I am busy and don’t have time to research all of the ways corporations have poisoned us.
What are some good rules on how to avoid microplastics?
Eat local foods? Avoid processed foods? Walk/bike? Use dry soaps? Don’t use any take away containers? Avoid walking near busy roads? Use cotton/wool for all clothing?
Don’t cook with Teflon or otherwise coated pans. Stainless steel, carbon steel or cast iron (can be enameled).
Short term: grow your own food.
long term: politics
The micro plastics are in the soil. If you live urban or suburban, your soil is likely more contaminated with micro plastics than food grown on a rural farm.
Can’t wait for the Water World future, these bags of dirt are gonna be worth a fortune.
The plastic particles are small enough to enter the cells of your body. No filter can let dirt through and block micro plastics.
I’ve found bits of plastic trash in almost all of the potting soil I’ve bought. I’m at the point where I think a heavily filtered hydroponic setup is one of the only ways to really minimize microplastics.
I’m going to take a different approach than most of the other comments here: you can’t. Microplastics are in the air and a large chunk of it comes from car tire residue. You’re breathing it, likely right now. Research is still in the early phases and we just don’t know how bad it is yet, both from the proliferation and the impact side of things.
Source is Breaking the Plastic Wave and Overview on the occurrence of microplastics in air.
Afaik it tends to concentrate further up the foodchain, so keeping meat, especially fish, out of your diet will help. Particularly filter feeders like shrimp and anything that eats those.
I’d also like to add that wrapping food in plastic reduces waste considerably, so you might want to look into that and balance your view against that.
It’s better to look into it yourself, as I’m not knowledgeable on the topic.
Afaik a significant portion of all food is wasted by supermarkets, restaurants, and at home. Wrapping it in a thin foil keeps it fresh and extends shelf life considerably. So it’s important to weigh all these things in order to find what’s best environmentally.
Further, it might be the type of plastic that’s safer for food and is trivial to recycle. It’s also very thin and soft and so that might require a lot less resources to produce compared to harder and thicker plastics. For example a plastic bottle might contain more plastic than say the wrapping of 100s of paprika’s. Just pulling those nrs from the air but it’s just to give a rough idea.
Become a communist and start advocating for workers to run the economy because we wouldn’t fuck ourselves over like capitalists will.
