this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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I remember when I found out that shit was plastic. I always assumed they were organic material of some kind, like the body scrubs with the crushed up walnut shell in it (which probably has fucking microplastic in it, too). So disgusting.
This is why we need to change how shit works. It shouldn't go: company does some shit > fall out > government steps in. It should go: company has an idea > must get permission first from environmental agencies
Nah corporations really don't give a shit at all, like all chewing gum is literally just plastic too and sheds tons of microplastics into your mouth as you chew it.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/rethink-chewing-gum-habit-essentially-plastic/
Plastic is an organic material though, so your assumption was correct.
The difference is in the definition or organic. When the average person thinks organic, they mean something that is or used to be alive. When a scientist think organic, they're talking about carbon compounds.
Plastic are made from fossil fuels which are from primordial plants. So still organic according to your definition. Just a few hundred million years since it was alive.
Interesting. Always thought chewing gum was more like when you made "plastic" out of the caesin in milk.
You can buy chewing gum made from natural materials but it's not the norm. Most chewing gum is made from mineral oil.
Also, chemically they are identical. Plastic made of a plant is still a plastic.
Nah it's just rubbery dried chicle sap, no chemical refining like with oil
This is what it looks like
I can almost taste the six seconds the flavor added to that will last!
Five minutes of microplastics or a blink of flavor? Answer might just be no gum :(
Yeah no idea why this is so hard to achieve but it's a very noticeable difference.
Yes really, still a polymer: it forms polyisoprene upon drying. You also find the stuff (synthesised from oil, yes, but chemically indistinguishable) in tires and condoms.
That's a different plant
Does not matter. All these natural rubbers are very similar in how they work, you can find a paper on the polymerization in chicle here if you don't believe me.
i assumed it was just glass or similar, maybe the same material as those moisture-absorbing silica packets
There are probably some with sand and other hard minerals, I think Dove had some soaps with aluminum oxide in it?
i've definitely seen things like that, i think mostly "artisanal" soaps with like ground coconut shell or something, but the thing is that it tends to look like shit.
I would much rather use that bar of soap than the mysterious liquid gels full of dyes and other junk. If natural tones are somehow gross and icky but a blood red goo that faintly smells of petro chemicals is fine then maybe we really are doomed as a species.
You go back a century or so, that bar of soap would likely have been considered a luxury product.
i don't think soap with grit added would have ever been considered a luxury product, low-quality soap still looks way prettier
The grit exfoliates and makes your skin softer by removing dead skin. Definitely luxurious before soaps were more common.
Soaps like Lava and Gojo have pumice in them. Because sometimes your hands need an 80 grit washing.
For real though, Gojo soap seems to work the best for getting rid of grease and oil from machines. My guess is regular soaps don't do a great job at carrying away the oil residue, but Gojo soap just sands down your top skin layer to remove it.
The pumice action definitely helps but I'm pretty sure gojo is also full of added chemicals to help the soap lift oils more effectively.
I kinda like the orange smell, too.
Plastic is an organic material, trees are mostly plastic (lignin, a phenolic polymer, cellulose a polysaccharide polymer, hemicellulose an heteropolysaccharide and suberin a polyester-like polymer).
The problem we're having is a naturalistic fallacy crossed with the unpleasant fact that almost everything we touch sheds dust and powder absolutely everywhere. This along with spores and yeast and other dusts constantly enter our bodies.
Plastic is only of note because we made it.
Any problems beyond that is speculative and will requires ginormous gobs of grant money to actually answer with anything than precautionary principle-based FUD.
Hydrocarbon based plastic absolutely isnt natural, there are many different kinds of plastic in existence but overwhelmingly stuff from the last 50 years has been the ~~inorganic hydrocarbon~~ non biodegradable hydrocarbon type which doesn't break down and is likely a endocrinologal distruptor & a carcinogen.
Had just woken up my mistake! Hadn't gotten to the coffee yet xd.
Hydrocarbons are, by definition, organic compounds made exclusively of carbon and hydrogen.
Do you know of any hydrocarbon that do not contain hydrogen nor carbon and that are relevant to this discussion ?
Care to not nitpick a slip of the mind (that's already been pointed out and corrected) literally just after I had woken up and address the actual point?
current plastics not biodegradable is the same problem that trees had for 300 million years. I think it's a matter of time before some yeast evolves the ability to eat plastic. Then all plastic will start to mold and rot like all other organic matter.
as for being "endocrinologal distruptor & a carcinogen", yes so is a lot of other stuff, probably stuff in wood, again, like turpentine
We're not going to ban all plastics until some company has a proprietary alternative that they can force us to buy by making all other products illegal to produce. But that new alternative doesn't exist yet.
My advice, don't eat electrical junction boxes
Ty for the response. I do agree we will likely wind up with some sort of plastic eating organism at some point, problem is how many centuries will that take. Might be a opportunity to apply gene editing at some point in the medium term future.
Fair point on turps but turps and other compounds from wood dont tend to linger in the enviroment for as long as plastic does currently.
Unfortunately any solutions will be taken by porkies and as you say regulatory captured into making our lives more expensive rather than for the betterment of humanity, should be govt ran labs looking into this sort of stuff not corpos with dollar signs in their eyes. Having saidthat some early stage alternatives such as a seaweed based biodegradable plastic could help hugely in the single use plastic department.
you get nitpiked because you are nitpiking a perfectly formulated argument