The excellent news curator site CITIZEN FREE PRESS posted a couple of links about microplastics today to news articles today: Study shows how tiny plastic particles manage to breach the blood-brain barrier (phys.org) Recycling plastics might be making things worse (phys.org)
You know what's odd about all of this? Glass bottles. What ever happened to glass bottles. As a kid I remember water coolers with 5-gallon glass bottles. Glass REALLY DOES recycle well. But we had to abandon it. Why?
Of course, you could say that glass breaks easily, but that's easily overcome. Next time you drink a Guinness beer, or see someone drinking a Guinness out of the bottle -- try to break the bottle. Let them finish consuming the beer first, no need to start trouble. Guinness bottles are (heat) shrink wrapped in plastic. Because of the tight plastic on the outside of the bottle, it prevents vibrations from causing the glass to break (by removing constructive interference) or "destructive" *literally* in the case of the bottle.
I had one at a party and people couldn't break it, even by throwing it on the sidewalk! Of course it *eventually* broke, but you get the point. It was insanely hard to break and people were lining up to throw it. Great entertainment for drunk people.
As a society, we went away from something that was truly environmentally friendly (glass), to something that was not (plastic). All for the environment...? 🤔
You know what's odd about all of this? Glass bottles. What ever happened to glass bottles. As a kid I remember water coolers with 5-gallon glass bottles. Glass REALLY DOES recycle well. But we had to abandon it. Why?
Of course, you could say that glass breaks easily, but that's easily overcome. Next time you drink a Guinness beer, or see someone drinking a Guinness out of the bottle -- try to break the bottle. Let them finish consuming the beer first, no need to start trouble. Guinness bottles are (heat) shrink wrapped in plastic. Because of the tight plastic on the outside of the bottle, it prevents vibrations from causing the glass to break (by removing constructive interference) or "destructive" *literally* in the case of the bottle.
I had one at a party and people couldn't break it, even by throwing it on the sidewalk! Of course it *eventually* broke, but you get the point. It was insanely hard to break and people were lining up to throw it. Great entertainment for drunk people.
As a society, we went away from something that was truly environmentally friendly (glass), to something that was not (plastic). All for the environment...? 🤔
I am reminded of the first discovery of microplastics in human blood and feces: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/24/microplastics-found-in-human-blood-for-first-time. Suddenly noted two years after the first time people were given mask mandates. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9055833/