And that by chewing it you are ingesting a bunch of microplastics? Please confirm if this is true. I don’t want to believe.
Side question: what alternative means is there for sustained, minty fresh breath that does not involve ingesting microplastics? (Mints don’t work that great imo, the freshness wears off too fast. Gum was my go-to. Now what is left?)
Yeah, 637 chunks under 50 um, assuming that’s a particle count, isn’t very much at all.
Unfortunately, that’s not true of pretty much anything. Mineral dust, microplastics, insect parts, dead fecal coliforms… Earth is a chaotic place; unless you work in semiconductors, nothing is truly clean (and if you do, you know it’s still mostly an aspiration). For food handling purposes, the requirement is that the amount of contamination is far, far smaller than you’ll ever notice, and everything harmful is dead.
Like, in chemistry, I’m pretty sure you never get a 100% pure reagent, right?
Somewhere else in this thread, I bring up plastic utensils. You know how stuff wears down after a lot of use? Yeah, that’s because every contact with something basically knocks off a layer of material. Usually we act like that material just vanishes, but of course it doesn’t. A good chunk of all microplastic out there is actually tire rubber from roadways.
Of course, factories use plastics as well, and the places where the raw ingredients come from have exposure to plastics, and it’s all transported along those road networks.
We made a material that ~never biologically breaks down. That makes it great for long-lasting packaging, infrastructure and tools, but it’s also going to be circulating around the environment forever. As a chemist, you know it’s kind of been a big deal and helped a lot of things. Hopefully it’s too too bad for us, because going back would hurt, and it wouldn’t clean up what’s already out there.