That's crazy! I didn't even realized they had plastic in them. Makes you wonder how many inconspicuous everyday items have the potential to become plastic waste.
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I didn’t even realized they had plastic in them.
you didn't WHAT THE F???
It used to be cotton, didn't it
Or even asbestos at some point lol
Asbestos may be - but no cigarette bud I have ever seen has decomposed. So definitely none of the millions I've had to see has ever been made of organic materials. And I would have a hard time believing that I simply never saw an organic cigarette bud in an intermediate decomposition stage. So they haven't been used in any significant amount during my lifetime.
I need some of those asbestos filters. My brand isn't giving me cancer fast enough.
Car tires are supposed to be bad. I remember reading each loses ~1kg in pulverised plastic dust over the lifetime?
Luckily, at least some of that is filtered from the air by people's lungs.
Oh, do you know what else? Paint. Apparently, a lot of studies didn't account for microplastics that came from several types of paint that end up in the environment. Scary stuff.
Like that paint that they use on highways that needs to be reapplied every so often because it disappears
Well, it doesn't just disappear. Microplastics. Highways are doubly bad for plastic waste.
Some exec at RJ Reynolds in the 40's
"The damn government is making us take asbestos out of the filters. What can we put instead?"
"I know, how bout some space aged plastic!"
Aren’t microplastics from car tires more common?
Presumably plastic pollution is a superset of microplastic pollution
I thought so too, and maybe they are using a different metric in this article, but I couldn't tell you since their source URL is a deadline.......
This article is quite likely fake news. The first paper cited only says they're the most common pollution on beaches.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935119300787
The metric is also "count", not volume/mass, so not a very useful metric at all.
I also remember Coke, Pepsi, and Nestle being claimed as the highest plastic polluters as well.