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Can't you just… not use microplastic?

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Future headline. Coating meant to protect from micro plastics sheds and damages DNA.

Unless this coating is cheap, nontoxic, and biodegradable, it's just kicking the can further down the road, really

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.

Future future headline: Scientists create new synthetic spray to protect customers from dangerous synthetic coating meant to contain micro plastics in fabric

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

Future headline: We spent so much time obsessing about micro plastics and plastic straws, we didn't focus enough on the most important issue at hand, which was reducing CO2 in the atmosphere. Now we have a runaway greenhouse effect and mass extinction around the globe.

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.

Stop using synthetic fabrics. Start using more cotton, wool, alpaca hair, bamboo, etc

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future newsline: Coating adheres to human skin and sometimes into the stomach liner preventing it from absorbing nutrients

SO much easier to just wear cotton, hemp, bamboo, banana leaf textiles.

Coating found to cause massive reproduction failures in fish: Fish stocks collapse. Billions may starve

Hemp is a great material for fabrics and had been cultivated extensively in the US back to Colonial times

Nano coating, thought to protect from micro plastics, gone viral, more at 10.