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A comment on Microplastics found in multiple human organ tissues correlated with lesions. Parent comment

Re:Microplastics found in multiple human organ tissues corre... by bamboozled on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @07:20AM (#42558294)
It also seems basically impossible to fix too. Once we've reached the point of no return (probably there now), that's it, we're done.
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Re:Microplastics found in multiple human organ tissues corre... by vouaobrasil on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @07:30AM (#42558320)
Yeah, probably.
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Re:Microplastics found in multiple human organ tissues corre... by Aromasin on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @08:57AM (#42558722)
Arguably the plastics break down until they become basic short polymers that exist in everything though no? At some point they progress from micro-plastics to non-harmful substances. So having a break point where we stop producing plastics would mean that we stop adding then to the environment whilst allowing the eventual half-life of the material to take its course (granted that's probably 10s of thousands of years from now, but with clean up operations that could be accelerated).
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Re:Microplastics found in multiple human organ tissues corre... by clark_dent on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @01:42PM (#42560787)
Well, no. Some common plastics like polycarbonate aren't biodegradable, and will basically never break down without application of significant heat/water/enzymatic activity/etc. For some of these, the half-life could be a great deal more even than 10s of millenia:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.9b06635#:~:te....

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Re:Microplastics found in multiple human organ tissues corre... by Purplehermann on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @09:52AM (#42559015)
Well no, the environment is probably easier to deal with than our bodies, and we get replaced gen by gen.
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