Post #1949: The great flat spot in car prices.

 

The biggest eye-opener that I ginned up in the last year was a graph of new and used car prices.  As above.

Functionally, all it told me is that official U.S. price statistics are worthless for tracking trends in how much you have to pay to buy a car.

But, as it turns out, if you look a little deeper, the goofy official U.S. car price data have a lot of company.  That is, many items in the U.S. Consumer Price Index now have “quality” adjustments of the type that generate those odd car price trends.  U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) price indices, for such items, net out a BLS estimate of the change in the “quality” of those items over time.  The upshot is that much of the spending in the U.S. Consumer Price Index is now somewhat divorced from the actual prices that you, the consumer, must typically pay.

I am hardly the first one to have noted this.  I think the BLS numbers for home computers, in particular, have drawn a lot of attention.  There, “quality” includes attributes like processor speed, disk size and speed, installed memory, and so on.  As computers have gotten better, but prices have risen in line with overall inflation, the BLS has recorded that as a massive, ongoing decline in the dollar price of home computers.  Per quality-adjusted unit.  And, because computers are part of the CPI, this means a lower overall CPI increase.

My only real point is that the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) is increasingly less relevant as a measure of “the cost of living”.  In any real-world sense.  It doesn’t track what it costs to get by in America.  Not unless you know where I can buy a brand-new 1993 Toyota Corolla, at the 1993 price, instead of what’s currently being offered on new-car lots.

The CPI measures something, and I’m sure that whatever it measures makes good sense to the folks who measure it.  But if you’re merely a typical U.S. consumer, and, say, need to own a car and a phone to get by in life, you can’t take the increase in the CPI as any accurate measure of what is happening to the cost of living.  For you, the typical U.S. consumer.

Sketchy details follow.


Did you know that the price of a typical new car in 2019 was the same as it was in 1993?

Lines:  Price index data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, via the Federal Reserve of St. Louis FRED system.  Toyota Corolla lowest MSRP from Cars.com, history of the Toyota Corolla.

That, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the official source for U.S. price data, and the keeper of the super-important U.S. Consumer Price Index.

I ginned up the graph above trying to make sense of new and used car prices, Post 1836.

I think we can agree that something happened about half-way up, on the graph above.  Or halfway across, depending on your perspective.  The lines diverge.

What happened, exactly, we might reasonably disagree about.  But the title of the graph gives a broad hint.  Just prior to that, BLS began embedding a quality adjustment in its car price data.

Whatever it was that happened, it’s clear that past that point, what the BLS tracked as the price of a car (orange and gray lines) had almost no relationship to the price of a car, meaning, what you actually have to pay to buy a car (yellow bars).


Did you know that the price of the typical cell phone fell 50% in just the past four years?

Source:  https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SSEE041

From the same folks who produced the car data above.  Again, quality-adjusted data.

Such a bargain now.   Maybe I’ll finally bite the bullet and buy an Apple phone, now that they’re half-price.

Or are they?

Might as well toss this one in, too:  The price for an internet connection is easily 10% less now than it was in 1997.  Again, this is supposed to be an index of the price, in dollars.  I have no clue what the big dip is, mid-graph.  But this is what the BLS says.

Base source:  BLS data query, for finding data series, https://beta.bls.gov/dataQuery/find


Did you know that the dollar price for major kitchen appliances in 2024 is essentially unchanged from where it was in 1998?

Source:  https://beta.bls.gov/dataQuery/find?fq=survey:[cu]&s=popularity:D&q=appliances

You get the drift.  BLS data, quality adjusted Per the BLS, you have to shell out fewer dollars, today, to buy a fridge, than you did 25 years ago.

Quality-adjusted.


Inarticulate conclusion: I am not a Luddite, I think.

I drive an Eee-Vee, for gosh sakes.  I’m not ready to toss my wooden clogs into the industrial machinery of Progress.  Nor am I here to kvetch about the accuracy of BLS’s methods for making these quality adjustments.  (That’s a completely separate issue).

Instead, I want to ask a question.  Can I buy a brand-new 1993 Toyota Corolla?  At the 1993 price?

No?  Then maybe the CPI is no longer a good cost-of-living index.  Or, alternatively, maybe it’s a bit harder for the younger generations to get by than you might think, based solely on the official numbers.

I’m not one to say that the sky is falling because of these quality adjustments embedded in the U.S. CPI.  Practically speaking, I would say that the CPI understates the actual change in “the cost of living”.  Where living is defined as living like the average American.  I.e., has a place to stay, drives a car, uses a cell phone, wears clothes, and so on.

You can see the full list of what’s adjusted in this fashion on the BLS website:   https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/.   Broadly speaking, BLS embeds some sort of quality adjustment into most of the items in these categories:

  • Cars/trucks
  • Clothing
  • Appliances
  • Electronics
  • Information services (internet, phone, cable service).

By and large, BLS has no such adjustments for:

  • Car/truck repairs, parts, or rentals.
  • Food
  • Energy
  • Health care
  • Misc household stuff

And there’s a separate, seemingly quite different adjustment for rent and the rental equivalent of home ownership.

By inference, then, payments linked to the CPI as a “cost of living adjustment” won’t rise fast enough to keep up with the actual cost of living. To some degree.  This includes most notably Social Security payments, but also most Medicare payments to health-care providers, and in general a whole lot of salary and contractual payment items in the private sector.

In my darker moments, I’m sure this is considered more a feature than a bug, by the Federal government.  At some level, it doesn’t much matter if these quality adjustments are right or wrong on their own merits.  They are saving Uncle Sam some money (via, e.g., reduced Social Security outlays), and they are being tolerated.  In a rational world, legislation that would weaken those adjustments would have to be scored as costing the Federal government money.  Hence, a tough sell, and the net effect is that the legislative branch turns a blind eye to it. 

Meanwhile, getting back to cars. I believe that most of the quality-adjusted items in the CPI have, in fact, gotten a lot better in recent years.  I’ve argued that for cars, specifically, many times, on this blog.  It’s self-evident for phones.  I’m pretty sure my current internet service is a lot faster than it used to be.  And so on.

Back to cars, well, in fact, cars are … more now.  Passenger vehicles are bigger, faster, and get better mileage than they did 25 years ago.

Source:  https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report

But at the same time, if you need a car and a phone to hold a job, you don’t have the option of buying a new 1993 Toyota Corolla (-equivalent), at an appropriate discount to the current model year.  Your option is to buy the better quality modern car (phone, internet, clothing) currently offered for sale.  At the current higher price.

So if your metric is “I gotta have a car”, then the cost of “a car” has indeed risen a lot faster than the BLS says.  Per the original graph, it (yellow bars) seems to have risen right in line with inflation/the overall price level (blue line).

What you can buy now is a better car than you could buy 25 years ago.  Safer.  Better gas mileage.  More bells and whistles.  (E.g., I don’t know the last time I even saw a car that didn’t have power windows and AC, both of which used to be luxury add-ons.)  But it’s still, at root, just a car.

A weird side-effect of this is that, per the BLS, recent generations of Americans are, in essence, victims of forced hyper-consumption.  When I was a youth, I drove cars that were absolute pieces of crap.  But they were cheap.  A kid today has no option but to buy a much better, far more sophisticated vehicle.  And those simply are not going to be as cheap as beater used cars were when I was in their shoes.

You have no choice but to buy a much better fill-in-the-blank than people were buying two decades ago.  And you have more-or-less no choice but to pay accordingly.  The net result of which is that the — income shares — of these items stayed about the same.  A phone was a relatively expensive object four years ago, and it’s just about as expensive now.

But, when it comes to cars, phones, internet service, and so on, as far as the Federal government is concerned, dollar prices have been flat-to-falling for past couple of decades.  And the reason we now pay many more dollars for “a car” is that we have, collectively, decided to buy bigger, better cars.

And while it is true that cars (phones, internet service, …) are better (bigger, more capable, faster, more efficient) than they used to be, you, as the consumer, or Americans, as consumers, don’t really have the option to keep your level of consumption constant.  Every time you replace an item of that sort, you have to replace it with what’s offered in the marketplace.  And if the market offers you ever-more-capable, ever-more-expensive items, well, if you want to replace your old one, that’s what you have to buy.

The bottom line is that if you accept the BLS quality adjustments as fundamentally correct, then you have to believe that we are, in effect, trapped on a treadmill of ever-increasing levels of consumption.  For some items, at least.

And yet, it’s an odd sort of treadmill.  It’s not as if you’re now required to own two phones, if you want to make phone calls.  It’s that you are required to own one, but your only option is to buy one that’s twice the phone it was, four years ago.  At about the same price you’d have paid four years ago.  Which the BLS then handily marks down as a simultaneous doubling of your phone consumption, coupled with a 50 percent cut in the price of a phone.

That’s just bizarrely at odds with perception, I think.  If the price of chicken goes from $2 to $1 a pound, then I correctly perceive that the cost of my chicken dinner has been cut in half.  By contrast, I sure wouldn’t notice much difference in functionality between a four-year-old phone and a brand-new one.  But per the BLS, that price has also been cut in half.  Even though I’m paying more for a new phone today than I would have paid four years ago.

Conclusion.

I guess that’s as far as I can take this train of thought.

If you’re of the opinion that a phone is a phone, then the BLS numbers don’t “fit” your experience.  You’ve seen no huge fall in cell phone prices these past four years.  By contrast, if you are really into phones, then maybe the BLS got everything right and there has been a halving of quality-adjusted phone prices over the last four years.

At root, my issue with these quality-adjusted items is that the declining price per unit is coupled with an offsetting mandatory increase in units consumed.  Per the way the BLS reckons it. With the result being a bunch of price cuts, on paper, that in no way, shape, or form reduce the amount of money I have to shell out, to own a (car, cell phone, and so on).

It’s kind of a good-news, bad-news joke.  The good news is that the price of X has fallen in half, as BLS measures it.  The bad news is that you can’t buy X.  All you can buy now is 2X.  Again, per the BLS method.

Sure, the BLS-measured price of X is way down.  But you can’t pocket that money.  You can’t use it elsewhere.  This makes a BLS-estimated price decline in (say) cell phones fundamentally different from a decline in (say) the price of chicken.  Unlike the chicken, the only way to take advantage of half-price cell phones is to buy twice as much cell phone.

So the joke’s on you.  Your out-of-pocket is the same, but BLS tells you your life has gotten easier.  Because cell phones now cost half what they used to (per quality-adjusted unit).  With the catch being, you now have to buy twice as much cell phone.

The effect of these ongoing quality improvements is that material goods are getting better.  But as the BLS measures it, that makes it appear as if material goods are getting cheaper.

But they aren’t.  Not if the relevant unit is “a working car” or “a functioning cell phone”.  And as a result, changes in the CPI understate the actual change in the cost of maintaining a typical American lifestyle.

My gut reaction is that the BLS numbers help to paint too rosy a picture of what it takes to get by in the modern world, versus the world of a few decades ago.  The march of progress has made these objects and services better.  But it’s almost a matter of opinion as to whether that has made them cheaper.

Post #1946: Now the government is coming for my smoke detectors.

 

Or maybe it’s just the smoke detector manufacturers?

At my wife’s request, I’ve gotten around to looking at the smoke detectors in my house.  How many do we have (three), where are they (one on each level), do they work (eh, mostly yes).  It’s something that one does, from time to time, as a responsible adult.

This is when I found out that the modern recommendation, repeated everywhere, is to toss out any smoke detector that’s ten years old or more.  Or maybe seven years old, depending on the source.

Why?  Well, maybe (fill-in-something-plausible-sounding here).  And if that happened, the smoke detector wouldn’t work.

You wouldn’t want to take a risk of that, would you?

Anyway, this was a new one on me.  You’re supposed to toss out all your smoke detectors once a decade, and buy new.

Really?

That’s what they say. Continue reading Post #1946: Now the government is coming for my smoke detectors.

Post G24-003, addendum 2: Starting ginger root, second try.

 

 

The goal here is to force some ginger root.  To do that, you put the root in a warm, moist (micro) environment, and encourage it to sprout.  Typically, you do that warm-moist thing indoors, with a planting tray on a “seedling heat mat”.

On my first attempt, I ended up cooking my ginger roots.  Per just-prior post.  Soil temps approached 110F, in what I think was its thermal steady state.

This post is about my second attempt at sprouting ginger root. Continue reading Post G24-003, addendum 2: Starting ginger root, second try.

Post #1945: Microplastic, not sure I much care about it.

 

Let me give you the argument, to see if you buy it.  (Read Post #1941 and Post #1942 to see where I’m coming from on this issue.)

1:  We’ve been using plastic, including artificial fibers, in the U.S., for a long time.  2:  Therefore, best guess, whatever microplastic does to humans, it has already done that to us.  Plus, 3: personally, as it turns out, I live in a microplastic-fiber-rich environment.  I think.

Regarding that last point:  The wall-to-wall carpet that came with my house is polyester fiber.  Not only do I walk around on the cut-off ends of pieces of artificial-fiber yarn whenever I change locations within my home, the fiber is polyester, which typically gets fingered as potentially harmful microplastic.

My guess is that this surely (surely!) generates a microplastic-fiber-fragment-rich living environment.  (But to be clear, there’s only a bit of research to support that, as outlined in this reference.)  And there are a lot of people in the same boat.  A lot of folks who spend a lot of hours in places with synthetic-fiber wall-to-wall carpet.

The upshot is that if microplastic from polyester fibers is a major health hazard, even if that only shows up late in life via a cancer effect, you’d think we’d have noticed it by now.  We’ve had a lot of time and variation in chronic exposure to do so.

Restated:   If there were significant human health effects from typical exposures to microplastic, you’d think we’d have noticed by now.

But how, from this viewpoint, can you explain why we are suddenly seeing and hearing so much about microplastic? How do you explain that, if it has, as you say, been there all along?

My guess?  I guess that we’re now seeing it because we’re now looking for it.

One guess for the uptick is a change in or diffusion of microplastic-detection technology.  The best studies seem to use some fairly exotic equipment, something I take to be a microscopic infrared spectrometer.  Maybe those have gotten cheaper, or maybe it’s just the case that more people have access to the required equipment.  Alternatively, other studies appear to use minimal equipment, but may require significant time.  The publishable standard of measurement is so low (particles per liter) that maybe a lab with the right filter paper (and a microscope and some lab assistants) can quantify microplastic-in-blank to a publishable degree.

(I think that this last point, more than anything else, explains the view that microplastic is an inexhaustible source of clickbait, via finding microplastic in any (e.g.) bodily fluid or organ that you care to examine closely enough.)

A second guess for the uptick is that we now bother to look for microplastics, in both the human and natural environments.

One the one hand, maybe we look more often because “microplastic” is clickbait-du-jour.   An internet-fed fad.  A response to economic rewards for attracting eyes to your article.  After all, every N days, somebody finds microplastic in some new (and yuck-inducing) substance and/or bodily fluid and/or internal organ.  And that makes great clickbait.  Particularly for the closet doomscrollers.

On the other hand, microplastic is part of a legitimate concern about plastic in the environment, overall.  I mean, how many times have we heard this story, only to find out it has an unhappy ending:

There's this stuff?  We use a lot of it.  But it doesn't decompose well.  

So, where does it end up?

But in any case, I’m betting that any human health impacts of microplastic are  pretty subtle.  Not that I’ve done any research on that, but just from a feeling that we’ve been living with plastic for so long, I think we’d have seen something by now.

OTOH, I live in a house with polyester wall-to-wall.  So take this FWIW.

 

Post G24-003, addendum 1: Slow-roasted ginger root.

 

Yield:  Approximately one-half pound roasted ginger root.

Preparation time: Ten minutes.

Cook time:  Two weeks.

  • Purchase a few ounces of organic ginger root.
  • Wash and cut into bite-sized chunks.
  • Sprinkle with copious amounts of potting soil.
  • Water to taste.
  • Place on seedling heat mat.
  • Bake at ~110F for one to two weeks, or until shoots fail to develop.

Ready, Fire, Aim.

I started some ginger and turmeric plants about two weeks ago (Post G24-003).  This is the first time I’ve tried growing these.

For me, they fall into the same garden category as potatoes and sweet potatoes.  They  are roots/tubers that you start by sprouting indoors, before moving them out to the garden much later in the year.  The sole difference, really, is that these will need to spend several months as houseplants before going out into the garden.

The potatoes are doing fine — see prior post.

The sweet potatoes aren’t expected to start sprouting for another couple of months.

But ginger and turmeric sprouts are now conspicuous by their absence, nearly two weeks after planting. So I decided to see what was up.

Turns out, the cheap seed-starting heat mat I bought from Amazon last year was a bit too powerful for the task.  I thought it might warm the soil enough for to prod these into growth — maybe 80F or so, from my roughly 60F floor. Never bothered to check it.  I figured that, if anything, that cheap little mat wouldn’t cut it, and so this tray of soil might remain too cool for the ginger and turmeric to sprout.

But now I see that I have more-or-less cooked those roots, over the past two weeks.  What felt warm to the touch was actually around 110F where the roots sit.  Pretty sure that’s lethally warm.

Another twenty degrees and I can claim I was trying to compost them.

In hindsight, expecting that off-the-shelf heat mat to be just perfect, for this situation, was kind of dumb.

So it’s back to the grocery store for another few dollars’ worth of ginger and turmeric.

And off to rummage in the garage for some sort of lamp dimmer or similar, to allow me to control the temperature of these heat mats.  Pretty sure that anything that will control a small electrical resistance load will work.  That, and a thermometer, and I ought to be able to make this work.

 

Post G24-002, addendum 2. Chilling the chitting.

I’ve been chitting a batch of potatoes at room temperature for about ten days now.  About half have started to sprout vigorously.  About half have not.

This is mostly a function of potato variety.  I’d say more about that if I could, but these are from bags of grocery-store organic potatoes.  (Organic, to avoid potatoes sprayed with a potent sprout inhibitor.)  The grocery store is a cheap source for potatoes for planting, but a downside is that all I know about the varieties is “gold” and “red”. Because that’s what it said on the bags.

The early-sprouter is “gold”.  This may be a result of some Yukon Gold potato somewhere in its family tree.  Or it may be an actual Yukon Gold, for all I know.  (Yukon being a pretty good indication that the potato was marketed to growers with cold climates and short growing seasons.)

Or maybe none of the above.  The exact variety doesn’t matter.   What matters is that all of these potatoes end up chitting at about the same rate.  I want them all equally ready to be planted, at the same time.

Ideally, these will all be in the same sprouted state, a month from now, on St. Patrick’s day (March 17).  That’s the traditional day for planting potatoes and peas in this area (Zone 7).

I have to slow down the ones that have already sprouted, both to avoid the sprouts getting too big, and to let the others catch up.  The ones that haven’t really gotten started yet will remain at room temperature.  The ones that are well on their way are now in a box, to be placed in a cooler, non-freezing location, such as the garage.  The nights are still getting down into the 20’s F here, so I don’t think the sprouts will survive on my back porch.

This is all part of this year’s chit-versus-no-chit experiment.  A similar number of potatoes sits in the fridge, not sprouting, in a bag with “DO NOT EAT” written on it.  The fridge potatoes are destined to be the control group in this experiment.  Assuming all goes well, sometime in July I’ll see whether chitting made any (statistically) significant difference in potato yield.

Post #1944: Chevy Bolt one-month review

 

  • I bought a used car.
  • And to gas, au revoir.
  • This is favored, by far,
  • By the energy czar.
  • If the range is sub-par?
  • Well, I don’t travel far.
  • Not to Ulannbataar, or far-off Zanzibar,
  • Just my local bazaar.

[Thumpity-thump.]

  • So it’s no blazing star,
  • No de-luxe Ja-gu-ar.
  • I don’t know it from NASCAR
  • Or races stock-car.
  • So it’s not caviar
  • With a Cuban cigar.
  • It is more Hershey-bar.
  • Middle-class avatar.
  • But I set a low bar.
  • Been no glitches so far.
  • And it isn’t bizarre.
  • Like some daft minicar.

[Thumpity-thump.]

  • In mood most noire?
  • Yearn for God’s abattoir?
  • Then grab hold of the busbar.
  • Forsake CPR.
  • But for now, NPR
  • And some padding lumbar
  • Will together debar
  • Good Saint Pete, registrar.

In prose

Bought a 2020 Chevy Bolt about a month ago.  Just over 5K miles on it.  Just under $19K with taxes and tags, should end up under $15K after the tax rebate.

It’s the best used car I’ve ever bought.  But — trust me on this — that isn’t saying much.

Good:

  • About 5 miles per kilowatt-hour, as driven.  Much better than EPA, and almost on a par with my wife’s 2021 Prius Prime.
  • Low C02.  Where I live (and charge), driving 150 miles in this car produces about the same amount of C02 as burning one gallon of gasoline.  I have years, paying back the C02 that went into making all those batteries.  But in terms of operating C02 emissions, that’s quite low.
  • Comfortable:  Lot of front leg room, driver position is much higher off the ground than a Prius, which makes this easy to get into and out of, and gives good visibility (for a car, that is).  The driver’s seat fits my frame (6′) well.
  • Zippy.  Very zippy when you need to zip.  Lots of acceleration off-the-line.
  • Plugs right into the wall.  Level I (120-volt) charging works just fine.  An overnight charge at 12 amps adds maybe 75 miles of range.
  • Surprisingly nice sound system.  I have what I’m pretty sure is the stock radio, and the sound quality is very good.

The neutral:

  • Came with just one fob.  That’s really an issue with buying it used.  But, it was surprisingly easy to buy and in-the-car program some new fobs.
  • No spare or jack.  But, it was easy enough to locate and buy a jack and spare that should work with this car.
  • All told, a couple-hundred bucks fixed both issues.

The not-so-good:

  • Bumpy ride.  Short wheelbase and tight suspension give it a jittery ride.  I probably wouldn’t notice it but my own suspension isn’t all that tight, so I tend to jiggle more than I like, as I drive.
  • Have to pay attention.  This car has tight, responsive steering and a somewhat wide turning circle, both of which were a surprise, given how small the car is bumper-to-bumper.  (This is a foot-and-a-half shorter than my wife’s 2021 Prius Prime, but has a wider turning radius.)  Both of these mean that you can’t just rest a couple of fingers on the steering wheel, and cruise down the road.  You actually have to grab the wheel and steer the car.

Summary

All my life, when faced with a major energy-using investment, I’ve opted for the most efficient thing I could reasonably get.  And, so far, I’ve never been sorry I did that.

This car fits that pattern.  As long as it doesn’t fail prematurely, I am more than satisfied with it.  It’s all the car I need and it’s about as C02-efficient as a car will likely ever be in my lifetime.

I don’t think I’m going to look back, a few years from now, and say “oops”.  For a used car, that’s about all I can ask for.

Plus, I can now sneer at all those old-fashioned hybrid cars on the road.

Post #1943: Microplastic, doing a burn test for carpet fiber

Most internet sources assure me that only four fibers are likely to be found in the pile of modern wall-to-wall carpet. A handful of sources add a fifth (acrylic).  Perusal of current offerings at Home Depot adds a sixth (triexta).

  • Wool
  • Nylon
  • Polyester
  • Polyolefin (including polypropylene and polyethylene)
  • Triexta
  • Acrylic

I think I can plausibly narrow it down to three, in my case, by eliminating these:

Triexta appears to be new enough that it’s not going to be the fiber in my 20-year-old wall-to-wall carpet.

Acrylic appears rare enough, in wall-to-wall carpeting, that I can’t actually find any roll-type carpet made with acrylic fiber currently offered for sale.

Polyolefin fibers appear to be used only in the cheapest carpet materials.  At Home Depot, that’s what their self-stick carpet tiles are made of.  That’s not going to be the basis for my well-wearing 20-year-old wall-to-wall.

N.B. 1:  SD means solution dyed, that is, that is, the plastic itself is dyed before the fibers are spun from it.  As opposed to dying the fibers after-the-fact.  This apparently is by far the preferred method for durability in modern carpeting.

N.B. 2:  Olefin (a.k.a. polyolefin) is a polymer (long molecule made from simple building blocks) where the basic building blocks are straight-chain alkanes (carbon and hydrogen and nothing else).  If you make it out of propane feedstock, you get polypropylene.  If you make it out of ethane feedstock, you get polyethylene.  I assume they use polyolefin when they make the fiber out of whatever’s handy, or from a mix of feedstocks.


Burn test

The most commonly-suggested way to tell what a carpet is made of is to burn (a bit of) it.  Condensing the guidance from this site:

Wool barely burns, extinguishes itself, leaves ash, and smells like burning hair.

Nylon burns well, with a smokeless blue flame, leaves a gray/black blob of melted plastic.  And stinks.  (I’ve sealed the ends of enough nylon rope to know that.  It’s your classic burning plastic smell, but does not stink quite so badly as the smell of burning electronics, which is typically the smell of burning PVC (plastic wire insulation).

Polyester burns well, with a smoky orange flame, sputters and drips as it burns, leaves a shiny plastic bead, and smells “sweet” as it burns.  (Really?)

Pretty sure this carpet isn’t wool.  So it boils down to burning a bit of it, and seeing if it stinks.  If so, it’s nylon.  If not, polyester.

What I didn’t realize is that you need a pretty good chunk of fibers to be able to do this test.  First time I tried it, I had a fluffy bit of fibers, and they simply shrank away from the flame.  Second time I got an entire piece of yarn, twisted it tightly, and got it to burn.

Results:  Sputtering flame, no ash, and no stink.  I’m pretty sure my carpet is polyester.  I could refresh my memory with a bit of nylon cord, or burn a bit of known polyester fabric, but I think this all makes sense.  Plus, burning nylon really stinks.  Like “don’t do that inside” stinks.  And while this did not smell “sweet”, this basically didn’t smell like much at all.  Which pretty much rules out nylon.

I may try some different test, if I can find one.

But odds are, given that this is 20-year-old decent-grade grade wall-to-wall carpet, with some worn spots, clearly made of synthetic, and the fiber burns without a stink, this is polyester.


Conclusion

The entire floor of my house is covered with the cut ends of polyester yarn.  And has been for the past 16 years or so.

All this time, not only did this not bother me, heck, it was downright comfy to walk on.

But now that my eyes have been opened, I see this as a comfy source of microplastic polyester fibers.

Should I care about that, or not?  Or do anything differently, now that I know?

Time to let this percolate a bit more.

Post #1942: Microplastic, some more targeted questions.

 

In my last post, I pinned down what I did and didn’t know about microplastic.  And, while I don’t (yet) think this spells the end of civilization, what I learned has given me pause.

With the just-prior post as background, I spend this post homing in on the questions that I should be asking.

They are:

1)  What are my likely sources of greatest exposure?

2)  How does this stuff break down?  What is the half-life of microplastic, particularly fibers, in various environments (including human tissue).

2B)  Are we seeing this topic frequently in the popular press because microplastic has been building up in the environment (that is, it’s now a much greater hazard than in the immediate past), or because we’re looking for it and/or we now have the means to find it?

3)  Are nano-scale (really tiny) fibers a particular concern?

I’m only going to address the first question, in this post.

Understand my background as a health economist.  Surgeons have been implanting chunks of plastic and metal into people for more than 70 years.  (The first pacemaker implant took place in the late 1950s.  Modern metal-and-plastic hip replacements go back somewhat further.)  So the right materials, properly chosen, won’t interact with the body at all.  OTOH, there’s a long list of materials that were tried and rejected, because they were not so inert.

So my prejudice is that incorporating random bits of plastic into your body is probably a bad idea.  The only question is, how bad is it?  And can you avoid it?


Wall-to-wall paranoia

The first question to ask for any environmental health hazard is, 1)  What are my likely sources of greatest exposure?

For airborne fibers, if I walk through it logically, my greatest source of exposure almost certainly has to be the wall-to-wall carpeting in my home.  It’s indoors, it contains a huge amount of fiber, it’s clearly synthetic fiber, and it is constantly being abraded by walking on it.  And it’s “clipped”, that is, every strand of carpet yarn has been sheared off, so that it’s an entire floor surface consisting of the cut ends of synthetic yarn.  In my house, every floor surface save bathroom, kitchen, and foyer is covered in the stuff.

For me, it’s a big, fiber-generating surface that I shuffle my feet across, every time I change locations within my house.

Reading up on it, I’m guessing it has maybe 60 ounces of carpet pile per square yard, a.k.a., “face weight” 60 carpeting.  Doing the math, that means my house contains somewhere around 700 pounds of carpet fibers.  In the form of short pieces of yarn, with their cut ends exposed, for me to walk on.  I’m pretty sure that outweighs all other cloth in this household, by a wide margin.  True, on any given day, most of it just sits there.  But so does most of the clothing in my closet.

I can only think of two things arguing against this being my greatest source of airborne synthetic fiber exposure.

The first is that, whatever it’s made of (I have no clue), it’s made to resist abrasion.  It was here when we moved into this house in 2007, and it looks about the same now as it did then.  (To within my ability to tell.  What I mean is, no obvious new wear spots have developed in the past 15 years.)

The second is a potential “inverse-square-law” for inhaled fiber concentrations.  That is, for a given rate of fiber shedding, the closer you are to the source of the airborne fibers, the more of them you may be likely to inhale.  If that’s true, then the fibers shed from stuff that’s right under your nose — shirts, sweaters, scarves, coats — might matter more than the fibers shed at your feet.

And if I put all that together, I come up with the obvious conclusion that crawling around on wall-to-wall carpet may not be smart.  Not that I’m planning to do that any time soon, if I have any say in it.  But the point being that having infants crawl around on your wall-to-wall carpeting might require a rethink.  Putting that differently, if you’re not worried about your kids crawling around on wall-to-wall carpet, I don’t see much point in being worried about this topic at all.  Because, outside of a factory, it’s hard for me to imagine where you could get a higher concentration of inhaled artificial fibers than in crawling across modern wall-to-wall carpeting.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

In my case, I’m going to start by trying to figure out what my carpet is made of.  It was here when we moved in, and I have no clue what the fiber is.  Nylon is a good guess, and everything I read says that nylon, in particular, is a fiber that you’d like to avoid breathing in, owing to what it produces as it slowly breaks down.

And I may be a little more diligent in vacuuming.  Given that the vacuum (in theory) has a HEPA-level filter on it, that (in theory) couldn’t hurt.


Conclusion:  What to do when you’re flying blind

From the prior post, it was absolutely clear that routinely inhaling a lot of nylon fiber is bad for you.  There’s even a name for the resulting condition — flock worker’s lung.

But so what?  Inhaling high levels of almost any fiber or powder is bad for you, be it coal dust, silicon dust, cotton dust, copier toner, wood dust, or what have you.

It’s still an open question as to whether or not there are identifiable health effects from absorption of microplastic at levels commonly found in the environment.

But, from my own perspective, given how picky medical device manufacturers are about the materials they will use for implantable medical devices, it’s a pretty good bet that inhaling and ingesting random plastic bits and fibers is probably not good for you.  How bad, exactly, we can argue about.  But almost surely not a good thing.

My first thought, in a situation like this, is to test for it.  Measure it.  See what my exposure is.

But I don’t think that’s possible, practically speaking.  I already have a “PM 2.5” meter, bought in response to the Canadian forest fires of 2023.  That almost uniformly shows lower airborne particulate levels inside my house than outside.  And that responds to all kinds of particulates, of which the tiny minority is likely to be microplastic fibers.

So this is a case of flying blind.  I can’t tell how much I’m exposed to and I have no clear idea what harm that exposure might do, anyway.

In that case, I can at least try to identify the easily-avoidable sources of microplastic, and so reduce my exposure until better information develops.  I might even go so far as to change what I buy, to avoid funding the production of even more items that shed microplastic.  (E.g., avoid synthetics in my next batch of shirts).  But I’d want to look at the full implications of that first.

So I’m stuck at the “identify my exposures” stage.  My water filter appears to take care of most of the microplastic that might make it into my tap water.  (Though I have no idea what it does with the very smallest particles).  And for airborne fiber, my biggest exposure has to be wall-to-wall carpet.  But this house was built for it, and replacing the existing wall-to-wall with hard-surface flooring would be ludicrously expensive.

Time to step back and let this percolate a bit.