Have you tried to take a train in the UK?
okâŠ
Not taking unnecessary plane trips and instead traveling by train.
Not taking any plane trips.
Taking vacations locally instead of taking a plane.
See above.
Taking public transport.
Yes, and yâknow, walking.
Buying food locally that hasnât had to be shipped from around the world.
Eating Huel and local farm vegetables, Irish oats. Coffee and tea from overseas is a guilty pleasure/addiction.
Not eating BEEF.
Are you kidding? Not eating animals of any kind.
Not using plastic bags at the grocery store or any stores they go to.
No.
And more. Iâm assuming you follow all those guidelines?
Yup, since youâre asking.
Speaking of buying things used.
It sounds like you buy everything used then, in order to not subject the rest of us to its pollution? 
Yes. Insofar as itâs possible.
Awhile back I bought a washing up brush, having failed to properly clean my shaker for the first two years. I didnât want to buy a brush but eventually I noticed there was a build-up of powder at the bottom of the shaker, which I couldnât get out with my custom-made sponge-on-a-stick (pat. pending) no matter how hard I tried.
So I had thought I could do without, and I tried to, and I waited and hoped but no used brush came available. People donât tend to offer them around. I couldâve stolen one from work, but well yâknow, thatâd be wrong. So eventually I did it: bought a brand new brush for ÂŁ1. It does the job marvellously and should easily outlive me. Iâll be sure to pass it on when I go.
All of your phones, laptops/computers, computer displays, tvs, sound systems, speakers, desks, chairs, tables, dishes, silverware, refrigerators, stoves, dishwashers, all of your clothing (major environmental impact from all this cheap clothing), couches, tv stands, headphones, printers, toilets, sinks, faucets, cookware, exercise equipment, weights, backpacks, suitcases, dressers, hangers, bikes, lawnmowers, snowblowers, all replacement parts in your vehicle that youâre able to buy used for, end tables, lamps, tool boxes, tools, power tools, water heaters, furnaces, garbage cans, books (I hope you buy them all digital or at least used!), and more, you bought them all used right?
Gee thatâs a lot of stuff. I donât own most of that. But I have second-hand clothes, books, laptop, phone, knives, forks, spoons, plates, bowls, and all that gubbins. All second-hand. No car. Second-hand bike. Power tools? Thatâd be the day. Dishwasher? Blimey. 
I struggle to buy shoes and underwear second hand, so I have to bite the proverbial bullet there sometimes. I did get some of Huelâs ethical clothing at the knockdown price. Kind of against my better judgement, but there you go. Guilty.
I hope you are not using any air conditioning during warmer periods. Itâs unnecessary for most people after all, and will likely subject the rest of us to more pollution because of it (unless you happen to be in an area with true green energy).
Good God no, AC is horrible. I have a second-hand fan. Itâs nice.
I hope youâre not driving out to see movies at movie theaters.
No, all the best movies are showing at home.
Or driving out unnecessarily to eat at restaurants when you couldâve eaten at home or at least taken the bus.
Uh, no again.
Buying used is certainly something to recommend.
Right on! 
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We actually sound remarkably similar to one another in this area then
My point wasnât for you to have to literally answer about all of those, but to point out the big picture like Phil remarked about, and like you alluded to in your early posts listing all the places someone should wear a mask.
Unacceptable. If youâre not buying underwear second-hand to save the environment then all your other efforts have been all for naught, in my book. 
I agree with you there. Home viewing is the way to go.
Hm, it didnât seem that way for me when I wrote it. I think a lot of information is lost over text alone. The listing of examples in my post was for me very tongue-in-cheek and mirroring of his earlier reply to me
Sounds sensible, and probably worth wearing a mask while walking in urban areas, next to busy roads too. Plenty microparticles thrown up by vehicle tyres, to say nothing of microparticles in exhaust. Also good to wear a mask when travelling in a car, as the air inside the vehicle is often more polluted than outside. Also donât forget the microparticles constantly shed by those fleece garments we wear. Masks will maybe be wise to use there too.
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I admit the snark. 
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They are. Although the stars of them who live in my darkened basement donât appreciate my efforts to save the environment. And they need a fair bit of cajoling to put in an Oscar winning performance.
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I guess the choices we make as consumers are exactly that â personal choices. We make them based on a few different rationales - such as in a sort of ignorance is bliss and we do it because we want to, with a moderate understanding of what those decisions entail or in the full understanding of the consequences of those decisions.
In any of those regards, thereâs no right or wrong reason if itâs your choice to do it and if you can justify it to yourself adequately from your own POV. If you returned to the original point of decanting a pre-packaged food product into another container â youâd so for different reasons. The primary packaging is designed to be fit for purpose so changing that is essentially superfluous. It could be for improving aesthetics, ergonomics or the desire to limit further contamination of the food in it.
By adding this extra step into the life cycle, do you then have to consider the returns on that extra money, raw materials and energy needed to create it? Does your rationale offset that in reality? It is a literal minefield with few if any simple solutions other than those you can justify to yourself. The biggest source of micro and nano plastics in our food is, unsurprisingly, the origination of it - in farming (materials/equipment used, irrigation etc).
The second biggest source is definitely more unexpected â organic fertilisers. Seems incredibly counter intuitive, but repeated research shows it to be the case - thanks to a number of circumstances. Our most efficient water filtration systems only capture around 80% of micro plastics and literally no nano particles so itâs easy to see how that would happen.
Ultimately â the primary packaging you get your product in was designed to protect its contents through various barriers â gas, non-ionizing radiation, moisture, bacteria etc. if you decant it into something else that doesnât possess any or all of these, then you have potentially compromised the products nutritional value or shelf life. So again, the responsibility of this outcome sits squarely with the same decision maker.
I had no idea about this. Just spent 30 min looking up various articles on it. Wow. Thank you for posting!
Youâve been like Morpheus in this thread, red-pilling us all into how deep the microplastic world truly goes.
I kinda wanna take the blue pill and go back to believing that my glass & stainless steel food canisters are taking a big dent out of my (food-based) microplastic consumption lol
I would like to know how much the microplastics in the soil actually end up embedded into the edible portions of the crops themselves. I saw data on how microplastics affect the soil and the way some of the plants grew.
Is there any good news you can tell us about microplastics?
Do you have a prophecy of The One ultimate solution that will help us achieve final victory this fight against microplastics?
I need something to believe in. To fight for.
âNew evidence that suggest that microplastics wonât be that harmful to us after all
âSome type of medication or treatment like chelation therapy that removes plastics from our bodies and can just be included like a daily multivitamin, with no adverse side effects lol
âNanobots that can hunt down the microplastics & nanoplastics including the ones in our bodies, and transport it to a safe location? (without harming humans/animals/plants, without harming the environment, without causing any unexpected consequences, without being weaponized, without being shut down due to conspiracy theories, and without ending up like the G.O.R.T. nanomachines that nearly destroyed the Earth from the âThe Day the Earth Stood Stillâ 2008)
âGenetic adaptations in human beings to where microplastics & nanoplastics can no longer harm us in any way, or better yet we can now properly digest & subsist entirely on microplastics & nanoplastics and we learn to enjoy a new diet of pure plastic? (if you canât beat em, join em)
âA benevolent superpowered alien with a passion for the environment, like Captain Planet, comes to wipe out all the plastics using magical powers? (Hey itâs possible! 
âAny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.â --Arthur C. Clarke)
âA collective Ascension to a higher plane of existence beyond the physical universe, like in Stargate, where we no longer need physical matter and we leave it all behind?
Thereâs gotta be some kind of way to clean up this mess, right?
Tell us some good news!
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A plant root can easily absorb any solid particle 0.04ÎŒm or less but can go as high as 0.1um. In that respect, its barriers appear to be at similar levels to human skin. Transpiration pull is the force which then aids in drawing the water (and anything in it) upward from roots to leaves.
Solids can stay suspended in water up to 100 ”m with water filters able to catch most of that but anything single digit in size is passing straight through. Nanoplastics are any particle smaller than 1Όm so go unfiltered. While difficult to detect, researchers have observed this by using luminescent particles so they can be tracked passing through the plants.
If only we could summon the alien. 
But we can be the alien!. Do it ourselves, and this is the easiest solution of all possible remedies. We make the plastics. We can stop making them. We can begin today, right now if we want to.
Of course there will be enormous consequences. It will be a cost/benefit decision. But easy to do. Just say no. Quit.
Back to The Middle Ages!. I wouldnât mind, thoâ there will presumably have to be a big population adjustment as we adapt to a whole new (aka old) way of life⊠so it wonât be pretty.
On a cheerful note the other species of animal life will benefit if there are fewer of us to go around, so thatâll make it all worthwhile. Itâll be the End Of the Plague (of humans).
Would miss having Huel for breakfast, but you canât have it all.
Thanks for the A.C. Clarke quote, always a tonic. 
ChatGPT was trained on Phil Câs knowledge.
Are you aware of actual measurements of microplastics found within the edible portion of crops?
It would be nice to know an actual figure and how it compares to microplastics measured in food stored in plastic food containers at room temp & microwaved.
" They then followed FDA guidelines to simulate three everyday scenarios using all three containers: storing food at room temperature, storing it in the refrigerator, and leaving it out in a hot room. They also microwaved the two polypropylene jars containers for three minutes on high. Then, for each container, they freeze-dried the remaining liquid and extracted the particles left behind.
For both kinds of fluids and polypropylene containers, the most microplastics and nanoplasticsâup to 4.2 million and 1.2 billion particles per square centimeter of plastic, respectivelyâwere shed during microwaving, relative to the other storage conditions they tested.
In general, they found that hotter storage temperatures cause more plastic particles to leak into food. For example, one polypropylene container released over 400,000 more microplastics per square centimeter after being left in a hot room than after being stored in a refrigerator (which still caused nearly 50,000 microplastics and 11.5 million nanoplastics per square centimeter to shed into the stored fluid). âI got terrified seeing the amount of microplastics under the microscope,â Hussain says."
https://www.wired.com/story/for-the-love-of-god-stop-microwaving-plastic/
I agree with this! More people need to be onboard.
It would be nice if there were a replacement material discovered/invented that wasnât harmful in the way that plastic is. So we could have our cake and eat it too.
Sounding an awful lot like Klaatu lol (the alien played by Keanu Reeves in the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still)
Glad someone liked it! 
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I would imagine there are way too many variables and variations for anyone to consistently say what that is TBH.
There are 58,502 waste water treatment plants registered in operation globally (obviously maybe many more) and each WWTP is estimated to release >300 million (so >15 trillion globally) plastic debris particles into nearby watercourses every day that were too small to be filtered, so you can imagine â there is a lot entering arable soil due to irrigation and fertilising.
If there arenât any clear numbers on how many microplastics end up in the edible portions of our food through the farming process itself, how can we say that it is greater than the ~450,000 microplastics per square centimeter (many millions of microplastics in total, and many billions of nanoplastics in total) that can be shed into food from merely storing food in plastic containers in a hot room?
I figured since you described the farming process as the biggest source of microplastics in our food that you had numbers that showed that.
Iâd like to see estimates of the actual count, and I hope information like this is making its way to lawmakers/policy-makers so they can put better regulations into place, and perhaps one day better filters into place, to mitigate this.
I guess it depends on what food, where grown, how fertilised, etc.
This may be interesting:
How microplastics are infiltrating the food you eat - BBC Future
You are quoting an article from Wired that itself misquoted a study on baby feeding bottles - using a variety of water temperatures, sterilization chemicals and repeated use over a 21 day period on a single type of plastic. While that test gave definitive particle counts in isolation â it isnât indicative of everyday usage of food containers in the broader term so you cannot use it as such. In the same way, one test on one plant at one time and location cannot speak to the global total as there are far more variables in nature than on one controlled test in a laboratory.
That was an excellent article. Very informative.
Thank you for sharing.
I liked this part of it which helped put things in context.
âPlastic fragments appear to accumulate most in the roots of plants, which is particularly problematic for tuber and root vegetablesâ
This is good to know 
â âOur research shows that we are ingesting microplastics at the levels consistent with harmful effects on cells, which are in many cases the initiating event for health effects,â says Evangelos Danopoulos, lead author of the study and a researcher at Hull York Medical School. "
Concerning, and all the more reason imo to reduce microplastic consumption in any way possible including by removing plastic food containers.