Chapter 1: What are microplastics and how do they affect our health?
So microplastics, I mean, we're all familiar with plastic. You know, if you take a look in your refrigerator or your pantry, I mean, almost everything is packaged in some kind of plastic container. Plastic breaks down over time, right? So things that can accelerate that breakdown would be like heat, exposure to oxygen.
And so that breakdown sheds plastic particles into whatever is being contained in that plastic container. Food, beverages, whatever. So microplastics, they sort of vary in size anywhere between 5... microns or micromillimeters to 100 nanometers in size. And when they're like five micromillimeters, that's like something that would be equivalent to a size of like a grain of rice. You can see it.
When you get down to the 100 nanometer range, I mean, that's like a thousand times smaller than a grain of rice. So you're not going to see it, right? And that's Honestly, those are actually technically nanoplastics, but we all just kind of call them microplastics just for simplicity.
And these microplastics are getting into food as we consume whatever food they're contained in, whether it's a beverage or, you know, disposable food. Your...
digesting it and they can be absorbed right now not all of them are absorbed i think i think you know it's there's some studies saying that we we basically consume anywhere between um you know hundreds to thousands of particles a day so how much of that we absorb not all of it you know fraction of it but it's a lot of particles that we're absorbing every day and um
You know, these microplastics are in our water, so water is contaminated with them. If you think about water treatment plants, you know, wastewater treatment plants are treating the water for pathogens, right? Viruses, bacteria. They're not treating them for plastics that are getting into the water.
And our water sources are contaminated for a variety of reasons, not to mention if you're, you know, turning on your faucet and getting water through the sink, Oftentimes, the water is transported through these pipes that are made of, you know, PVC, which breaks down. There's plastic in that and it breaks down over time and sheds microplastic into your water. So water is another source.
Of course, if you're drinking bottled water out of plastic bottles. That's another added source of microplastics as well. And so microplastics themselves are, there's a growing body of evidence in terms of what they're doing to human health. And we can talk about that. But there's also chemicals that are associated with them, right?
How, like just how prevalent are these things? Like how difficult is it to avoid microplastics? Yeah.
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Chapter 2: How prevalent are microplastics in our environment?
So the company, I can't remember. I have to look at my phone. But the company that I was going with are they store the water, the water stored in stainless steel instead of plastic like jugs.
Oh, so you're getting it delivered. You're not getting it.
No, no, no, no. What I mean is like, like the, so the housing, the tubes, and then like, you know, they have, there's like the storage containers that are like part of the system.
Okay. Right. I don't know exactly how they're remapping the whole house to have no plastic in the pipes.
Um, no, no, no, no. It's just the, just the filtration. That's well, actually, I mean, in a way it's just that what's coming through my showers, what's going to come through.
Because the filtration is going to be close to the last point.
Exactly.
Right. Understood. Understood. Well, Ben will be listening. So I'm sure he'll, he'll, he'll tell me whether or not.
Well, the one thing to consider with reverse osmosis filtration is it does. So the great thing about reverse osmosis is it filters out not only microplastics, but it filters out nanoplastics. It filters out really, really, really tiny, tiny, particles and chemicals, including trace elements and minerals and things that we need.
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