California Votes To Ban Microbeads 247
New submitter Kristine Lofgren writes: The California Assembly just passed a vote to ban toxic microbeads, the tiny flecks found in toothpastes and exfoliants. Microbeads cause a range of problems, from clogging waterways to getting stuck in gums. The ban would be the strictest of its kind in the nation. As the article notes, the California Senate would need to pass a bill as well, for this ban to take effect, and if that happens, the resulting prohibition will come into place in 2020. From the article: Last year, Illinois became the first state in the U.S. to pass a ban on the usage of microbeads in cosmetics, approving a law that will go into effect in 2018, and earlier this year two congressmen introduced a bipartisan bill to outlaw the use of microbeads nationwide. And for exceptionally good reason; the beads, which serve as exfoliants and colorants are a massive source of water pollution, with scientists estimating that 471 million plastic microbeads are released into San Francisco Bay alone every single day.
471 million? You may want to think about that. (Score:5, Informative)
471 million potatos is a lot of potatos. .2mm bits of plastic is enough to cover in plastic all of the living rooms in California.
471 million
Wait - no - one living room. Or about a dinner-plates worth a day.
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471 million potatos is a lot of potatos. .2mm bits of plastic is enough to cover in plastic all of the living rooms in California.
471 million
Wait - no - one living room. Or about a dinner-plates worth a day.
If the beads are 0.2mm in diameter then, by my maths, that comes to about 1 (one) (US) gallon of them. Did someone leave off some zeros?
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Every day. That's the difference.
Even assuming that it's a dinner plate sized amount of pollution, over two decades, you are looking at 7300 dinner plates. Only, broken into little chunks, easily consumed by aquatic life and smothering plants, clogging pipes etc.
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To be fair, I suspect the number in the article is off by several orders of magnitudes (low).
I should really check the original article.
Poisoning fish? (Score:2)
Are the fish capable of digesting plastic? One would think that it would just pass through. It's hard to know whether or not to take the matter seriously, as (sadly) the average environmentalist has no idea what the definition of toxic is. One would think that if there were some interesting data the article would at least link it.
Re:Poisoning fish? (Score:5, Informative)
It gets stuck in some species guts, and some smaller invertebrates guts dramatically reducing their ability to feed.
It is an actual problem.
Another major issue is the beads attract pollutants onto their surfaces. These are then efficiently transferred into whatever ingests them.
There is very little reason to be using plastic microbeads, rather than - for example - wood.
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Your second point seems a tad weak as before being stuck on the bead, said pollutants are floating freely in the water the organisms large and small breath.
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Your second point seems a tad weak as before being stuck on the bead, said pollutants are floating freely in the water the organisms large and small breath.
Who says they are "floating freely in the water"? These beads will soak up oils that normally float on top of the water, and carry it down into the water to life that otherwise does not come in contact with those oils.
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http://randiragan.com/wp-conte... [randiragan.com]
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From my experience, when those details are left out its often due to
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Yeah, I can go googling around and try to find out....but maybe I got other things to google tonight.)
while you are busy "googling" you might try reading the ingredients list on your hand lotion
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Do you mean that you don't have a sufficiently vested interest to do the research that the articles author should have fucking done in the first place?
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one way is it suffocates them by sticking in the gills
toxic microbeads? (Score:2)
The article doesn't support the statement that the microbeads are toxic.
Is there any information that the microbeads are actually toxic?
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The article doesn't support the statement that the microbeads are toxic.
Is there any information that the microbeads are actually toxic?
True story. Had a friend in college who would tell you any chance he got to stay away from microbeads, they were the worst thing ever invented, Satan's gift to mankind, etc.
Seems he'd gotten a handjob from a girl who used microbead-laced lotion and it burned the hell out of his junk.
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It turns out that when you take materials that are usually not a problem, and change their surface chemistry, they can become problems. Take carbon, for example. Pencil "lead" is graphite. Not a problem. OTOH, take a look at a bottle of graphite lock lube. It's the same element, in a fine powder form. There are all kinds of warnings on it because it can get into your lungs.
IANAChemist but I think a real chemist would agree that surface chemistry is an exciting new field, and we don't know enough about
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yes yes ... but it says "exceptionally good reason" ... there must be harm ... exceptionally serious harm ... right?
Re: Meh... (Score:2)
Maybe they are broken down into something nasty by oceanic zooplankton? I know some small fish eat them, and achieve no nutritional value of them, expending energy to catch up with them in water and therefore starving as a result.
I also read an article about a company experimenting with the idea of using microbeads to lower the caloric levels of food, ba
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Sounds like someone needs to produce a line of McMicroBead burger, with extra PE.
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They're not toxic really to anything, not even zooplankton. The biggest problem comes from the stuff lower in the foodchain that can eat it and block up their digestive system, or collect in there causing the creature in question to starve to death.
One of the big problems with sewage plants is there is a capacity limit to them, and when they hit capacity they dump directly into rivers/oceans/etc. That most happens in places where waste water and sewage are still on one system aka most of the world and the
Re: Meh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Although the beads aren't toxic, they can and do adsorb hydrophilic pollutants such as PCBs and other oily pollutants such as dioxins. Normally these chemicals settle out into the lake/river bottoms (or evaporate from the surface), but when they attach to microbeads, which being small and similar density to water, they can stay dispersed in the water. Small creatures eat the beads and the PCBs or whatever enter the animals flesh through the gut, and it is supposed that predatory fish at the top of the food chain will have higher levels of the pollutants due to bioamplification in the same fashion that mercury is found in higher levels in top of the food chain oceanic predatory fish.
PCBs and dioxins in the food are bad news for humans in even very tiny quantities.
However, although they are finding and counting the beads in fish, I have not seen anyone doing measurements of captured fish to see to what degree fish are capturing pollutants.
OTOH, it doesn't make sense to wait until things get really bad to decide to solve the problem. Once these beads get into lakes and rivers, there's no way to get them out.
Re: Meh... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, sewage treatment systems have a lot of trouble (at present, let's just simply say "can't") filtering them out. They go into the sewage, they will go into the sea.
Setting up filters for particles as small as 1 micron for all sewage going out into the ocean is obviously going to be a massive expensive. Who wants to pay for that so that people can keep sticking bits of plastic in cosmetics?
Seriously, whose bright idea was it to make bits of plastic, bite-size for plankton, looking like fish eggs, whose very design intent is to wash out into the ocean? And no, while they're not harmful to us, they absolutely will be to plankton - if not immediately [slashdot.org] (how healthy do you think you'd be if you wolfed down an entire meal-sized chunk of plastic?), then with time. Plastics act as chelators for heavy metals [plosone.org] and a number of organic poisons, to such a degree that they might even be economical to mine [dailykos.com]. There's simply no way that this isn't going to have an impact.
And it's so stupid when one can just use soluble crystals (salts, sugars, etc) instead of plastic.
Re:Meh... (Score:4, Informative)
The problem isn't necessarily the beads or whether or not they're toxic (though obviously, if they're made of a toxic material and being ingested that's a big problem).
What's of concern is that it could potentially contribute, in a huge way, to a problem referred to as "plastic soup," a conglomeration of plastics from various sources, microbeads, regular trash being dumped at sea and so on. This isn't a small problem, either. The largest of "patches" of plastic debris could potentially be twice as big as the entire landmass of the U.S. as you can see here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The exact size of the patch is hard to estimate for another reason, a lot of these plastics are _extremely_ difficult to see, particles that are essentially suspended just below the surface of the water. There are a lot of big, solid items in these patches that can be identified, but it's the former "soup" of plastic particles that's the real issue...they're hard to identify, they're hard to clean up and in the case of microbeads, they're hard to filter out of the water supply. Considering they offer little to no benefit in any of their commercial applications that I can see, I'm wondering why they haven't been banned already. I could easily see these cosmetic companies producing a fine-grained sand from any tropical beach and calling that "all natural microdermabrasion," it'd do less harm and people would probably buy the hell out of the stuff.
RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
It's a little more than that. Studies have shown toxic pollutants bind to microbeads. Other studies have shown fish are eating the microbeads and absorbing the toxins. Humans eat fish. Microbeads are poisoning our food supply, and a number of governments are sponsoring studies to learn more about their impact.
Here's another article:
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/environmentalists-drawing-a-bead-on-microplastics [ottawacitizen.com]
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Humans today have a quite high level of plastic in their blood, which, according to studies of fish, strongly reduces fertility. (for reference, see Plastic Planet).
Re: RTFA (Score:2)
There is no actual evidence of harm anywhere, or even of increased uptake of pollutants by humans.
Re: RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
They're small enough that they don't steal to the top in any meaningful time, and aren't attracted to any floculants. There is currently no good approach to treating them in sewage beyond hoping UV will break them down. Hope is not a plan.
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the guy is telling you why.
your inability to grasp it from your lack of knowledge of WTP is your problem.
you learned some terms, but you've never learned how to design one, and what or how stuff is permitted through.
Re: RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
A medical centrifuge accelerates this process dramatically....
really? how long will it take you to filter sewage with a medical centrifuge?
And if not, then we need to look at other means of processing the water. Possibly some sort of industrial centrifuge would be a good idea?
Why why why does every single municipal sewage treatment plant on the entire planet need a massive upgrade because there are people out there who cannot stand the concept of having dead skin cells on their faces?
Re: RTFA (Score:4, Interesting)
A medical centrifuge accelerates this process dramatically....
really? how long will it take you to filter sewage with a medical centrifuge?
And if not, then we need to look at other means of processing the water. Possibly some sort of industrial centrifuge would be a good idea?
Why why why does every single municipal sewage treatment plant on the entire planet need a massive upgrade because there are people out there who cannot stand the concept of having dead skin cells on their faces?
you shouldn't even need microbeads for facial skin exfoliation, acid masks are $15 for a bottle that lasts for like, a year. the acid dissolves the glue holding the dead layer of skin on, and then it slowly falls off. No exfoliation needed, just 5-10 minutes of applying the mask then rinse off.*
*I am a man. I looked into this as a means of regrowing/replacing skin that was damaged from acne when I was much much younger, so young in fact that I came up with my silly username
Re: RTFA (Score:2)
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because there are people who cannot stand the concept of paying a tiny fraction more
really? have you priced makeup products in the drugstore? the prices are outrageous. Anyone who is paying $15 for a tiny bottle of soap will also pay $16 or $17 without batting an eyelash
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I don't know how much energy that would gobble.
You're an idiot. ;)
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Did I suggest that or are you a halfwit?
I have been pretty clear from my FIRST post that I don't really care.
Ban the fucking beads. I don't care.
Did that process in your little brain? How many times do I have to say that for you morons to grasp that?
Okay, so you righteous chewing out concluded, my point is that if these beads are making it through and they have a lower density... why are they getting through the settling tanks? Am saying "if this is a problem, we probably have OTHER problems that we don't even know about." Thus shouldn't we just make the treatment process better? Not because of these beads... because again... ban them... I do not care... but rather this should be a wake up call that the treatment facilities need to be improved.
Do you understand NOW? Or are you just that stupid? :)
And I love that you suggested that I suggested that we use a medical centrifuge to clean sewage. I did no such thing. I was pointing out that they would absolutely sort by density. that is all. I also pointed out that maybe we could use an INDUSTRIAL centrifuge to further filter water.
So run the water through the settling tanks to remove most of the particulates. Then power up a giant centrifuge to filter the product of the tanks.
Maybe that isn't practical. I don't know how much energy that would gobble. But that was the closest I got to that idea. I at no point suggested we use tiny medical centrifuges to process municipal levels of sewage.
You're an idiot. ;)
You are being down-voted because you are acting like a child, or perhaps you are a child. If you do a quick search online you'll find plenty of resources about the question you have. I've given you a link to an article and the relevant portions of the article below. It took me 1 minute to find this. If you want to participate in a discussion you should consider doing some research before spouting, "why why why." Only kids should be allowed to do that.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/tiny-plastic-microbeads-pi
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If there is any turbulence or convection in the water, there is nothing to say that they will ever sort.
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They're so small and light that their denisty doesnt really come into play, even in the settling tanks. the lightest of currents can keep them from settling out. the part of the WTP most likely to catch them is the filtration.
the biggest problem is significant amounts manage to still make it through the plant and into wildlife, where they are small enough to collect in tissue and fuck em up.
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Well again, yes it will sort out if you give it enough time. The question is how long does it take?
again is there some special reason why we need to spend billions and billions to upgrade our sewage treatment plants to accomodate the idiots out there who are too lazy or stupid to use a proper washcloth to wash their faces?
Re:Meh... (Score:5, Informative)
However, I am questioning the quality of your water treatment process if this is actually a problem.
Have you ever heard of "Ocean Spray"? They grow lots and lots of cranberries. The crush the cranberries to make juice. They flush the dead cranberry skins down the drain. The local sewage treatment plant has terrible issues because the massive amount of cranberry residue screws with the chemical processes in the sewage treatment plant so that none of the sewage gets treated properly.
The moral of the story is that sewage treatment plants are designed to handle the standard sewage that we all dump down the drain and they are not prepared to handle stuff that is not expected.
Maybe YOU are willing to put up with a big increase in your local taxes to pay for the extra equipment needed?
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Frankly, I think it is weird that they're even throwing it out.
So they decided to plead guilty to 21 misdemeanor criminal charges and pay a $400,000 fine instead of finding a use for it. If there was a use for it they could have avoided all of that.
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What I am saying is that if that is getting through the system there are probably a lot of other things in there that you don't even know exist. A better system would not only deal with this bead issue which is irrelevant to me. But it would also deal with a wide variety of other contaminants that you don't even know are in there.
Consider further we're looking increasingly to closed loop sewage treatment facilities that output water INTO your tap directly from the sewage treatment facility. They're already strongly considering that in California.
My point is that the stupid beads don't matter and what this really indicates is that the water treatment systems needs to be upgraded.
There are a lot of things that we DO know about. Prescription drugs for the most part are not filtered out in sewage treatment plants.
Some like birth control pills are actually in high enough doses that they are starting to affect the wildlife. I agree that the sewage
treatment plants need to be upgraded and a closed loop via distilation or reverse osmosis would be expensive but might be the best
way to make sure 100% of the bad stuff doesn't make it out.
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I agree that the sewage
treatment plants need to be upgraded and a closed loop via distilation or reverse osmosis would be expensive but might be the best
way to make sure 100% of the bad stuff doesn't make it out.
Maybe you can try going to poor towns in West Virginia and tell them that they have to spend millions of dollars on new sewage treatment plants because of toothpaste and skin soap.
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Maybe you can try going to poor towns in West Virginia and tell them that they have to spend millions of dollars on new sewage treatment plants because of toothpaste and skin soap.
Lay off the appeal to the poor and other forms of appeal to emotion and look at your question again.
Then, consider that the article itself argues how California (due to its economy's size) banning this particular product (which article claims is being used because it is cheaper) will FORCE the industry to stop using it altogether.
Meaning that instead of "poow witwe tows iw Wewst Wiwviwia" (Isn't appeal to emotion retarded?) it will affect the economy of the ENTIRE USA and thus indirectly the world - becaus
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for someone who doesnt care, you sure do argue a lot while sticking to and defending the same points of ignorance.
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However, I am questioning the quality of your water treatment process if this is actually a problem.
"Quality" and "design cases" are two very different things. Water treatment processes need to be carefully designed for the exact things that get flushed into them. A lot of assumptions are made for local municipal waste streams, and you often see advertisements taking care of the rest (i.e. don't flush cooking oil down the sink). Hence you end up with interesting cases like refinery waste water treatment plants producing water so clean you can drink it despite having inputs of arsenic, mercury and all the
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Re:Meh... (Score:4, Insightful)
I dare you to tell us the cost of fitting tanks and skimmers into every sewer in California. Or every other body of water it flows into .. like apparently 471 million plastic microbeads are released into San Francisco Bay alone every single day.
Filtering the inputs to San Francisco Bay would be ridiculously expensive. Outlawing this plastic crap makes far more sense.
What you describe is theoretically possible, but utterly absurd in reality.
It's not a nothing issue. It's huge amount of crap dumped into waterways which acts like silt, doesn't break down, and otherwise serves to give people whiter teeth (or whatever the hell it's used for).
California has decided that's a dumb idea.
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I don't care
Yeah that's why you have taken the time to write so many posts
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Oh, my, but I bet you'd squeal like a pig.
You're a whiny little punk with nothing intelligent to say.
But, hey, you can tell all the other whiny little punks at your playdate tomorrow how tough you were on the intertubes.
I'm sure your mom will be impressed.
Childish little asshole.
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I can't imagine it is really a big water treatment issue since they have a different density than water and you could separate them with settling tanks and skimmers.
Separating really small objects of almost the same density as water (0.91â"0.96 g/cm3 - they are made from polyethylene) is not easy, and the fact is that they pass through all existing water treatment works. Plastics are in fact a serious environmental issue, 1) since they often leak hormone-like chemicals, and 2) because plastic objects are mostly not broken down into their chemical constituents, but instead break up to form very small plastic splinters and fibres. These are now found everywhere in o
Cyanide is a natural material too... (Score:2)
Sand is a natural material, and the environment already knows how to deal with it.
Every time you get the urge to say "it's natural so it is OK" - REMEMBER CYANIDE.
Or Ebola. Or AIDS. Cancer too...
All perfectly natural.
Just like sulfuric acid - which is used to unclog pipes once they accumulate too much sand.
Or even "apricot shells and cocoa beans" suggested by the idiotic article.
Both of which soak up water, sink to the bottom and clog up pipes - calling for more perfectly natural chemicals to poured down the drain more often.
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then the fish are eating them and then you'll be eating it.
Do you eat fish guts ?
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Do you eat fish guts ?
Not only do lots of people eat the guts of small fishes every day, but fish sauce is made by putting whole fishes into pots and letting them ferment. There's lots of people eating fish guts. Also, fish guts normally don't just get thrown away, they get made into fish meal which is then used for food production. Also, guts don't just sit there, they digest stuff. That includes pulling toxins attached to the beads into the blood stream of the fish. Lots of toxins are bioaccumulative. All this stuff is Junior
Re:Meh... (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly I'm surprised that they were legal in the first place, but if there wasn't an explicit law against them then I guess the companies that have manufactured and used them were free to do so regardless of any perceived morality on the matter.
Re:Meh... (Score:5, Informative)
it's a little different. The microbeads bind to organic pollutants that were already in the water. Animals that eat the beads absorb the pollutants from every bead that passes through their system. The pollutants then move up the foodchain after leaving the beads behind in feces. Even small to medium sized fish are found to have 10-20 beads in their digestive tract at any given time.
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Even small to medium sized fish are found to have 10-20 beads in their digestive tract at any given time.
Which is a remarkably underwhelming number.
Not if he's talking about all fish everywhere. That's probably like... thousands of beads total.
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Which is a remarkably underwhelming number.
Really! How many proportionately sized particles (say matchhead sized) in your own gut at any time would also be underwhelming?
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How many proportionately sized particles (say matchhead sized) in your own gut at any time would also be underwhelming?
10-20. It's probably TMI, but I have more than that in my gut right now.
My simple solution (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why I eat only organisms without a digestive tract.
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Tell me... how's that sucrose crystal diet working out for you?
Re: Meh... (Score:2)
I think most large companies just voluntarily quit putting these into things. I used to use a few products that used them which eventually disappeared from the shelves. I even remember the big name corporations that own the subsidiaries that make up most of the market in these sectors announcing the voluntary phase out. So is this new law even necessary?
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This isn't the first time that I've seen mention of this. If I'm remembering previous articles correctly, these beads are ending up being consumed by very small sea creatures, who cannot process them, who then are eaten by bigger sea creatures, who also cannot process them, etc, until they build up in large concentrations toward the top of the foodchain to poison those alpha predators. There's concern for humans that eat those largest animals too.
Honestly I'm surprised that they were legal in the first place, but if there wasn't an explicit law against them then I guess the companies that have manufactured and used them were free to do so regardless of any perceived morality on the matter.
I'm kinda disappointed, the Crest 3D toothpaste in the blue tube was the first one that actually manages to maintain teeth whiteness for me
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depends on the type of plastic and whether or not a given plastic can be digested by microorganisms.
Microbeads are mostly made out of PE for example which isn't readily biodegradable under many circumstances. However, there are some species of bacteria that can digest it.
The issue is less the beads than what they're made out of and what sort of treatment the water goes through
If the sewage treatment process is letting microbeads in any great quantity into the rivers or ocean then I have to ask what else are
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My understanding of the process is
wrong
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Re: Meh... (Score:2)
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I'm aware that there are places that make potable water from effluent, but no major city does that with all their sewage, or even most of their sewage.
Then how do cities like New Orleans do it? The get at least some of their water from the Mississippi, and there's a lot of waste added to that along the way.
Dallas pulls from the Trinity River (less now than when it was founded, at least percentage-wise). It does pump the water into some city resevoirs, which are then used as settling tanks. The only problem with that is White Rock Lake needed millions of dollars of dredging, as the lake became more and more shallow. Though that wasn't the Trinity. Th
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You explicitly make it impossible for anyone to determine your contribution to the community.
You just make mindlessly hostile comments to random posts on the site.
Kill yourself.
If your words were source code, it wouldn't compile.
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Well, without knowing the language I suppose it might compile, but I'm pretty sure it'd croak on the third statement.
Re:Meh... (Score:4, Funny)
I won't take you seriously until I see some unit tests.
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I won't take you seriously until I see some unit tests.
I'm pretty sure I don't want to see anybody on Slashdot testing their unit.
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The only thing compiled here is a smug sense of superiority and possibly entitlement.
Please do not execute with the --verbose argument any more.
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Between any anonymous stranger's lack of record and karmashock, I'd choose the goodwill and integrity of the person without a record every time.
False dichotomy. You can distrust both Karmashock and ACs.
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So if you're not filtering out microbeads one can assume you're also not filtering out oils...
well if you bothered to learn how sewage treatment plants remove oils from water, you would see that the process does not involve a filter.
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And guess what, the microbeads have a lower density than water. So they should be filterable by that method.
guess what, the beads don't get a chance to settle to the bottom.
"should", what a lovely word. As a computer person you should know full well that it is not the same word as "shall"
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Rivers for example filter water yet contain no "filter" as you term it. Oceans filter water yet also contain no "filter".
These are not true statements.
Re:lots of beads (Score:5, Interesting)
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http://ewao.com/a/1-microbeads... [ewao.com]
Re:lots of beads (Score:5, Funny)
So how much pollution do 471million microbeads actually make?
Wouldn't that be 471 beads?
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Less than four liters, not 400 liters.
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Microbead manufacturers will reform and will start manufacturing non-toxic naturally dis-integrable microbead.
Yeah just like how the oil companies reformed and started using safer methods to transport oil after they learned their lessons from massive spills.
oh wait, they didn't
technocracy (Score:2)
ugh its too hard to type what I was going to say
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Recently switched to a face wash that uses peach pits or apricot pits or whatever instead of the stupid little plastic beads that's don't actually scrub.
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sometimes I wonder how we managed to crawl out of the mud and become humans without having an effective exfoliant
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because the average american takes that long to decide on a new brand of toothpaste
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You've probably been in a prolonged coma. because the budget deficit problem was solved many years ago. Even when it was a problem, it was a problem because only because a combination of laws and court rulings requiring certain amounts of money to be spent on things while simultaneously forbidding (or making impractical by need for 2/3 public vote etc) most ways to collect revenue to pay for it.
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Disgusting.
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471,000,000 beads a day.
To turn that into a volume we find the cube root, which in this case rounds to 778.
Now those beads spoken of here are again only 0.2mm, so that means we have to divide that 778 beads length on a side by 5 to find out it's 155.6mm.
If we convert that to inches, that means the entire 471 million beads we are talking about would
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http://conbio.org/images/conte... [conbio.org]
Microbead contamination and harm Although their small size makes them difficult to detect, microbeads have been found in inland and coastal aquatic habitats 4,5 and in fish 6 . Experiments have demonstrated harm in fish 9,10 from plastics that are the same type, size and shape as common microbeads. Microbeads pass through water treatment facilities, are released into natural wat erways and become microplastic debris. Microplastic is ubiquitous in aquatic habitats
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http://randiragan.com/wp-conte... [randiragan.com]
http://ewao.com/a/1-microbeads... [ewao.com]
seriously, your post history makes it clear you exist only to troll.
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First of all, a number of natural toxins exist and are produced every day by organisms (e.g. cyanide) and natural phenomena like volcanic activity. Just like man-made pollutants, those natural toxins are being passed up the food chain via microbeads when they should be resting harmlessly outside the reach of our food chain.
S