No, the boomers with all their magic environment poisoning synthetic fabrics with antiwrinkle coatings did. The next seven generations will have microplastics in every part of their body, but I haven’t touched an iron in a while.

I lived in an area that was going to start strip mining for sand that was the right consistency for fracking. Plenty of conservatives were amongst the loudest opponents. There’s plenty of hypocracy, no need to exaggerate. Their reasons were not wanting to have so much heavy equipment on the roads and fear of silicosis, not opposing natural gas extraction.

For anyone who thinks this would be a good tradeoff, this would be the worst sleep of your life.

I’ve only had sleep paralysis a couple times and it was always because I was stressed about homework/work and my brain kept trying to work through the problems in my sleep. It is a terrible experience. Sleep is about way more than physical rest. Depriving your brain of good sleep will ruin your memory and make functioning during the day exceedingly difficult.

Plus, let’s look at what employers did in response to women entering the workforce. Has average household income doubled? No, pay has stagnated to the point of households needing two incomes to meet expenses. Don’t expect working through your sleep to mean a life of leisure in the day. You’re more likely to see wages fall to the point where everyone needs a day job plus a sleep job.

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.