<
https://www.wired.com/story/for-the-love-of-god-stop-microwaving-plastic/>
"At the start of his third year of graduate school, Kazi Albab Hussain became a
father. As a new dad and a PhD student studying environmental nanotechnology,
plastic was on his mind. The year before, scientists had discovered that
plastic baby bottles shed millions of particles into formula, which infants end
up swallowing (while also sucking on plastic bottle nipples). “At that time,”
Hussain says, “I was purchasing many baby foods, and I was seeing that, even in
baby foods, there are a lot of plastics.”
Hussain wanted to know how much was being released from the kinds of containers
he’d been buying. So he went to the grocery store, picked up some baby food,
and brought the empty containers back to his lab at the University of
Nebraska—Lincoln. In a study published in June in
Environmental Science &
Technology, Hussain and his colleagues reported that, when microwaved, these
containers released millions of bits of plastic, called microplastics, and even
tinier nanoplastics.
Plastics are complex cocktails of long chains of carbon, called polymers, mixed
in with chemical additives, small molecules that help mold the polymers into
their final shape and imbue them with resistance to oxidation, UV exposure, and
other wear and tear. Microwaving delivers a double whammy: heat and hydrolysis,
a chemical reaction through which bonds are broken by water molecules. All of
these can cause a container to crack and shed tiny bits of itself as
microplastics, nanoplastics, and leachates, toxic chemical components of the
plastic.
The human health effects of plastic exposure are unclear, but scientists have
suspected for years that they aren’t good. First, these particles are sneaky.
Once they enter the body they coat themselves with proteins, slipping past the
immune system incognito, “like Trojan horses,” says Trinity College Dublin
chemistry professor John Boland, who was not involved in this study.
Microplastics also collect a complex community of microbes, called the
plastisphere, and transport them into the body.
Our kidneys remove waste, placing them on the front lines of exposure to
contaminants. They are OK at filtering out the relatively larger microplastics,
so we probably excrete a lot of those. But nanoplastics are small enough to
slip across cell membranes and “make their way to places they shouldn’t,”
Boland says.
“Microplastics are like plastic roughage: They get in, and they get expelled,”
he adds. “But it’s quite likely that nanoplastics can be very toxic.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
