Okay - newsflash. Microplastics are everywhere already. In the water you drink from tap. In the wild caught (or farmed) fish you eat. Soon we’ll be told they are also present in the fruits and vegetables we eat, maybe even in milk and eggs! Pretty sure meat and chicken already contain them to varying degrees.
So yeah, sure, there are microplastics in drinks in glass bottles. But to say they contain “more” microplastics than plastic containers sounds like the BS concocted by packaging lobby.
Here’s a fun fact: did you know that a good RO system can filter out most microplastics from the tap water, but it also releases some (of its own) into the filtered water! We really dug ourselves into a big hole by using plastics for just about everything.
The comforts of modern life will take a very significant hit if we really want to undo our polluting way of life. It can be done, but many people will vote with their wallets to keep those comforts as long as possible, and companies will fight to earn that profit as long as they can.
I think nothing short of a global catastrophe will change people's minds.
Or a really solid better-in-every-way yet ecologically sound alternative. Then again, the battle is not on one turf - we need alternatives for a whole host of plastics and synthetic plastic like compounds (nylon, rayon, Teflon and friends…). Think PVC pipes, the rubbery insulation on wires, tires (which can have nylon and other synthetic materials other than rubber), high quality ropes/harnesses, nets, clothing of-course - the list is endless and each use case is unique.
So what we might see is - an early adoption in some industries and use-cases and a slower adoption in others while better materials are invented/discovered.
On a brighter note, with all the kick-ass compute we’ll have in triple digit billion dollar AI facilities, that opens up scope for new discoveries in science. Hopefully, accelerating its pace.
We can buy ourselves a huge amount of time if we just stopped letting countries dump metric millions of tonnes of plastic into bodies of water for them to be endlessly ground-down into micro-sizes. As it is now, we're watching like deer in headlights, as the third-world pollutes the entire world with plastic.
Micro-plastics and forever chemicals will be this century's Lead.
I wouldn’t specifically criticize the third world for this issue. It’s a problem we’re all contributing to in different ways. Also, let’s not forget that a lot of first world waste gets shipped off to the third world for “recycling”, some of which inevitably ends up in the waterways and into the ocean.
For instance, one of my favorite pens is from a Japanese company that has consistently resisted making it reusable. Therefore, Japan, known for its cleanliness, indirectly contributes to a significant portion of avoidable waste. Of course, North America has its own equivalent, such as Bic pens. Not to mention the vast amount of wasteful toys. The third world, on the other hand, faces a slightly different challenge, primarily centered around plastic bags, bottles and containers.
On a slight tangent, maybe the real problem is consumption. But good luck taking that up with pro-capitalists!
Japan is huge on plastic. It's shocking for many people when they arrive here. It's absolutely wild the amount of plastic that is used and how little effort there is to reduce its use.
I've seen blocks of land covered in weed mat after a demolition was performed and before the next build or sale of the land...it's then just disposed of...
In the countryside in Japan, plastic burning is still fairly common. Civil engineers just bury those 1 ton bags in roadside and riverside embankments full of soil...if that embankment is ever ripped up again, the soil is going to be full of fragments of those bags, either way they’re shedding into waterways starting from now.
Yes Japan incinerates a lot of plastic but there is only one incinerator which does C02 capture at the moment. I honestly think the average person in Japan sees it like it's just organic material. Interestingly, it’s a lot of work as a consumer to constantly sort it, clean it and dispose of it to code.
Well, it's not a catastrophe until it affects you. It needs to severely hit a critical mass of the population in developed countries; and by that time it may be too late.
Anything less than critical mass can be swept under the rug by governments until your term is over.
It's not usually an option, whether to have a government or not. And when it's deliberate, the motivation is invariably protection from somebody else's government.
Im sure the concentration of microplastics is going to go up. Right now we’re talking just about microplastics but soon we’ll see stats showing how steady it’s accumulating everywhere.
You bet - I’m sure it’s the only fool proof way to get rid of all microplastics. Cumbersome though. But realistically, I no longer think they can be avoided. Probably already lodged all the way up in my brain waiting to cause some nuisance as I get older :-/
Our best hope is nanotechnology and bots or maybe even bioengineered cells or microorganisms that can get in there and eat them or at least reroute them out of the human body through natural pathways.
Home distillation probably only works if you have all copper plumbing instead of the PVC or PEX plumbing that a lot of homes have. But copper plumbing is probanly going to leach various metals into the water.
No? Your plumbing shouldn’t matter if you’re distilling the water.
Some volatiles are going to come through (which can be mostly mitigated with an activated charcoal filter at some point in the process), but you’re vaporizing the water and condensing it back into a liquid, leaving behind stuff like metal and microplastics.
Sure, but unless you're distilling the water at point of use, you'll have plumbing to distribute it. The typical setup is to have a distillation plant, some storage for the water and then plumbing to distribute it. Anything else quickly becomes infeasible.
Natural rubber is also plastic. We tend not to call naturally occurring polymers "plastics", but natural rubber is usually vulcanized, so it is not that natural.
Natural rubber from tires is a significant source of microplastics (along with the other polymers the tire is made of)
I'm pretty sure tires are mostly synthetic at this point. I wonder if the natural rubber has a different safety profile than the synthetic, if it is more biodegradable, etc. Even traditional chewing gum fits the definition of plastic, but somehow it feels like it would be safer to use than modern synthetic plastic chewing gum. No idea if that's true
I kind of feel there'd be a difference between vulcanised tire rubber and my drink stopper, but I guess there might not be. Also, tires grating on road is probably a bit different a wear profile. Clearly someone needs to test microplastic shredding in container rubber.
Oh well, at least they have some in that design with cork tipped plugs. It's a bit harder to find though.
Even if cork is used, the adhesives it needs to stay in place can also be plastic, and shed microplastics.
We better evolve to tolerate some level of microplastics because they're not going away any time soon. It's mind boggling how many microplastics sources are in modern civilization, and how hard it would be to eliminate say half of them.
Does cork need adhesive to stay in place? I'm not doubting you, just had never heard that before. I thought the cork had enough friction with the glass on its own.
Not sure for all cork material but the one for wine bottle are saturated with glue (I’m taking about the « natural » one, not the fake plastic).
You can do the experiment at home but there’s many videos online: place the cork plug on a plate and put in inside your microwave for a couple of seconds. The glue melt.
You're talking about those ones made of glued-together cork chips, right? They're only vaguely natural, and it wouldn't surprise me to find out they're shedding all sorts of who-knows-what. I've not tried melting one in the microwave, but ewww. I think I'd rather buy wine with a metal cap - the supposed "breathability" of a cork only matters (to the extent it does matter) for wine that will age a long time, which isn't anything I do.
It would surprise me to find out that the traditional, straight-from-the-tree kind need adhesive to stay in the bottles. I mean corks have been used to stop bottles for hundreds (thousands?) of years; surely they didn't use glue all that long ago?
I suppose - to supply a speculative counter-argument myself - it may be more profitable to cut the natural corks X% smaller, and counteract the mechanical deficit with glue. (That's, uh, kinda typical of the world we live in.)
I’m French and never saw the metal cap but surely it seems perfect for the non aging one. However tradition plays a big role - even if there’s better modern caps.
Regarding the pre modern chemical techniques: not an expert but it seems people used to drink younger wine back then, and used wooden barrels or clay amphora for the older times. For in between times (and the amphora) solid cork as you mentioned seem very plausible.
Considering the material deficit: consider that when you do the microwave cam cooking, the cap double in size and don’t fall down in many small parts. It’s so big it’s basically impossible to put it back inside the bootle. My 2 cents hypothesis is they use glue to use more cork and have a better sealing, enhancing the conservation.
How about steel/aluminum caps or some other alloys? No need to go as far as using cork for everything though cork has its uses and its not dirt cheap. Ive seen wine bottles with rubber cork immittion. Not sure but could contain microplastics too.
No worries, it came as a suprise to me also .. makes sense when you think about a simple industrial process with a hopper full of bottle caps rubbing against each other, creating a cloud of particles and washing that down toward the capping station and into the bottles as they are capped.
Not sure we can conclude much there tbh, their own numbers and the numbers in other studies they mention show truly enormous ranges for their rather small sample sizes. Plus, if they're right and the contamination is mostly coming from cap damage, it'd vary immensely by the kind (and treatment) of the cap and luck on how much damage it got, and not the kind of bottle, even if they do currently correlate.
So a useful study to say "stop painting the insides of caps, duh" but it hardly seems like anything intrinsic to the container. And hard to extrapolate to other areas which may not paint their caps, or anything that uses corks.
I don't think they're painting the insides, it sounds like the bottling machine has a hopper full of caps, and they rattle around in production and chip microscopic bits of paint off and those stick to the insides and everywhere, until washed off by the booze.
Ah, yep, you're correct - I was misinterpreting the pictures in the paper. On rereading, they seem pretty clear about it being paint on the outside that somehow gets on the inner surface.
Though also:
>The results show that glass containers were more contaminated than other packaging for all beverages except wine, because wine bottles were closed with cork stoppers rather than metal caps.
So yeah. Cap differences, probably for fashion more than function, which are probably easily remedied.
This is a great finding by a public health organization which will result in simple changes in industry that benefit everybody. For us believers in government it's important to highlight public wins amid all the cynicism.
To be fair, I think almost every article that mentions microplastics mean nanoplastics. Microplastics seem to be defined in the milimetre range, so they should be well visible.
The paper mentions in multiple places, including the abstract, that the cause of higher microplastics readings was likely from the bottle caps, given that the found microplastics matched the color and composition of the paint on the bottle caps.
And? The glass has nothing to do with it. It's all about the bottle caps which can be made of plutonium for all I know. It's misleading to suggest that it has anything to do with the glass.
However, it is about bottle caps that are designed to go exclusively on glass bottles. I guess the headline could have read “Bottled drinks with caps that are designed to go on glass bottles ... ” That doesn’t seem like it would be misleading; it would also be less ambiguous than “bottle caps” which could suggest any cap to any bottle. (And it would be a rather obtuse way to phrase it.)
Regardless, the headline seems to be literally accurate. Microplastics are indeed found in larger quantities in glass-bottled drinks than in plastic-bottled drinks. Those microplastics in glass-bottled drinks come from the paint on the designed-for-glass-bottles bottle cap.
So yeah, sure, there are microplastics in drinks in glass bottles. But to say they contain “more” microplastics than plastic containers sounds like the BS concocted by packaging lobby.
Here’s a fun fact: did you know that a good RO system can filter out most microplastics from the tap water, but it also releases some (of its own) into the filtered water! We really dug ourselves into a big hole by using plastics for just about everything.