Every generation alive has microplastics in them
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
575 points (96.9% liked)
Showerthoughts
36051 readers
620 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
and probably will for at least a few generations unless we can do some major filtering of all mediums
And literally nothing came of it, this whole thing is fear mongering and political theater.
Can someone tell me what microplastics do to the body? I’m almost too afraid to ask at this point.
That's the neat thing: nobody can. It's incredibly hard to devise a study that can show anything about it. There is no way to get a human without microplastics in them to get a control group, and by this point as far as I know there is no plausible theory to get a specific study.
Everyone kinda suspects that it can't be good for you, simultaneously there is zero actual evidence that something is ever happening. We don't know, and that's very frustrating.
It seems like they'd be fairly inert. Although that's certainly no guarantee that they're not really bad for you. Much like inert gas, the danger could well be them replacing or getting in the way of something else.
Veritasium has a video about it on YouTube.
It’s very informative and may just give you the fix you’re looking for
IIRC the one thing we are sure of is that they don't break down, nor do they get out. So you better hope they don't do anything bad on top of that
Probably do the same thing most of the junk humans dump into the environment. Reduce average lifespan, cause diseases and reduced fertility.
Don't forget the nanoplastics! These are even more hazardous!
Bah. I dont care about lead, microplastics or even covid.
Chernobyl and mad cow-disease are my jam.
I still licked lead pain in the craddle, ate too many food preservatives and artificial colorants, ate too much red meat, too much fat, got micro plastics poisoning...
And all I have to tell is bad breath, flatulence that could strip paint off the walls and a stupid sense of humour.
Millennials? More like GenX. We’ve been eating out of microwaved tupperware since the sixties.
So have the millennials who were breast fed.
And formula fed
Mmmm, tasty math.
load more comments
(8 replies)
It looks like the cumulative total of plastics produced by the 80's was around 2-3 ~~trillion~~ billion tons, whereas now it's probably more like 20-30B.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/global-plastics-production.png
Yeah and also for Gen X, Gen Z, Gen Alpha. We all still alive and everybody gets microplastic in their balls and brains. Its for all ages
load more comments
(21 replies)
Honestly I don't think we're socially responsible enough to end something like lead poisoning these days.
You'd have people saying they like the lead and deliberately putting more of it in. Pussy-ass liberals trying to take their god given lead away...
Imagine trying to stop the hole in the ozone today. We'd have people spraying CFCs in the air just to spite the effort.
As someone just old enough to remember, we did have that with CFCs. Might not have been super mainstream, and nobody who would have done it out of spite really had the disposable income to actually do it.
I grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian "cult" and I remember the adults around me "joking" about it all the time. I remember a Missionary to northern Canada visiting our church (in rural America) to try to raise support talking about the temperatures and joking that it's so cold that he wanted to stand outside with an aerosol can in each hand to try to bring on some global warming, and that getting a laugh from the congregation. You might think that maybe it was a "harmless" joke that maybe as a child I didn't pick up on the sarcasm, but there were absolutely adults there who fully believed that there was nothing humans could do to damage the earth, because God takes care of it. "And how dare the government and these evolutionists try to tell us how to live."
for the past few months ive started to think we're like a couple years away from putting lead back in the gasoline
Trump deregulating gas and paint to put lead back in both would be so unsurprising it won't even garner a reaction from me.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Someone will call not wanting lead poisoning woke and that will be that.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Nah, because every future generation will have it too.
Bold of you to think that the microplastic is going to go away after one generation...
load more comments
(3 replies)
The pipes in the US still contain plenty of lead. Also, Covid brain damage. Tons of it.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Except that microplastics have been a major problematic thing since basically plastic become a popular thing, we just didn't know it yet back then. It's not like millenials invented plastic or popularized its use.
The amount of it in our environment has been ever increasing though. There's more of it in the oceans, the soil, the rivers, the plants. The whole food chain and ecosystems are contaminated more than ever before.
At what point does it become macroplastic? kiloplastic for the Europeans.
Microplastics cause neurological damage and anti social violent behavior?
We don't know about the longer term consequences yet, just like we didn't about lead.
Not saying it's a definite but I wouldn't be surprised.
No, people knew lead was poisonous even back near Roman days. Though just like how humans constantly do stupid things for some benefit, they kept using it as a sweetener for ages.
Also mercury in relation to, "as mad as a hatter". It's just mercury was very good for the job.
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(9 replies)
I wonder what our neurosises will be.
Depression, I would say. Same as how boomers are labeled as uncaring and sociopathic because of lead.
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Everyone has microplastics, even newborn babies, and we have no sign of decrease in its use.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I'm crazy. Mark My Words. In 20 years, we'll have so many microbes capable of consuming plastic people will be bitching about their packages not being able to effectively protect their goods from spoiling. The goldfish has spoken.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Don't forget about PFAS!
Luckily, for the younger generations, we'll probably just get cancer instead of becoming massive malleable assholes
view more: next ›