EVERY SINGLE soil sample we've been testing has some amount of plastics.

Farmers are feeding plastic to our pigs, then spreading the waste as fertilizer. Imagine our farm fields being covered with a thin layer of partially digested micro plastics, neurotoxins and Roundup-like herbicides.

There is no longer any industrial food stream not heavily contaminated with plastics, the weird thing is no one seems to care at all!

> One of the studies included in the new review found 1 liter of water — the equivalent of two standard-size bottled waters bought at the store — contained an average of 240,000 plastic particles from seven types of plastics

How many non-plastic particles? I've heard it said there's enough uranium in seawater that we can theoretically use it to generate power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY

The safe allowable ppm counts are insanely low for this shit.

This is not to say it might not be worth it in some cases, just that it is a trade-off, and plastic is remarkably good at what it does.

I propose a new model; 'total liability'.

Every time something bad happens, you identify every person who contributed to the harm, calculate each person's liability and they have to pay. If some of the culprits cannot be identified, then the remaining culprits who can be identified have to absorb the unallocated liability... Not allocating full liability to people who do harm is akin to allocating it to everyone, including those who played no part in the harm. This is immoral and creates perverse incentives for continued harm.

For example, someone discards an empty plastic Coca Cola bottle on the ground in a public park, the person is fined maybe 95% but 5% of the fine is directed to the Coca Cola company for having made the decision to make the bottle out of plastic instead of tin or glass; thus being complicit in the harm. The money for any harm done, by any entity should go directly towards UBI and be paid out equally to all citizens.

The government could also use statistics to fine companies based on reasonable estimates of current harmful practices. For example, how much damage is microplastics causing in terms of medical costs globally? Make a list of all companies responsible, fine each one proportionally to their contribution to the harm.

People should be paid for identifying, reporting and successfully proving harmful practices (they deserve a commission, like a lawyer).

Identifying and reporting problems adds value to society and should be rewarded.

The majority of the proceeds should go to UBI. Why UBI? Because diffuse harms require diffuse remedies. It's not possible to award damages for widespread harm in a fair, non-corrupt way, so distributing to all citizens equally is the best approach. It's not perfect, but people know how to count and it's easier to identify and prove fraud if the rule is simple like 'each person gets the same amount of UBI'.

Whatever your gut tells you about what has the most or least plastic in the food you're eating is probably incorrect.

War rations from the 1950s had the most, along with fast food cheeseburgers and Whole Foods grass fed steak.

Kraft Mac and cheese was low, especially after microwaving.

Dust in your house? Again, largely made up of fabric fibers. Which are increasingly plastics. Especially so if you have a carpeted house.

I'm not fully against some of these ideas and studies. And I am all for reducing our exposure to microplastics, where we can. But folks largely ignore the microplastic lining in cans, thinking they are avoiding that plastic bottle. We seem to have done a great job of avoiding large plastics in the fear of microplastics. Meanwhile, folks have very little intuition on where the microplastics come from.

> Microplastics ... in glass bottles contain more microplastic particles than those in plastic bottles, cartons or cans. This was the surprising finding of a study conducted by the Boulogne-sur-Mer unit of the ANSES Laboratory for Food Safety. The scientists hypothesised that these plastic particles could come from the paint used on bottle caps. Water and wine are less affected than other beverages. [1]

[1] https://www.anses.fr/en/content/caps-glass-bottles-contamina...