this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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I've been reading the wikipedia article, not through all of it yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics
Some highlights:
Bottled water has much higher microplastics content than tap water.
Coral can ingest microplastics
Waste water treatment plants filter out most (but not all) microbeads into sludge. Some places use that sludge as fertilizer for farms.
Microplastics are in stuff you would not guess. Paper coffee cups have a plastic liner. Clothes put off large amounts of microplastics when washed. Tires put off microplastics. Some exfoliants and other cosmetics contain microplastics as microbeads.
wtfff
Maybe there's plastics stuck to the things we detect plastics with?
I should really give the scientist some credit, but I think this is a funnier outcome
Or there was plastic stuck to the machines used to sample and it contaminated the area during sampling. Or there was plastic in the lab during testing. Though potentially those should have been ruled out by testing a blank sample and a control sample of just the 'empty' sampling equipment.
I feel like there could be a few rational explanations to that, but I want someone smarter than me to tell me what exactly they could be...
If the sediment is <100% consolidated, then water could be carrying microplastics down through the layers, even through microscopic voids.
I'm guessing this is referring to synthetic fibers like acryllic and polyester?
Correct.
AFAIK, those 'fleece' type materials are directly made from recycled PET (like water bottles).
So about those T-shirts and hoodies prodly saying they're made from 100% recycled plastic...
"microfiber" is really terrible.
They just found it in rain so there is no escape.
Haha I drink filtered tap water. Wanna bet that the filter will put more microplastics into my drinking water?
I have 5 gallon plastic jugs of water delivered, I wonder if that's worse or better water than my potentially lead water from my faucet.