On a related note, for those who don’t listen to Le Show…
https://harryshearer.com/le-show-archive-search/?date=Search+by+Date&keyword=Microplastics
“Anyway, dear, when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, the daddy puts a seed in the mommy’s tummy … and nine months later, the mommy gives birth to Barbie!”
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Yeah, this is something I think about a lot, lately. Plastic is such a new material, and this kind of ubiquity is even more recent, but we’ve also built everything around it - manufacturing, shipping, construction. And some of the uses aren’t easily replaced - all the food (and medicine, etc.) packaging that hugely extends its shelf-life, making it cheaper (or even possible to sell at all), for example. Consumer goods (and their packaging) are really the tip of the iceberg, and while much of the rest of it is replaceable with other materials - at least in theory - there are significant costs to doing so (and not just financial, but environmental, etc.).
That’s sort of the key problem, isn’t it - plastic, by its nature, doesn’t lend itself to reuse; it’s disposable, and that’s the point. You can’t recycle it - either at all, or if you can, not in cost effective ways - and you can’t sterilize it easily/at all. (It’s soft enough that normal use creates nicks and scratches that trap contaminants - which is why plastic food cutting boards are a bad idea, they’re bacterial nightmares. Also certain chemical contaminants can cling to plastic.) Plus, the very usage of plastic at all creates microplastic pollution. If you want to be able to reuse something, you make it out of glass, ceramic, metal… but then those have limits to their uses.
The irony is that a common replacement for certain uses of plastic is paper products made water resistant with… PFAs. PFAs being toxic “forever chemicals” that are also now ubiquitous in our environment.
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Every Lego is sacred,
Every Lego is great!
If a Lego is wasted,
God gets quite irate!
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They’re painful enough when you just step on them…
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The p(lastic) is stored in the balls.
Really is a shock for me, previously under the impression that stuff had to be broken down to the molecular level to get into the blood, not to mention become a byproduct of semen production. Haven’t been this shocked since i found out that cesium-137 practically didn’t exist anywhere until after WWII, whereby it immediately became present everywhere.
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I’m fairly convinced that this accounts for a large part of why my biologically male offspring and all his peers seems to have some sort of hormonal imbalance judging from their secondary sex characteristics and gender expression. I had to remember that they grew up with water that came from PETE bottles. When I was growing up, orange juice came from glass bottles, and our water came from the tap. Now every food product is packaged in plastic.
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Yeah, they’ve known about the sex development impact of endocrine disrupting chemicals leaching out of plastic (and found in water supplies from other sources) for even longer. There have been moves away from using (some of) those chemicals in the plastic, but it’s looking like that was just rearranging the Titanic deck chairs…
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If there was only one reason for plastic to exist, Lego would be it.
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What kind of container were the samples, er, collected in? Plastic, perhaps?
If it’s in testes, it’s reasonable it’s in semen and not a testing artifact.
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now, cue the people trying to link xenoestrogen microplastics in foetal brain tissue with LGBTQ+ people. 
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I wrote a piece on this a couple of years ago. Here’s an excerpt.
“If the plastic breaks down it doesn’t go away. It turns into microparticles, which can now be found in the ocean’s deepest trenches, the highest mountain lakes, in fish, in salt, and in you. We’re all being slowly plastinated.”
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I mean, here’s hoping it’s all rhodium with coking on it (ka-ching, but nobody use that vacuum in the house ok?), but maybe you should get some air filters run and sent to a testing lab?
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I was so thrilled today to see a Batelle / ORNL / U. KY / U S. FL Orlando (So, USF Orlando somehow,) study (and patent assigned to Batelle, the operators of ORNL ) for recyclable rubber. But of course what has to be made for distribution to not be plastinating us (not counting new metabolism that eats plastic but doesn’t ruin more lives instead,) would be some biodegradable monomers or such in there (leaving mere melanin-sized flakes in us that maybe we can deal with, ideally? [Lysosome - ER - ribosome - whatever: “Oh, is this graphene ribbon? I know this!” LErw sciences it into lethicin or the latest health monopeptide using a laggy VR GUI; very impressive for a phase coagulation entity.])
Not sure what’s cooking as far as having a drama where a public health official is designing this study and maybe, [stares into distance] what we need is the sampling power of WonderLush! [supercut of WonderLush accessories.] [Later, during Reviewer 3’s inquest of Mennonite and LDS semen test samples…]
Mood: Meet-cute where the guy’s still cumming, but has to explain it’s front matter, retail banding, shipping materials, distribution compliance filings, and the water-resistant return envelope.
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You make it sound like The God Whale (c) 1974, T J Bass.
But that’s what it is getting like.
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That this accounts for what now? You know trans, non-binary, and intersex people occur as a natural part of human variation, assuming that’s what you’re talking about?
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