There was a recentish David Cronenberg movie about humans evolving to eat plastic so we'll be fine. Can't wait to chow down on plastic.

many organisms are eating plastics, but that is not good for us at all in the short term. A study ? bedford institute? from a while back reported that plastics that they were collecting from the ocean, were full of holes from bieng eaten by something, and if you think about plastic as a widly distrubuted, easily broken down substance with very high intrinsic energy content, that it's no surprise at all that things are eating it. But back to us, thats bad, because all.of those things eating plastic, are then eaten, and passed up the food chain to us, at the top. So what we need to know, is how far advanced the process of filling the food chain with, undesirable for us substances, is, and what the future looks like if we just shrug, or how long will the system take to clear itself out. ie: is the biosphere "saturated" or not. If not, what is the max concentration that we can expect, and when

What if there are negative byproducts of this process though? It's a leap to conclude that we're fine. Consider that we'd be placing a lot of food for fungi into the environment, in places they shouldn't be, which would likely disrupt those environments... And also, the fungi likely can't live in every place the plastic is. Deep sea, deserts, alpine, etc.

Or a corporate exploit where large businesses lobby for more regulations that small businesses can't afford to comply with.

Is there such thing as proper plastic recycling today? My understanding is that all current generation plastic recycling is basically a scam, minor pilot projects because it is so energy inefficient that you can't possibly do it at small scale, leave alone at the scale of world-wide plastic use.

Even the Petroleum Institute has admitted that previous generations of "recycling" was a scam, but swears that this time it's real, is my understanding of the situation. In fact, I seem to recall speculation that most of the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was "recycled" plastic that had been shipped from the US and Europe to China, then dumped into rivers there and ended up in the Pacific Ocean, because plastic recycling wasn't just a scam, it was actively negative for the environment.

Just to be clear, recycling is good (paper mostly works out, aluminum for sure), but plastic recycling in particular is largely a scam designed to assuage people's guilt at how much plastic they use.

Ultimately, the way to do this is to stop using it unless absolutely necessary and use other alternatives. It's like bugs where fixing the problem before the build stage is orders of magnitude easier than trying to fix the problem once it's been released.

How would you possible bury it if it's distributed throughout the environment and biosphere extremely evenly from the top of Mt. Everest to the bottom of the Mariana's trench to inside your testicles and brain?

Bury everything currently on the surface of the planet and replace it with material from underground?

We can't filter water at the scale necessary. Also, when you bury it, it's going into the water cycle unless you enclose it like a landfill. That's not realistic. It also means the plastic would need to be processed at that landfill to prevent it from eventually entering the water cycle as well (once the landfill is EOL and the lining erodes).

The earth doesn't filter the byproducts out. Burying isn't a solution. It also doesn't address the behemoth scale of plastics already in the environment which will continue to release byproducts into our water.

Totally, and I hope we care to make this happen. If we cared to, I think we could solve it much faster than 200 years. My doubt is more so about our perceived incentives and will to focus on it. We've solved some insane problems, and while I know virtually nothing about this stuff, my intuition here is that solving plastics problems is likely simpler (chemically and logistically) than, say, sending rockets to space and creating nuclear reactors. I know it's more complicated than it appears on the surface (we have heaps of plastic and its byproducts in a dozen types of forms, in all different biomes, in all stages of decay, and countless byproducts under the same conditions... On a global scale), but other problems we've solved have been multifaceted too.

Maybe what we need is a strong will to solve the problem, no lobbying to prevent the funding of the necessary research or restrictions on creation of plastics, and so on. Similar to how the space race and nuclear programs more or less got all of the money, resources, and agency required to get the job done.

It seems like the reality with plastic is we've become insanely good at making it, but nowhere near as good at dealing with its externalities. We can get better at it.

floor tiles, ceiling tiles, plaster & sheetrock

There were times when you could have been surrounded by the stuff in your own home.

It was also boxed up in pure form and sold as artificial snow.

* as topsoil/fill (graciously provided by Raybestos) when my hometown built sports fields in the 70/80s

Yeah, they have "BPA Free" polycarbonate now, since that's what was regulated. I still wouldn't use it, there's many better cheaper alternatives, unless you're just importing it without testing? At least they're labeling it as PC?!?

Mostly, don't get your polycarbonate hot.

To be clear, if you're really worried about plastic, you can't use paper or aluminum containers either since they're coated. It's glass only, but no mason jars or screw caps since those have silicone seals. Seal it with wax/cork.

Silicone is likely one of the safest, though.

No I'm blaming the decline of American Civilization on Obama, because he didn't run for a 3rd term. Easily, the best Republican candidate since Nixon.

They should have included "/s" at the end of that, to avoid confusion. It was a joke.

That video is the craziest thing I have ever seen.

You are probably correct. We just called it "trichlor."

I wouldn't call the smell "pleasant," or "mild," though...

This was 1983-1987. My first job.

> Given that autism is highly heritable, most experts are sceptical of the idea that environmental factors could drive a major increase in the numbers

But we do know that age of fathers does drive increase autism rates - thus while there is likely a genetic component, there are degradations related to age that further increase the risk: https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/risk-of-autism-spike...

> First off autism rates are provable increasing in the US.

Yes. That's what happens when you make a brand new label. (And then redefine it a few times; Asperger's used to be separate, now it's part of the spectrum. Or when we started realizing that, say, women are underdiagnosed with it and started working to address that.)

Rates of female "hysteria" are at an all-time low, for similar reasons.

> It is a proven fact that older fathers have a higher change of having offspring with autism…

Which could be just because of biological changes from their age, or environmental exposures during that time, but also could have other explanations, like autistic people having a harder time on average finding long-term partners.

Expect no improvement in the short-to-medium term.

It is also what happens when you pass dumb laws with no consideration of second order effects. If you want to ban bad plastics, mandate a safe alternative.

>audience for those products has substantially less information

I assure you, they will not do anything with the information even if they had it.

Convenience trumps every other consideration including safety.

You’d be living in the stone age if it wasn’t for that so maybe calm down.

You probably don’t need to be getting 200g of protein a day, to start with.

We're still prototyping and testing, but you'll probably have to eat it twice a day to get complete coverage. It needs to be in the gut at the same time as the plasticizer to have any effect.

Based on everything I know about the mechanism of action and the impact of dietary fiber in general on microplastic adsorption I would need to see a study with protocols and raw data published to be convinced that barley is lacking and your solution is superior but I'm open to it.

https://iadns.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fft2....

I grind hulled barley to a powder and then boil it with RO water in the microwave. Total cook time in my microwave for the ~2tbl I consume is 2 minutes and 10 seconds.

I put in a little stevia/monk fruit for taste.

Because the end result is basically a thickened drink with a rather neutral flavor I'll often throw in my 3rd shot of espresso for the day or just drink it as is while still hot.

A lot of cultures that are long lived tend to have barley based drinks but of course isolating barley's effect is a fools errand, it's just correlation at best.

I started playing with barley for a "cream of wheat" esq experience, which was actually way better than cream of wheat or oats but I found that the water absorption of barley is so high that for gastro purposes it's more consistent to add enough water that it remains a drink.

The upside bonus is that due to the mechanism of action you can start with very low volumes of barley and it doesn't give you gastro distress the way other types of fiber supplementation can, basically the soluble fiber slows down the movement of food through the intestines giving your gut more digestive time to create a homogenous, gelled slurry making the defection process closer to ideal texture.

I now also spend far less time on the toilet and it only takes 2 minutes and a single hot beverage every morning.

One other positive side effect is I've found that my overall hydration stays more consistent as well.