and kill microorganisms. It hits the bottom of the foodchain. It attracts other pollutants and concentrates them, filling a role as a kind of carrier of poisons that absolutely do kill life of all kinds. It's bad shit. You have a lot of anger in your comment. It's not neurotic to study carefully what our massive carelessness is doing to this planet. Rather, it is depressing to see how flippant and dismissive some people are because they are uncomfortable seeing the cost our economies are exacting on our home planet.
howlin 6y ago
Which is a great reason to eat as low on the food chain as you can.
- waheoo 6y ago
  So steak ok?

jayd16 6y ago

> I'm looking at you, SF hacker nerds. I just wear what they hand out.

Gibbon1 6y ago
'vendorwear'
- bartread 6y ago
  A long while ago I started refusing the offer of vendorware at conferences and events, and recycled everything I did have. I never wore it and it just creates waste and clutters my drawers.

briefcomment 6y ago

Praying for cotton and wool to become stylish. And I hope we get creative with natural fibers like linen, beech fiber, spider silk, et.

1over137 6y ago
and hemp, one of the best fabrics for many reasons.
theplague42 6y ago
Cotton and wool are totally in style, not sure why they wouldn't be? I'm slowly eliminating polyesters from my wardrobe. If you like the feel, you can do rayon or other processed natural fibers.
- techntoke 6y ago
  Rayon is still incredibly toxic to produce because of the process.
  - kortex 6y ago
    How so? Carbon disulfide is rather nasty, but it's straightforward to recover most of it. TLV is 10 ppm, while the effluent air from Teepak is 100 ppm [0], meaning you could spend hours a day with just over a 10:1 dilution of the factory exhaust. And there are lots of efforts to get those emissions way lower. If it means less microplastics, I'm all for it. [0] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5518183 https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5518183
    - joveian 6y ago
      Tencel brand is a closed-loop version of the lyocell rayon process.
eru 6y ago
I thought cotton was pretty much the default fibre?

bartread 6y ago

> 1) stop wearing those stupid fucking polyester hoodies (and other artificial fibers; aka your socks, gym shirts and underpants) -that's where most of it comes from. I'm looking at you, SF hacker nerds. Other benefits of not wearing clothes made out of plastic or primarily plastic (into which I am lumping all human made fibres), particularly anything that touches your skin directly, and particularly in areas prone to perspire, include that you'll smell a lot nicer.

undersuit 6y ago

Stop wearing them and landfill them because we don't have much better plastic remediation options?

elric 6y ago
Buying fewer of them will result in fewer being made, which should result in fewer being landfilled, surely? I don't know what the state of plastic recycling is these days, but it used to be terrible but with promising prospects.

monadic2 6y ago

What’s your point? I’m hoping this is not yet another contrarian remark without an end.

beamatronic 6y ago

I read this in Jotaro Kujo’s voice

jbay808 6y ago

This is obviously a huge overestimate. But go actually weigh out 10 grams of flour on your kitchen scale. Do you really think you have more diesel exhaust in your lungs than that?

dungdongdang 6y ago
Weight from a full Year? Absolutely. Volume - probably not. It won't take up even close to as much space as the flour. That diesel exhaust also weighs much more than the hydro(1)carbon(12) chains flour is made from, simply because things like N(14)O(16) and metals in the particulate matter are much, much heavier.
- wcoenen 6y ago
  Diesel exhaust soot density is in the 1 to 2 g/cm3 range. Flour is about 0.6 g/cm3. So the soot is indeed a bit heavier. But you can adjust the amount of flour you weigh out to visualize the volume, and it still seems like a lot. The point your parent comment was making still seems valid to me. I could not immediately find a reference for typical soot exposure.
  - dungdongdang 6y ago
    volume of 4mg of flour vs the 10 proposed is not "a bit heavier" - it's quite a bit less flour. A single puff of a cigarette I believe deposits about 6-20mg (depending on study) of crap into your lungs. I'm guessing about 10-15 puffs per cig. so, 10mg/puff * 10 puffs/cig * 20cigs = 2g per pack of cigs. so the comment is saying 4-5 packs of cigs worth of soot, over a Year. that's literally nothing.
    - monadic2 6y ago
      Well, it’s not literally nothing, it’s literally a massive amount of pollution. Puffing on cigarettes is literally inhaling pollution without air so I’m fairly certain you were never intending to engage in good faith in the first place.

GaryNumanVevo 6y ago

Most consumer plastic ends up in a landfill and typically don't leech microplastics in to the watertable. Fishing nets on the other hand? Top polluter in the ocean https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacific-garbage-patch-plastics-environment/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacifi...

titzer 6y ago
This is true. It's also true that far more than 99% of bullets fired in wars don't hit people.
- pjc50 6y ago
  .. and then people spend the next century slowly cleaning up toxic lead and leftover explosives, like the "iron harvest" of WW1 battlefields.
  - DrScump 6y ago
    Military small arms ammunition must be jacketed, per the Hague Convention.
fennecfoxen 6y ago
I don't know about the oceans proper or the rest of the "western US" that we seek to address in our parent article, but I was specifically told the biggest source of microplastics in Califonia's coastal waster was car tires. https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/us/microplastic-pollution-car-tire-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/us/microplastic-pollution-car... And that synthetic fibers were only #2.
- GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
  Ocean pollution, especially in fishing areas is especially detrimental due to biomagnification. Unfortunately the more I learn about micro-plastics, the more bleak my outlook gets.

jnurmine 6y ago

With all this talk about microplastics in the environment, I was a bit surprised to learn that water cleaning facilities use e.g. "moving bed biofilm reactors" such as "Bioportz" which are small, round, hollow plastic things in moving water. When seeing those move about and bump onto each other, my immediate thought was to wonder if any environmental microplastic comes off from those through abrasion/wear.

learn_more 6y ago
I wonder how much the biofilm on the surface manages to prevent erosion of the substrate.

elevenoh 6y ago

>Pretty sure I have more shit in my lungs from being around diesel engines for a few days, or, like being around potheads. Character of shit in the lungs > quantity. Making assumptions here, but prefer to have cannabis combustion byproducts over plastic.

longtom 6y ago

> stop wearing those stupid fucking polyester hoodies According to this chart, the main sources of pollution are by far wear and tear from car tyres and road surfaces. Synthetic clothing comes last. https://i.imgur.com/KmbY72h.jpg https://i.imgur.com/KmbY72h.jpg That being said, one should never forget secondary effects of reducing consumption which is economic stagnation, which in turn leads to inequality and social unrest. At the same time, it is not really proven microplastics are particularly harmful. Its benefits may outweigh some harm to organisms when it only shortens live expectancy by a few years. That being said, it is of course always worthwhile to remove pollutants where adverse effects are obvious and where alternatives are available.

sergeykish 6y ago
63% from cars (tyres, road surfaces, paint marks) [0]. No one yet know has bad it is. Plus living near the road causes * cancer, asthma, reduced lung growth in children [1] * dementia, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis [2] Killing millions worldwide [3] and injuring millions just in USA [4] That's inequality. [0] https://www.celticwater.co.uk/bloghow-does-plastic-get-into-the-ocean-plastic-pollution-from-roads/ https://www.celticwater.co.uk/bloghow-does-plastic-get-into-... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/25/living-near-busy-road-stunts-childrens-lung-growth-study-says https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/25/living-n... [2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200123152616.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200123152616.h... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
- hedora 6y ago
  I can’t find it any more, but there used to be a fine grained map of the bay area’s air pollution. It it basically the inverse of per capita income.
  - sergeykish 6y ago

elric 6y ago

Recycles fabrics, like fleece made from PET, leeches ridiculously large quantities of microplastics every time you wash them. Wool, cotton, linen and hemp fibers seem like the way to go to me. Synthetics have their place and their uses, but there is such a thing as "too much of a good thing". And I'm sure people will start whinging about how much water it takes to grow cotton, but they will conveniently forget to mention all the shit caused by synthetics.

488643689 6y ago
Also synthetic fibers are mostly used in "fast fashion", out side of functional fabrics. I am a trans woman and when I switched the fashion sections I was shocked by the amount of low quality plastic shit marketed at girls/women. Pullovers made from 100% polyester jeez... The fashion industry is one of the worst offenders in terms of environmental and climate damage. Fashion...

titzer 6y ago

By mass, 8 million tons of plastic garbage is estimated to be entering the oceans every year. The oceans, with their hundreds of thousands of miles of shoreline and reef breaks, are the world's broadest, most powerful erosive force. The oceans grind up our plastic garbage into micro and nanoplastics and clearly that is now being swept up into the hydro cycle and rained back on Earth. This is not that hard to grasp. Yes, artificial fibers are bad. They cause lots of microplastic problems in local water sources. I agree we should stop wearing them. But this problem is huge and global. The risk to human health from microplastics seems lower than some other types of pollution. But microplastics are persistent pollutants that don't go away after a year or two or five; they might survive centuries. They sicken and kill aquatic life, over and over. They are poison pills that never stop being poisonous. It's truly bad shit. We need to think about whether we want to address this problem at a global scale or not. If not, then we are accepting a big loss of biological life due to our utter carelessness.

sergeykish 6y ago

I imagine you already do not drive car, wear only rawhide sole shoes and use eco packaging - to prevent all the bigger real pollution sources by longtom.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

Don't forget plastic sneakers, which create microplastic every time you take a step.