Microplastics Knowledge Test

Our under-the-sink filter

Although environmentalists have been warning about the dangers of microplastics for over two decades, there is not yet scientifically valid proof of causation between the presence of microplastics and health problems. Nevertheless, last year we grew sufficiently alarmed that we installed a microplastics water filter under the kitchen sink.

The WSJ lists ten questions to test one's knowledge of microplastics. Your humble blogger guessed on all of them and only got the correct answer on three out of 10. I'd be disappointed, dear reader, if you don't do better.

Microplastics Filter

My son bought and installed a microplastics filter under our kitchen sink. He's concerned about keeping his boomer parents healthy, and, unlike me, he keeps abreast of environmental news.

I've been skeptical about all the climate doomism that makes our lives expensive and needlessly worse--get rid of our incandescent bulbs, gasoline cars, and reliable nuclear and fossil fuel power plants!--but there might be something to the concerns about microplastics, which are in the seas around us: [bold added]

Microplastic particles are widespread in Monterey Bay anchovies and the diving seabirds that eat them as a main food source — which could possibly impact the birds’ reproductive systems, according to a new study.

Scientists at UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis and the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance studied microplastic pollution in Monterey Bay by testing microplastic particles in the water and in anchovies and common murres, a bird species found in abundance in the region.

They found that 58% of anchovies and 100% of murres had microplastic particles in their digestive tracts, according to the study published Nov. 4 in the Environmental Pollution journal.

The study also comes two months after California became the first state in the United States to begin requiring water agencies to test for microplastics, which can be found everywhere from clothing, food packaging, drinking water and the ocean. Another recent study by Stanford University scientists found that whales are ingesting “colossal” amounts of microplastics that mainly come from the fish they feed on.

The troubling increase in cancer among young people causes us to ask what's different about us when we were kids in the 50's and 60's, and the leading factors seem to be excess sugar to less sunshine and exercise. The ubiquity of microplastics may be an answer, too.

California: Legislate First, Then Look at the Science

2012: Photo of an Indian beach (coastalcare.org)

A decade ago some scientists were raising the alarm about microplastics. In the intervening years, one would have thought, incorrectly, that there would be at least partial answers to these basic questions:

1) How harmful are environmental plastics to human and animal health?
2) What is the extent of the problem?
3) What is the cost of remedy?

But scant scientific progress hasn't stopped California legislators from considering laws to stop microplastics from entering the oceans: [bold added]

California is set to become the first state, and maybe the first place in the world, to try to limit microplastics at sea...

But there’s a problem with regulating this pollutant. Only so much is known about it — how it gets to the sea and to what extent it’s there. Also, standards for collecting and measuring microplastics are just emerging, and what level of the material may be safe to tolerate is still unclear.

“We can’t sit around and wait for the science,” said Mark Gold, executive director of the Ocean Protection Council, noting the scale of plastic pollution. “There’s a lot of things we can do in the interim.”

Banning plastic grocery bags in 2007 didn't work out, so let's redouble our efforts.

By the way, legislating before all the science was in can make matters worse. Two major examples:

1) requiring MTBE to be added to gasoline for fuel efficiency, then finding out that it poisoned the water supply;
2) banning incandescent bulbs, thereby forcing the purchase of CFLs that poisoned people with mercury when they broke.

When you live in a one-party State, lawmakers don't suffer the consequences of rushed legislation.

Trash: We Must Redouble Our Efforts

Sometimes a stiff breeze lifts rubbish from a receptacle or blows a paper cup from someone's hand, but I have never seen anyone deliberately litter.

(The collection system isn't perfect; that's why there was the annual California Coastal Cleanup last Saturday. Thankfully, according to local politicians, not a single toxic needle of the unaccounted-for millions gets washed into the Bay.)

2019 Coastal Cleanup (Chronicle photo)

In the fast-food restaurants where plastic is still allowed I always take advantage of this legal exemption, in this instance at Wendy's. The lid, cup, and straw are the perfect drink delivery system: minimized spilling, water resistant, disposable, and cheap.

At home I placed them in the blue recycling container as I have for the past 20 years. Nevertheless, some trash still leaks through.

We, the people, continue to disappoint our leaders. We must redouble our efforts!

Needling the Opposition

(Photo from ZeroHedge)

San Francisco needle exchange programs--both non-profit and government-sponsored--have been in existence for nearly 30 years. While probably preventing disease, the costs are significant: [bold added]

in 2018, the program distributed 5.8 million syringes and collected 3.8 million, an improved collection rate of about 65 percent. There was a significant uptick in dropoff of needles at kiosks which increased to 241,080 in 2018, a more than 300 percent increase from the 59,000 in 2017.

An unaccounted-for two million syringes with drug residue are an environmental disaster, whether they end up on the streets, on playground and parks, in landfill, or are swept into the Bay.

President Trump entered the fray by announcing that the EPA will cite San Francisco for violations because of needles flowing into the ocean. Predictably, San Francisco politicians and "experts" denounced the President by asserting that San Francisco sewers don't allow needles to get through.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed said the city has a combined sewer system that “ensures that all debris that flow into storm drains are filtered out at the city’s wastewater treatment plants.” She called Trump’s remarks “ridiculous assertions.”

“No debris flow out into the bay or the ocean,” Breed said.

The whole premise behind the ban on plastic straws was that the straws end up in the Pacific Ocean, hurting ocean wildlife.

It's a very strange system that catches all the needles but not all the straws.

Update (9/21/2019) -- once again Willie Brown, tongue firmly in cheek, has the final word:

But, of course, Trump overplayed his hand by falsely claiming drug needles on San Francisco streets are washing into the ocean. Rather than having to deal with a national focus on the city’s homelessness failures, local officials got to turn the story around as just another Trump lie. And they were right, of course. The needles don’t wash into the ocean.

They end up on sidewalks and in parks.

California Catatonia

Water bottles at SFO: get 'em now (WSJ photo)

California imposes rules on all sorts of formerly innocuous behaviors and products. On the other hand it now permits actions--smoking marijuana (while driving!), service animals in restaurants--that at one time were frowned upon by the patriarchy. Of course, the bureaucracy ignores rules, e.g., vagrancy laws, it finds inconvenient.

As someone who's lost track of these developments, I found Andy Kessler's summary to be useful and amusing, in a I'm-laughing-or-I'd-be-crying sort of way: [Bold added]

First they came for our plastic grocery bags. Then they came for our plastic straws. Now they’ve come for our plastic water bottles at SFO. Yes, you read that right. Starting Tuesday, the sale of plastic water bottles will be banned at San Francisco International Airport, one of the few places they actually make sense. California has many dumb laws and statutes and bans, but this one is especially brainless—spurred by futile self-righteousness.

After running late for your flight after a 30-minute security line only to have TSA confiscate your Fiji water bottle, you’ll now have to stop at a crowded water fountain to fill your own metal flask. Or buy an overpriced glass or aluminum bottle at the concession stand, paying another 10 cents for a bag. And your teeth will chatter if you drink through a paper straw. Of course you could risk dehydration instead: Men lose up to a half-gallon of water during a 10-hour flight. Oddly, you can still buy sugary drinks in plastic bottles at SFO; only healthy, calorie-free water is banned in plastic. You can’t make this stuff up.

Other fields are even worse. Starting next year, the California Building Standards Commission will require every new home to have solar panels. This will add $8,400 to the average cost of the state’s already expensive homes. With a shortage of about 1.4 million housing units, according to the California Housing Partnership, that’s a $12 billion unfunded mandate.

But maybe the housing shortage can be solved with yet another legislative “fix.” Last December state Sen. Scott Wiener introduced Senate Bill 50, which would allow developers to ignore certain local zoning laws within half a mile of train or subway stations and some bus stops. The bill would allow five-story buildings, high density and massive parking structures. Although the bill was tabled in May, many of its growing group of supporters argued it didn’t do enough to create incentives for affordable housing. That tells me another version of this bill will pass eventually. So here’s what may happen: Many towns will preserve local zoning pre-emptively by closing their train stations. Lose-lose situation.

So what? you might ask: Just take an Uber or Lyft. Not so fast. Also winding its way through Sacramento is Assembly Bill 5, which would reclassify “gig economy” workers as employees, entitled to full benefits and a $12 minimum wage. This means the cost of rides, deliveries and even manicures would go up, up, up. The bill is an overreach because most drivers truly are temporary workers. According to the delivery company Postmates, half of delivery workers quit after 80 days and about 45% work less than nine hours a week. Once again California legislators are trying for a trifecta: Fix a problem that may not exist, kill a very Californian innovation, and damage the employment prospects of the same workers they are trying to protect.

There’s more. Proposition 64, passed in 2016, allows Californians to grow six pot plants at home. Why not seven? And there is still no measurable legal limit for driving while stoned. When hungry, you can bring your dog to restaurants. Since 2015 no one can stop you. My son worked at a nice restaurant and was told that the only thing he was allowed to ask was “Can I do anything for your service dog?” Keep your poodles away from my noodles. Meanwhile, Starbucks is rolling out sippy lids, like toddlers’ sippy cups, to replace plastic straws. Iced coffee dribbled down your shirt can certainly be humiliating.

Progressive taxes with top marginal rates of more than 50%, plus San Francisco’s proposed tax on initial public offerings, will keep housing prices high—in Incline Village, Nev. California’s electricity prices are also progressive, increasing to more than 50 cents a kilowatt-hour after users exceed a meager baseline. Of course residents can offset this by picking up an electric car, which the state deems worth an almost 30% discount.

But don’t expect auto manufacturers to make out well. The California Air Resources Board didn’t like the Trump administration’s freeze on emissions standards at 2020 levels, so it waived the waiver, requiring the tougher rules and 54 miles per gallon. Ford, Honda, Volkswagen and BMW have already cut a deal with California to meet the higher standards, but with many loopholes. Auto makers like to manufacture one car for all states, so they comply with California laws, dumb or not.

In some places, the right laws are in place but no one cares. San Francisco, like Los Angeles, has a nasty homeless problem. Fed up, voters in 2010 passed a “sit-lie” ordinance that outlaws loitering between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. “Outlaws” in this case mean perpetrators are supposed to get a ticket. But the police don’t bother with that anymore, so Karl Malden’s famed Streets of San Francisco are filled with needles and human feces, which the city spends $30 million a year to clean up—ineffectively. But heaven forbid you want to buy cold water in a disposable bottle at the airport.

Thanks to passing laws against things they don't like, Californians don't have guns being acquired by felons or the mentally ill, don't have human trafficking, and don't have people addicted to illegal painkillers. Despite its success, it's puzzling why the rest of the country doesn't want to be more like California.

Green for Show, Analytics for Dough

Being green: I re-use them at home.

Starbucks is often mocked for its responsiveness to the directional changes in progressive winds, but we need to give credit where it's due. We like the redesign of its cold drink lids, all to eliminate the plastic straws that comprise 0.03% of plastic waste.

[Digression: the straw-waste percentage is about the same as the percentage of carbon dioxide (.039%) in the atmosphere. One of the wonders of our time is the belief that the future of life on earth rests on eliminating the last speck of these "dangerous" substances. For perspective, getting rid of plastic straws would be like ordering a 200-pound person to lose 1/16th of a pound.]

(From imgflip)

Anyway, credit to Starbucks for finding a new use for sippy cups.

Mock them all you want, but Starbucks stock is on fire:

The world’s largest coffee chain posted adjusted earnings of 78 cents a share for its fiscal third quarter, a 26% increase compared with a year earlier. Analysts polled by FactSet had expected earnings of 72 cents a share, excluding certain items.

Starbucks’s sales of $6.8 billion were up 8%, also beating expectations. Global same-store sales growth of 6% was the strongest in three years. U.S. same-store sales rose 7%. Cold beverages helped drive growth in the afternoon, the company said, a time when Starbucks has struggled to boost sales...

Starbucks also remains focused on expanding its business in China. Net store growth there was 16% during the quarter, bringing the chain’s total to more than 30,000 locations world-wide.

FWIW, I think much of Starbucks' growth is due to collecting and analyzing data on its customers. The iPhone app knows my food and drink favorites, the stores I go to most frequently, and the promotions that I respond to. Starbucks also knows how often I do a grab-and-go and how long I linger when I use its WiFi.

With privacy all the rage, Starbucks has to downplay the role of data analysis:

Data collected by Starbucks’s digital programs is helping the company better understand what beverages customers want, said Chief Operating Officer Roz Brewer. “We know a lot more about our customers now,” she said.

I agree. I don't think the sippy cups are why the stock has a 30 PE.

SBUX has nearly doubled the past year.

Another Danger to Our Precious Bodily Fluids

(Image from Henkel.com)

Health experts are always telling us to drink more water. And if you want to minimize microplastics in your body, drink more from the tap and eschew bottled sources.

If you live somewhere with clean, safe tap water, relying less on bottled water is a great place to start reducing your plastics exposure, [Univ. of Victoria Dr. Kieran] Cox says.

Bottled water was such a big contributor of microplastics that the researchers did a separate analysis; when people drink their water only from bottled sources, they ingest about 90,000 microplastic particles every year from that water, but people who drink only tap water get 4,000 of such particles a year.

“It’s a 22-fold increase in plastic consumption from a single lifestyle choice,” Cox says. “With these kinds of issues, small choices can make a big impact for you personally and for plastic pollution.”

When out and about, plastic bottles of water are convenient, cheap, and sanitary. At home, however, a tall glass of iced water from the tap is quite pleasurable, and for me fewer microplastics tip the balance.

It also helps that the Foster City municipal water supply meets or exceeds "all primary drinking water standards set by the United States Environmental ProtecƟon Agency (USEPA) and the California Department of Public Health (CDPH)."

Surprising Development

Costco Optical will never run out of pliers.

At Costco Optical one can order prescription eyeglasses for $130--more if you want fancy frames, lenses that darken in the sunlight (polychromic), or multi-focals.

I chose the cheapest option--why invest in expensive glasses when cataract surgery is a likely possibility?

I' m exclusively an eyeglass- and hard-lens-wearer. Hard contact lenses last at least three years, and I can't, er, see disposing of soft contact lenses every day. Soft lenses encourage behavior that is bad for the environment: Flushing Your Contacts Does Terrible Things to Our Land and Oceans

For a lot of people, contact lenses are a daily necessity. Market research shows 45 million Americans, about one in eight, wear contacts, meaning the United States alone consumes somewhere between five and 14 billion lenses annually. And now, new research shows all those contact lenses may end up as micro-plastic pollution in our soil, rivers, and oceans.

An estimated 20 percent of contact-lens wearers, studied as part of a 400-person online survey, flush their lenses down the sink or toilet, as opposed to placing them in the trash as industry experts recommend. That amounts to 20 metric tons of plastic, or 20,000 kilograms (about 44,000 pounds), flushed per year—about the weight of a small airplane. The biggest culprit? Daily-use lenses, which occupy about 40 percent of the market.

As I slouch into my dotage, one surprising development has been that many of my penurious ways (transportation, cooking, consuming) have turned out to be friendly to the environment.

Maybe Their Time Has Not Passed

Added to the reasons against dining out (excess sugar, fats, and calories in general) is higher ingestion of phthalates. [bold added]

the phthalate levels of those who dined out often were nearly 35 percent higher than those of people who reported eating food purchased at the grocery store, and fast-food restaurants are a particularly strong source of the chemical

Phthalates affect the endocrine system. Forbes:

scientific studies...have shown how phthalates may interfere with sex hormones and suggested links between consuming phthalates and a variety of health problems such as birth defects, infertility, cancers, childhood asthma, obesity, and autism.

Phthalates are not a substance added to food but arise from contact with wrapping and other plastics.

phthalates are chemicals used in many plastic items to help them become more flexible. Therefore, phthalates may be leeching from all of these plastic items into the food that subsequently goes into your mouth.

Plastic-wrapped meats (kirwens)

Apparently we should patronize fast-food restaurants less in order to avoid phthalates. Cooking and dining at home carry their own risks, however. Meat, chicken, and fish must be inspected not only for spoilage but for the manner in which they are wrapped. (Plastic wrapping seems like progress because consumers can examine the shielded product without contaminating it.)

Supermarket butchers who wrap the orders in paper--maybe their time has not passed after all.

Particularly Vexing

(Chronicle illustration by John Blanchard)

With all the other important events (stock market drop, gun control demonstrations, Federal budget signing, North Korea, possible trade war) that the Chronicle could cover, your humble blogger was surprised to see the Friday headline Alarming Study of Garbage Patch. [bold added]

The giant mass of floating plastic that has imperiled birds and wildlife between San Francisco and Hawaii contains 1.8 trillion pieces of trash covering an area nearly four times the size of California....

A team of scientists from the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, based in the Netherlands, said the debris field, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, covers about 618,000 square miles of deep ocean and weighs 80,000 metric tons.

Two years ago we commented how scientists weren't certain about how much this massive plastic garbage heap could affect human health. Furthermore, there was some evidence that sunlight and bacteria were degrading "micro-plastic" particles, making the pollution less permanent than had been believed.

Despite greater awareness plastic trash is growing "exponentially."

Researchers said that will continue to grow exponentially unless drastic measures are taken to reduce the proliferation of plastic garbage and litter back on land, and to prevent it from flowing out storm drains into waterways that lead to the ocean.

The huge sprawl of junk is particularly vexing to environmentalists in San Francisco and other eco-friendly population centers in California, where much of the debris probably originated.

More and more of our store-bought food and goods are sealed in plastic. And we wrap our non-recyclable trash in plastic bags--easier to carry and less messy--and dispose of them in the proper receptacle. It's no surprise that plastic waste from California continues to pour into the Pacific.

Hey, but we banned plastic bags at the supermarket. Give us a medal.