Cookie_Emperor t1_j6nbwof wrote on January 31, 2023 at 3:37 PM

Reply to comment by FabianRo in Researchers develop coating that prevents synthetic fabrics from shedding harmful microplastics in the wash by Ok_Champion6840

You don't usually use microplastic, you use plastic and that just breaks down over time. Just the abrasion in a washing machine is enough for that, but also basically any other mechanism that degrades the material.

Microplastic to plastic is similar to sand in comparison to solid rock.

Atlas_from_the_North t1_j6nfi4k wrote on January 31, 2023 at 4:00 PM

Still, the point is valid. We could just ... not use plastics.

Cookie_Emperor t1_j6nk4zd wrote on January 31, 2023 at 4:29 PM

I think you vastly underestimate how much plastic we use and how optimized it is.

The global production of new plastics is a few hundred million tons per year, not including textiles (elastan, nylon and anything polyester is plastic). Then we have a ton of different kinds of plastics, mixed with thousands of different other components, to get the right results. A producer of packaging machines once said their most complex machine is for wrapping cheese, as that were like 5 layers of different plastics with different functions. Masks and other PPE is also mostly just plastic, and one of the really resilient kind.

We can substitute a lot of plastic, or simply not use anything as a substitute in some cases (thinking of the image of peeled oranges in plastic containers here, thats a complete waste), but that is way harder to do than people like to think. There is another reason than just cost why we use plastics.