plastics ... revisited



Once again plastics are in the news - front and center.  This time it's about the tiny plastic microbeads that we are eating.  The whole plastic straw thing is so yesterday.  i do still wonder what caused the tipping point on plastic straws - i mean they've been around everywhere forever.                                                                                                                                                                                                 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 

My 'ah-ha' moment:  I recently saw a documentary about the Pacific garbage gyre where they were cutting open tiny fish's stomachs and revealed all the plastics in there, and then they said these fish are not disected or cleaned, they are just chopped and processed whole with all these plastics ending up in our food chain. 



So how do these plastics end up in our bodies??   First of all, these are the main 'plastic in' fish:  tuna, lobster, and shrimp. - so if you eat of lot of these, you might want to cut back. 
The bigger culprit is the plastic packaging.  Just about everything we buy in the supermarket touches plastic at some point in its life.  Just look around your kitchen and inside your fridge.  The milk, OJ, cheese, meats, etc are all in plastics of some kind.  These plastic coverings leach into the product in very tiny amounts cumulative over time. P

Plastic particles have been found in tap water, bottled water, and even beer! 


https://www.theweek.co.uk/97282/how-plastic-particles-end-up-in-our-bodies

What you can do
There are few things we can do to reduce the plastics inside our body. 

 Here's an article that presents three strategies to alleviate some of the plastic microbeads that have invaded and embedded our entire earth and all species. 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solving-microplastic-pollution-means-reducing-recycling-and-fundamental-rethinking/

but they are missing one big solution that technology cannot fix:  human behavior.  These three solutions rely on business profit making...

when i interned with Dr. Michael Braungart (Hamburg Germany at Epea)  he had a ppt slide show that showed larger and larger landfills on the globe that eventually overcame the entire globe - so that our entire earth was one big garbage dump.  we are well underway, and it seems the oceans are that garbage dump - seems out of sight out of mind is what has caused this... we don't see the tiny pastics, the tiny particles... even the big stuff that sinks to the bottom of the oceans.

We haven't even started exploring the bottoms of the oceans to see the landfill dump under the water.
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utensils
all those 'recylable' plastic spoons and forks you use at organic food places and whole foods - guess what!  they are NOT compostable or recyclable.  They are designed with beets, corn etc - yes, BUT they are processed with enzymes and high heat and therefore are very difficult to break back down.  supposedly these utensils are sent to an industrial composting yard where high heat (using natural gas) is need to break them down.  One brave young reported in Sac went to visit such a compost yard in Dixon and found the utensils in their original, good-as-new state after 6 months in the hot composting heap.

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