• Fermion
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    9 months ago

    That’s a little hyperbolic. There’s a lot of mechanics at play in generating microplastics. Fabrics have microscopically thin strands of plastics. It should be no surprise that rubbing up against thousands of tiny strands every time we move and wash synthetic fabric clothes releases many tiny particles. Plus clothes have to deal with UV degradation making the plastic more brittle.

    The plastic components in an RO system should be specced to not leach plasticizers. They should have smooth walls and laminar flow. There shouldn’t be much to abrade the plastic surfaces and shed particles. They may not be perfect, but water from an RO system will have orders of magnitude fewer microplastics. So an RO system still “does something about it.”

    We do need to address the problem, but I wouldn’t want people to avoid beneficial remediation just because it has some plastic components.

    • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      obviously still better than not doing it but it’s just annoying and frustrating because they don’t make any out of stainless steel construction at least not that I can find. I was able to get stainless steel food grade corrugated piping because they use it in the Solar industry for solar hot water heating. Finding true stainless steel faucets instead of just stainless coated brass is possible although a little bit expensive. I’ve gone stainless for pretty much everything in the kitchen, including reusable straws as well as leftover food containers both the container and the lid. Because it seems to be basically the only material not actively attempting to kill us in some way.

      So it’s not as if I’m not actively reducing my exposure to it as much as possible, but it’s really frustrating how impossible it is to escape from entirely