Even before you get to microplastics. You find a couple of sea creatures strangled by the things washed up on the beach and the you start to hate plastic bags.
Six pack rings are even worse. We need to work on banning those.
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Ugh…don’t get me started on those.
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Regular ear cleaning helps avoid this. You are at risk if you go A LONG time without cleaning, or washing the insides of your ears.
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Not according to my doctor. Follow your own doctor’s advice instead of mine, of course.
I agree with everything you just said, but we won’t have a food chain at all unless we devote most of our efforts toward carbon.
Something like 10% of plastic gets recycled. The answer to that problem is to stop buying the stuff, and to make the manufacturers take some responsibility. One can not absolve oneself after buying plastic by recycling it. So little of if gets recycled that it almost doesn’t matter.
Most people have a certain bandwidth available for conservation. Some people just think it doesn’t matter how much plastic they buy because they recycle. Even worse, after doing that good deed, they’re likely to feel they have don their duty and stop there.
By all means, keep recycling. I do. I just know that it is not the answer to the problem. Not even close. Don’t buy in the first place, Reduce, and Reuse. Recycle is a last resort.
Cotton bags need to be used 130 times to have the same carbon footprint as using “single use” plastic bags, whereas plastic reusable bags need only to be used 11 times. If you can do that, more power to you.
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In my post “So little of if gets recycled that it almost doesn’t matter.” should be: So little of the plastic we recycle actually gets recycled and repurposed that it almost doesn’t matter.
I call it Wishcycling
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Plastic swabs are evil b/c many reasons.
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Thing is it’s a little more complicated than that.
There are 2 types of genetically determined ear wax. With the dry kind of wax that’s most likely to become compacted or cause issues being most common among Asian and Native American people.
Which is why you see so many ear cleaning tools out of Asia, while the west just grabs a Q-tip.
The don’t clean it advice is based on the assumption of white earwax in white ears. And it’s mostly to avoid compacted wax or damage to the ear drum from doing it improperly.
Growing up my pediatrician was Cambodian, and rather than telling us not to clean our ears he taught us the right way to do it. And advised that doing it wrong would cause an issue, but so would not doing it at all.
Besides it doesn’t really mesh with basic personal hygeine. It might be medically perfectly OK to have ear wax visible at all times, and smearing on your head phones. But that shit is gross.
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I don’t think the advice is to not clean it, it’s more steering people toward peroxide drops and flushing and such, rather than jamming things back into their heads.
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The stock stock idea is more along the lines of don’t, and ears are self cleaning so it’s unnecessary. If you have a problem let the doctor handle it. Which doesn’t work for everyone, and kind of doesn’t account for any totally safe grossness.
Flushing liquids into your ears can cause issues as well, including infections. And drops are not neccisarily for routine hygeine. As I understand it this is more what the doctor does or advises to deal with a problem. I’ve been warned not to go the flushing route as I’ve always been prone to ear infections and swimmers ear.
Which is not to say a Q-tip is the right approach for everyone what has to clean their ears. Or the “correct” tool for the job. Just that cleaning your ears is perfectly OK, neccisary for a lot of folks, and a Q-tip is fine if you use it properly and safely. One of the major reasons to advise against it is kids puncturing their ear drums by shoving things way too deep into their ears.
There’s a world of difference between the tip of a tool visiting the exact part of your ear that in ear ear buds do, and some one swabbing in the actual ear canal.
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can you spell the name of this item out in the romanji for me please @Davet ?
They are called mimikaki (耳かき) or quite simply ear picks. You can get them from Amazon in a wide variety of configurations.
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It exists. This pick is of Marley’s Monsters Toilet Unpaper, but that’s only one of several brands (and of course the Etsy folks make a lot of it)
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