Fermion
Look for an expiration date. Radionucleotide style detectors end up failing with false positives when they reach end of life. You might need to have all the old ones replaced.
Harvard is a $50 Billion endowment fund that happens to run a school. So Harvard divesting from Israel affiliated investments is potentially significant.
That’s a little hyperbolic. There’s a lot of mechanics at play in generating microplastics. Fabrics have microscopically thin strands of plastics. It should be no surprise that rubbing up against thousands of tiny strands every time we move and wash synthetic fabric clothes releases many tiny particles. Plus clothes have to deal with UV degradation making the plastic more brittle.
The plastic components in an RO system should be specced to not leach plasticizers. They should have smooth walls and laminar flow. There shouldn’t be much to abrade the plastic surfaces and shed particles. They may not be perfect, but water from an RO system will have orders of magnitude fewer microplastics. So an RO system still “does something about it.”
We do need to address the problem, but I wouldn’t want people to avoid beneficial remediation just because it has some plastic components.
People have very limited bandwidth. You can only dedicate so much energy to care about things at a given moment. Bedbugs aren’t a huge threat society wide, but individually they’re devastating. So if you spend a bunch of personal energy and effort on making sure you don’t bring bed bugs into your home, what things are you not paying attention to that normally would be a big deal?
Viral outrage campaigns don’t need to be devastating on their own. Their purpose is to keep people distracted, tired, and apathetic.
The fact that you think this is an embarrassingly unsuccessful endeavor implies to me that they are doing a good job obscuring their actual objectives.