The pipes in the US still contain plenty of lead. Also, Covid brain damage. Tons of it.
I wonder what our neurosises will be.
I think it’s more physiological. Since microplastics are ingested maybe it’s related to the rise in oral and rectal cancers.
Yeah, but the nanoplastics get past the BBB (Blood Brain Barrier), what’s it, a plastic spoon in every human brain? Enough for some psych effects I guess. Oh, there’s 27 million tonnes of nanoplastics spread across just the top layer of the temperate to subtropical North Atlantic
Shit’s pervasive and in your brain.
Depression, I would say. Same as how boomers are labeled as uncaring and sociopathic because of lead.
Yeah and also for Gen X, Gen Z, Gen Alpha. We all still alive and everybody gets microplastic in their balls and brains. Its for all ages
why the alpabet suddenly changes after Z? it should either be “omega & alpha” or “z & a”
Same reason we started with X, millennials actually got a name, and then went back to Z. Somebody with a head full of lead came up with it.
Millenials are also called Gen Y. Millenials just happens to have sticked more. And Gen Z is also called Zoomers.
Well zoomer comes from the z. Does it not?
They’re just place holders until the generation gets a shared experience to refer to. Millennials saw the millennium. Boomers were products of the baby boom but they also saw their economy boom. Gen X are missing, their letter was fitting.
My prediction is one of them will become gen algorithm, as they never knew a time when their media wasn’t decided for them. Maybe, gen android, few of them know how to use a file system after Chromebooks became ubiquitous. Or they’ll be the second greatest generation due to ww3. This stuff is entirely unpredictable.
What name does GenZ get? Born just in time to be power users, born too late to have any power to stop the enshitification. Same non-existent economic prospects as GenX.
Gen Z is already named “Zoomers”, but it’s not sticking as much as “Gen Z”.
Boomers were products of the baby boom but they also saw their economy boom.
I though boomers were the producers of the baby boom
No, the products. World War 2 ended in 1945, and then EVERYBODY FUCKED and 80 years later we’re still cleaning up the mess.
Maybe. Their generation starts 1946 so I thought they were the product. One way or the other they are involved in a baby boom.
You are correct. After WW2 ended there was a “boom” of babies being born.
Generation Omega sounds like some real dystopian plot
Waiting for uprising of the Sigma.
Honestly I don’t think we’re socially responsible enough to end something like lead poisoning these days.
Imagine trying to stop the hole in the ozone today. We’d have people spraying CFCs in the air just to spite the effort.
As someone just old enough to remember, we did have that with CFCs. Might not have been super mainstream, and nobody who would have done it out of spite really had the disposable income to actually do it.
I grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian “cult” and I remember the adults around me “joking” about it all the time. I remember a Missionary to northern Canada visiting our church (in rural America) to try to raise support talking about the temperatures and joking that it’s so cold that he wanted to stand outside with an aerosol can in each hand to try to bring on some global warming, and that getting a laugh from the congregation. You might think that maybe it was a “harmless” joke that maybe as a child I didn’t pick up on the sarcasm, but there were absolutely adults there who fully believed that there was nothing humans could do to damage the earth, because God takes care of it. “And how dare the government and these evolutionists try to tell us how to live.”
Someone will call not wanting lead poisoning woke and that will be that.
for the past few months ive started to think we’re like a couple years away from putting lead back in the gasoline
Trump deregulating gas and paint to put lead back in both would be so unsurprising it won’t even garner a reaction from me.
I’m all with you. But it feels like they did already.
Nah, because every future generation will have it too.
Millennials? More like GenX. We’ve been eating out of microwaved tupperware since the sixties.
It looks like the cumulative total of plastics produced by the 80’s was around 2-3
trillionbillion tons, whereas now it’s probably more like 20-30B.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/global-plastics-production.png
So have the millennials who were breast fed.
And formula fed
Mmmm, tasty math.
The worst part: postpartum women have lower levels of microplastics than other adults.
So you’re saying the baby took some of the plastic out of them, that’s horribly depressing at least they got 10 to 15 point IQ boost in return
Might be that. Although your body goes into absolute overdrive during pregnancy, and it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that some of the immune system reactions that kick in manage to eject some level of plastic microparticulates
Seems Like something people should be definitely looking into to find out why, with the state of science in America It’s probably not going to be here
Once at a Phish show, I consumed a rather copious amount of 🍄’s while hanging w/ mah friends beforehand. For some reason I couldn’t get the image of Plastic Man (Comic cartoon on Saturday mornings in the early 80’s) Out of my head. Every fucking song from that show I processed through the Plastic Man perspective. I was done with that memory before my brain would allow me to forget it. It was a loooonnnggg show b/c 🍄’s.
I once ate shrooms and went to a club (late 90s in the Netherlands, psytrance). The party experience was complete gone for me, it was just like watching a nature show, where I heard a David Attenborough narator talk about how the female of the species was using various color pigments on her face to attract the male. While the males where using dance moves to show strength and virility.
OP, you are in for a seriously rough time if you think containing micro plastics is as simple as removing lead from gasoline and paint.
Nobody said it would be.
What’s replacing plastic. Good luck.
What did plastic replace? Good chance we can go back, if we can convince some people the line doesn’t need to go up. Good joke, everybody laughs…
What kind of generational hazard would you like to have growing up, kids? :D
Hopefully renewable, compostable/biodegradable plastics.
It’s the getting the old shit out of everything that will be the issue
Microplastics cause neurological damage and anti social violent behavior?
We are just beginning to understand how much the chemical Imbalances that lead to depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders originate in the digestive tract and how microplastics from food may disrupt the processing of these chemicals.
We don’t know about the longer term consequences yet, just like we didn’t about lead.
Not saying it’s a definite but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Plastic has been around for 80 years. Shouldn’t we know something by now
No, people knew lead was poisonous even back near Roman days. Though just like how humans constantly do stupid things for some benefit, they kept using it as a sweetener for ages.
Also mercury in relation to, “as mad as a hatter”. It’s just mercury was very good for the job.
To play devil’s advocate, we always knew lead was toxic, but we didn’t know the only healthy dose was 0
But we know plastic is inert and we knew about lead.
plastic is inert
wat? In no way is it inert.
I don’t think the impacts of microplastics are quite as catastrophic, they can’t be or we would already know.
Which isn’t to say they aren’t bad just damn lead is realllly bad.
The concentration of them is rising exponentially, that’s the part that terrifies me.
It’s possible we just haven’t crossed a threshold yet.
My non-professional guess is that microplastics will eventually sterilize us by disrupting our sperm’s ability to function properly. Only the wealthy can afford the medical procedures to bypass this.
'Twould be sweet irony and a blessing for the earth.
Although the best method for removing it I’ve found is donating plasma (PFAs down 30% in 6 months of regular donation, the hope is nanoplastics are also removed…) so it might be the poors (in USA) and generous that get to have kids, so that’s nice…
It’ll end up blocking vital neurotransmitters leaving us zombified and giving us an insatiable craving for brains
Maybe kids will need to be carefully sheltered from plastics until they are old enough to freeze their sperm.
this reads like the next step is to force them to freeze theirs
I’m crazy. Mark My Words. In 20 years, we’ll have so many microbes capable of consuming plastic people will be bitching about their packages not being able to effectively protect their goods from spoiling. The goldfish has spoken.
I’ve run across at least three separate articles now of researchers from across the world discovering plastic eating bacteria in the wild. Short plastic. Its days are numbered.
but at least people are born now without nuclear explosion isotopes
up until a few years ago every living being had them
so if we can stop lead from being blasted everywhere
and we can stop exploding nukes
maybe we can stop the plastic problem… but probably not for a few generations
If it is a small amount that make the cut (in relative contrast to all current members of humanity) If a fraction make it, that would be giant W for humankind. The diversity would be enormous and incredibly resilient & unbelievably healthy.
What’s next ? Latent radioactive dust ?
Probably volcanic ash lungs from all the volcanoes in the world erupting all at once due to climate change.
Pffft! … at least microplastics take decades or a lifetime of accumulation to affect your body, mind and health
Social media rots your brain and mental capacity in a matter of years or months
And the person responsible for both issues is the same dude Roy J. Plunkett
Freon too?! Some people really want to watch the world burn.
and teflon. don’t forget about teflon.
