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More And More Reason To Boot Seven Springs and Nestle: 6,000 BOTTLES PER MINUTE

Nestle Water Bottle In: More And More Reason To Boot Seven Springs and Nestle: 6,000 BOTTLES PER MINUTE | Our Santa Fe River, Inc. (OSFR) | Protecting the Santa Fe River

Nestle Water Bottle In: More And More Reason To Boot Seven Springs and Nestle: 6,000 BOTTLES PER MINUTE | Our Santa Fe River, Inc. (OSFR) | Protecting the Santa Fe River

 

Nestle will soon or may even now be producing 6,000 plastic bottles PER MINUTE.  Few of these are re-cycled in spite of the false hype that Nestle puts out.  Most go into rivers, road ditches, city gutters and into landfills.  This is reason enough to boot Seven Springs Bottling Company’s permit from the Santa Fe River Basin.

You can help by donating to OSFR’s legal fund.  ALL this money goes to helping the river– we have no paid workers, all are volunteers.  And we need help.

And the river needs help.

And Seven Springs Water Company is helping draw down the river and the springs.

Seven Springs permit to further deplete the Santa Fe will result in not only nitrate-laden bottled water, it will have the potential to put more microplastics into your body, and “…the potential impact on human health is not yet known.”

Thanks to OSFR board member Bill Basta for the link.

Read the complete article here in the Guardian.

Comments by OSFR historian Jim Tatum.
jim.tatum@oursantaferiver.org
– A river is like a life: once taken,
it cannot be brought back © Jim Tatum


Microplastic particles now discoverable in human organs

Microplastic and nanoplastic particles are now discoverable in human organs thanks to a new technique.

Microplastics have polluted the entire planet, from Arctic snow and Alpine soils to the deepest oceans. People are also known to consume them via food and water, and to breathe them in, but the potential impact on human health is not yet known.

The researchers expect to find the particles in human organs and have identified chemical traces of plastic in tissue. But isolating and characterising such minuscule fragments is difficult, and contamination from plastics in the air is also a challenge.

Q&A

What are microplastics?

To test their technique, they added particles to 47 samples of lung, liver, spleen and kidney tissue obtained from a tissue bank established to study neurodegenerative diseases. Their results showed that the microplastics could be detected in every sample.

The scientists, whose work is being presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society on Monday, said their technique would enable other researchers to determine contamination levels in human organs around the world.

“It would be naive to believe there is plastic everywhere but just not in us,” said Rolf Halden at Arizona State University. “We are now providing a research platform that will allow us and others to look for what is invisible – these particles too small for the naked eye to see. The risk [to health] really resides in the small particles.”

The analytical method developed allows the researchers to identify dozens of types of plastic, including the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) used in plastic drinks bottles and the polyethylene used in plastic bags.

“We never want to be alarmist, but it is concerning that these non-biodegradable materials that are present everywhere [may] enter and accumulate in human tissues, and we don’t know the possible health effects,” said Varun Kelkar of Arizona State University, part of the research team.

“Once we get a better idea of what’s in the tissues, we can conduct epidemiological studies to assess human health outcomes,” he said. “That way, we can start to understand the potential health risks, if any.”

Microplastics are those less than 5mm in diameter and nanoplastics have a diameter of less than 0.001mm. Both form largely from the abrasion of larger pieces of plastic dumped into the environment. Research in wildlife and laboratory animals has linked exposure to tiny plastics to infertility, inflammation and cancer.

The researchers are now testing tissues to find microplastics that accumulated during donors’ lifetimes. Donors to tissue banks often provide information on their lifestyles, diets and occupations, so this may help future work to determine the main ways in which people are exposed to microplastics.

The new methodology developed by the team to extract plastics from the tissues and analyse them will be shared online so other researchers can report their results in a standardised way. “This shared resource will help build a plastic exposure database so that we can compare exposures in organs and groups of people over time and geographic space,” said Halden.

Previous studies have shown people eat and breathe in at least 50,000 particles of microplastic a year and that microplastic pollution is raining down on city dwellers, with London, UK, having the highest level of four cities analysed last year. The particles can harbour toxic chemicals and harmful microbes and are known to harm some marine creatures.

Other work has shown different kinds of nanoparticles from air pollution are present in human hearts and brains, and have been linked to brain cancer.

 This article was updated on 17 August 2020, after more information was provided to the Guardian by the researchers, to reflect the fact that the plastic particles had been inserted into the samples of human tissue.

The day after the election …

… the US withdraws from the Paris climate accord, on 4 November. Five years ago nearly 200 countries committed to a collective global response to tackle the climate crisis. But when Donald Trump took office he announced that the US would leave the Paris agreement. On the one issue that demands a worldwide response to help safeguard the Earth for future generations, the US has chosen to walk away. The president is playing politics with the climate crisis – the most defining issue of our time.

The stakes could scarcely be higher and with your help we can put this issue at the center of our 2020 election coverage. The election will be a referendum on the future of democracy, racial justice, the supreme court and so much more. But hovering over all of these is whether the US will play its role in helping take collective responsibility for the future of the planet.

The period since the Paris agreement was signed has seen the five hottest years on record. If carbon emissions continue substantial climate change is unavoidable. The most impacted communities will also be the most vulnerable. Instead of helping lead this discussion the White House prefers to roll back environmental protections to placate the fossil fuel industry….

 

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