Nah, because every future generation will have it too.
Yeah and also for Gen X, Gen Z, Gen Alpha. We all still alive and everybody gets microplastic in their balls and brains. Its for all ages
why the alpabet suddenly changes after Z? it should either be “omega & alpha” or “z & a”
Same reason we started with X, millennials actually got a name, and then went back to Z. Somebody with a head full of lead came up with it.
They’re just place holders until the generation gets a shared experience to refer to. Millennials saw the millennium. Boomers were products of the baby boom but they also saw their economy boom. Gen X are missing, their letter was fitting.
My prediction is one of them will become gen algorithm, as they never knew a time when their media wasn’t decided for them. Maybe, gen android, few of them know how to use a file system after Chromebooks became ubiquitous. Or they’ll be the second greatest generation due to ww3. This stuff is entirely unpredictable.
What name does GenZ get? Born just in time to be power users, born too late to have any power to stop the enshitification. Same non-existent economic prospects as GenX.
They really aren’t power users though. Tech is a) generally more reliable and b) so locked-down that so many young people never learned how to troubleshoot
Honestly I don’t think we’re socially responsible enough to end something like lead poisoning these days.
for the past few months ive started to think we’re like a couple years away from putting lead back in the gasoline
Trump deregulating gas and paint to put lead back in both would be so unsurprising it won’t even garner a reaction from me.
I’m all with you. But it feels like they did already.
Imagine trying to stop the hole in the ozone today. We’d have people spraying CFCs in the air just to spite the effort.
As someone just old enough to remember, we did have that with CFCs. Might not have been super mainstream, and nobody who would have done it out of spite really had the disposable income to actually do it.
I grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian “cult” and I remember the adults around me “joking” about it all the time. I remember a Missionary to northern Canada visiting our church (in rural America) to try to raise support talking about the temperatures and joking that it’s so cold that he wanted to stand outside with an aerosol can in each hand to try to bring on some global warming, and that getting a laugh from the congregation. You might think that maybe it was a “harmless” joke that maybe as a child I didn’t pick up on the sarcasm, but there were absolutely adults there who fully believed that there was nothing humans could do to damage the earth, because God takes care of it. “And how dare the government and these evolutionists try to tell us how to live.”
Someone will call not wanting lead poisoning woke and that will be that.
Millennials? More like GenX. We’ve been eating out of microwaved tupperware since the sixties.
So have the millennials who were breast fed.
And formula fed
Mmmm, tasty math.
The worst part: postpartum women have lower levels of microplastics than other adults.
So you’re saying the baby took some of the plastic out of them, that’s horribly depressing at least they got 10 to 15 point IQ boost in return
Might be that. Although your body goes into absolute overdrive during pregnancy, and it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that some of the immune system reactions that kick in manage to eject some level of plastic microparticulates
Seems Like something people should be definitely looking into to find out why, with the state of science in America It’s probably not going to be here
Most likely its the same reason blood donation lowers microplastic levels in blood. Production of new cells that aren’t tainted with it. A woman’s blood volume increases by 40% during pregnancy. Of course ill freely admit thats just a hypothesis and you’re probably right, there would be benefit into studying it.
I’ve thought more about it. I bet there’s fucking loads in the placenta.
It looks like the cumulative total of plastics produced by the 80’s was around 2-3 trillion tons, whereas now it’s probably more like 20-30T.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/global-plastics-production.png
This one’s gonna last a few (the final few?) generations.
Microplastics cause neurological damage and anti social violent behavior?
We don’t know about the longer term consequences yet, just like we didn’t about lead.
Not saying it’s a definite but I wouldn’t be surprised.
No, people knew lead was poisonous even back near Roman days. Though just like how humans constantly do stupid things for some benefit, they kept using it as a sweetener for ages.
Also mercury in relation to, “as mad as a hatter”. It’s just mercury was very good for the job.
To play devil’s advocate, we always knew lead was toxic, but we didn’t know the only healthy dose was 0
But we know plastic is inert and we knew about lead.
plastic is inert
wat? In no way is it inert.
My non-professional guess is that microplastics will eventually sterilize us by disrupting our sperm’s ability to function properly. Only the wealthy can afford the medical procedures to bypass this.
It’ll end up blocking vital neurotransmitters leaving us zombified and giving us an insatiable craving for brains
Maybe kids will need to be carefully sheltered from plastics until they are old enough to freeze their sperm.
this reads like the next step is to force them to freeze theirs
'Twould be sweet irony and a blessing for the earth.
Although the best method for removing it I’ve found is donating plasma (PFAs down 30% in 6 months of regular donation, the hope is nanoplastics are also removed…) so it might be the poors (in USA) and generous that get to have kids, so that’s nice…
I don’t think the impacts of microplastics are quite as catastrophic, they can’t be or we would already know.
Which isn’t to say they aren’t bad just damn lead is realllly bad.
The concentration of them is rising exponentially, that’s the part that terrifies me.
It’s possible we just haven’t crossed a threshold yet.
We are just beginning to understand how much the chemical Imbalances that lead to depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders originate in the digestive tract and how microplastics from food may disrupt the processing of these chemicals.
Pffft! … at least microplastics take decades or a lifetime of accumulation to affect your body, mind and health
Social media rots your brain and mental capacity in a matter of years or months
I wonder what our neurosises will be.
Depression, I would say. Same as how boomers are labeled as uncaring and sociopathic because of lead.
I think it’s more physiological. Since microplastics are ingested maybe it’s related to the rise in oral and rectal cancers.
Yeah, but the nanoplastics get past the BBB (Blood Brain Barrier), what’s it, a plastic spoon in every human brain? Enough for some psych effects I guess. Oh, there’s 27 million tonnes of nanoplastics spread across just the top layer of the temperate to subtropical North Atlantic
Shit’s pervasive and in your brain.
I’m crazy. Mark My Words. In 20 years, we’ll have so many microbes capable of consuming plastic people will be bitching about their packages not being able to effectively protect their goods from spoiling. The goldfish has spoken.
I’ve run across at least three separate articles now of researchers from across the world discovering plastic eating bacteria in the wild. Short plastic. Its days are numbered.
Bold of you to think that the microplastic is going to go away after one generation…
And the person responsible for both issues is the same dude Roy J. Plunkett
Freon too?! Some people really want to watch the world burn.
and teflon. don’t forget about teflon.
Eliminating lead products has been a lot more feasible than the impossible task of eliminating microplastics. They are in everything. So unfortunately Gen Z and onward will suffer with us millennials.
The pipes in the US still contain plenty of lead. Also, Covid brain damage. Tons of it.
Don’t forget about PFAS!
What’s next ? Latent radioactive dust ?
