Microplastics and Migration, A Response to a question on Instagram
Someone on Instagram asked the following question, "I love what you’re doing! I just wanted to ask if your bottles have been tested for microplastic shedding or migration into water over time?" Press is full of scary articles about microplastics, so I will post my response as a blog.
Hi and thanks for digging what we are doing.
First, I'll address your questions directly, but please keep reading after.
Microplastic Shedding: Every thing that rubs up against any other thing makes particles shed. Every time you put your hand in your pocket, skin sheds from your hand and fibers shed from your clothes. When wind blows against your house, paint particles shed from the walls, and on and on. So yes, little pieces of plastic would shed when you open and close any bottle, even a metal bottle, because the metal rubs on the plastic gasket and against the metal threads. Any test that purported to show that shedding did not happen in a particular situation would be a fraud. (If people were mad at metal instead of being mad a plastic, you’d be getting inundated with propaganda about getting cadmium and lead particles in every gulp of water from a stainless steel bottle. You do, but in quantities that are far too low to matter to your health. As I say that there’s no health effect, I wonder if I’m the last reasonable person on the planet, hahaha.) All the particles in the world that are constantly shedding and going in our lungs and in our mouths, are eaten and pooped out. Super-tiny ones we pee out. Even tinier ones we breathe out. The liver and spleen filter other ones. The body has a very comprehensive plan. (I'll do a blog on this topic at some point since wellness types and environmentalists would like us to believe that we are all hypersensitive to every possible harm to the extent that everything needs to be banned now.) Any organism without a plan to deal with the relatively large quantities of non-digestible particles it has to eat in order to get nutrition would be dead, like a billion years ago, because they would not have evolved. For plastic particles, the body follows the same program it has for all undigestible particles. Here’s a great article about why they can’t mass balance all the microplastics in the gyres, spoiler, because all the animals are eating it and then pooping it out.
Migration: My resin supplier does testing on the recycled resin it produces and they are licensed to sell it as a baby bottle, which is the highest certification you can get for recycled plastic. I’ve put links to those certifications in a blog here: https://www.buoy.eco/blogs/transparency/transparency We use no additives in our manufacturing process, which makes it a real pain because recycled resin flows so poorly, which is why so few people make things from recycled plastic. Re the migration concern, the advantage to recycled resin, aside from the fact that we need to stop throwing away the matter of our whole lives several times in a year, is that if there was anything harmful to leach out, which there isn’t for food-grade plastic, it leached out into the milk or juice or horchata that it held in its first life, and is gone by the time Buoy gets it and makes a bottle for you. Looking at the molecule: The backbone of high density polyethylene (HDPE) is just carbon and hydrogen in a straight line. It's like a carbohydrate, but with no oxygen atoms. So nothing would leach from the monomer itself. Having said that, you are likely concerned about BPA. Food grade HDPE doesn’t need Bisphenol A or any of the related compounds, so they don’t add it. Even if the original manufacturer were a cartoon villain, they wouldn’t add an expensive chemical if they didn’t need to spend the money on it. (If you really want to avoid BPA or any phenol, by the way, the best thing to do is not to buy anything that smells like anything. Phenols are used in large quantities to preserve odors, which flutter away without them, so perfumes, laundry detergent, hand soap and on and on. But having said this, there is not good evidence that I’ve seen that phenols do much or anything bad to you, so I wouldn’t be all that up a tree about it unless you have a high genetic breast cancer risk.) Bottom line: Plastic is very inert. That’s why it’s used so widely in medicine and pharmaceutics, my original field. It just doesn’t react with things. If there are bad additives that are messing with the natural world, we should identify and stop using those. That’s a worthy and good activity. I wish the science and activism would focus on that instead of spreading unnecessary panic.
More than being interested in whether or not you buy a bottle, I would like for you to give me the chance to reframe the current panic over microplastics as something that is not the hazard that all the news and posts you read makes it out to be. (This is not from some virgin plastic maker with a conflict of interest but from someone who has invested tons of his own money into a company whose purpose is to take plastic out of the environment where it might turn into microplastics, which I infer that you understand from your original message.) You seem like a nice person and it’s upsetting to have nice people go around thinking that they are slowly dying from some insidious, unavoidable toxin when that’s not actually happening. I hope you’ll read my answer to concerns about microplastic from a teacher at my kids' school. The evidence cited there makes a strong case for the status of microplastics research. (Spoiler, they are mostly finding lab dust and lipids, but incorrectly tagging it as plastic contamination.) But even after reading that, you might be asking, “So if there’s not much to it, why are people saying it? It seems beyond belief that people would just make stuff up. These are scientists. Do you not believe in science?” As an engineer, I do believe in science. Here’s my stab at explaining the panic-producing dynamic that has gripped the developed world: There are NGOs and enterprises who profit like crazy from panicking everyone over the next thing that’s going to give them cancer or destroy the planet. These are generally NOT the scientists doing original research. The real scientists do research and publish their conclusions, then NGOs and enterprises who profit from panic amplify the most extreme interpretation of only those studies that find alarming trends or trends that can be made to seem alarming. In some cases, they deliberately misread things. Journalists read these amplifications and then maximize the harm even more, because it’s great click bait. No one clicks on an article saying things aren’t so bad after all.
Plastics make great panic bait because you cannot escape. Most microplastics are from tires, clothes, paint, and agricultural plastics. We quite literally cannot construct the modern world without these things. Because they can’t scare people with climate change any more (since their armageddon predictions have been failing since the 1970s and the public is finally just numb), they had to keep up their income by creating fear around something that you absolutely cannot separate yourself from. (I do believe that climate change is real, by the way. It’s just clear that it’s not going to do what the alarmists kept saying it was going to do and we need to stop giving them trillions to solve the problem and start doing something better with the money like help the developing world from starving to death.)
That’s enough from me. Thanks for getting this far. I try to make things short, but it’s complicated.
