Researchers may have found an effective, green way to remove microplastics from our water using readily available plant materials. Their device was found to capture up to 99.9% of a wide variety of microplastics known to pose a health risk to humans.
As always with most things in our capitalist society, it’s better for shareholders if general population injests microplastics than for them to spend money on products to prevent it. Capitalism only spends money on things that bring profit, not to make a world a better place. If while making that profit the world becomes a better place, that’s a marketing win.
If this can be commercialized into an at-home filter that’s easy to install and use, you can absolutely bet that this would be advertised to hell and back and make a fuckton of money from people convinced of the absolute need to filter out microplastics.
Of course, no direct adverse health effects have ever been proved from them, but wouldn’t you pay $30 for a filter, just in case? I guarantee you millions of people would.
The shareholders don’t want you to become living plastic; they want you to buy shit, and this is a very obvious product that would make a lot of money.
Microplastics and other pollutants from plastics production are endocrine disruptors This is believed to affect your metabolism, body temperature, fertility, thyroid and immune system. Co-pollutants from plastic exposure such as heavy metals have extensive and well known health effects. PVC (found in residential plumbing and consumer goods such as vinyl records) are notoriously toxic and off gas for years, releasing several potent carcinogens and heavy metals into the environment. Source 1 source 2
Microplastics, and several types of plastics in general, are well understood to have significant health effects.
AFAIK we know microplastics weaken our immune system fairly confidently.
There are some established effects, and none of them are good - to be very clear - but my general understanding is that the effects don’t seem to be super super significant, though there’s a lot we don’t know. I’d certainly support efforts to reduce and eliminate them from the environment, including drinking water, but I think the amount of paranoia and fear (that will absolutely be exploited by corporations) is probably a bit overblown. If there were obvious and clear direct health risks, I imagine we’d have noticed them by now, though again, there’s a lot we don’t know.
To put it another way, is the risk so great that I think every family should spend $30 on a filter every few months? Probably not, but I know plenty of companies will cheerfully sell you them anyway just to make people feel better about it.
In retrospect I think I was thinking of PFAS. I’m not sure if that’s technically a microplastic or not. Anyway; I would imagine intaking chemicals that your body is unable to remove effectively is probably bad no matter what it is. As bad as mercury or lead ? Probably not. I guess the question to find out is what thresholds of microplastic content correlate to how much negative health outcomes.
And yeah, the irony of the same corpos that poisoned the worlds water supply with microplastics wanting to sell you a microplastic filter wrapped in plastic container isn’t lost on me and most definitely will happen.