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TIL boiling water can remove microplastics
(pubs.acs.org)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Let's say it this way:
Microplastics in your body are bad, so if you know how to reduce your intake, you know how to be healthy longer, which allows you to keep fighting the good fight for the environment longer. Would be a shame if you die of cancer due to plastics while some oil baron stays healthy due to only drinking tea.
You should care about this, you don't have to choose between your/human health and the environment when deciding on what to care for. Nobody only cares about humans, but saying "Microplastics can be removed (for human consumption) by boiling" is still good news to most people.
Is there anything saying microplastics are bad? I mean we and everything is full of them. What about food the food we eat is full of it so seems like a waste.
In some studies Mircroplastics seem to be linked to skin cancer. And while no food will truly be 100% free of it, I believe like toxins, they build up each level of the food chain (Bio-accumulation). So eating big carnivorous fish like Tuna may be less healthy than beef which is less healthy than a vegan diet, but most research on Bio accumulation seems to be focused on marine life.
Don't get me wrong, I do find this information interesting. It's still just about as useful as eating a huge bucket of greasy fried chicken and then chasing it down with a Diet Coke, and thinking you're accomplishing something.
The chicken, and any other foods you eat, still have microplastics in it. Unless you treat all the water, not just for yourself, but for the foods we grow to eat too. Not very feasible when you think of the bigger picture.
They also say microplastics are even found in the clouds. Clouds are basically just saturated humidity, aka water in the air. There's pretty much no such thing as air with 0% humidity, so you're literally breathing in trace amounts of microplastics, right this moment, while you're reading my comment.
And where are you gonna store the boiled water anyways? I don't know of anyone that keeps glass bottles around these days. I guess you could put it in a metal thermos, soldered together with lead based solder..
If I spent every day freaking out about every little thing I can do to try to extend my life by 6 months or whatever, I'd end up dying of a heart attack.
If people really wanna put a serious dent in the microplastic problem, they need to focus way more on removing all the macroplastics from the oceans and the environment. Boiling a pot of water every now and then ain't doing much of shit.
A wise man once told me that perfect is the enemy of good.
Boil your water if it's worth the effort for you. Otherwise don't. For many of us, it's a small effort for small gains.
Ugh.