I hate flying. And yet, my wife and I will soon be taking a flight on a Boeing 737-Max-9, from Virginia to the West Coast and back.
To get in the right mood for the flight, I’m going to calculate just how much this adds to my carbon footprint for the year. And then start on the path to doing some penance for it. If that’s even feasible. Continue reading Post #1953: Penance for flying?
In the prior post, I finally tracked down and read the Commonwealth of Virginia’s plans for fully de-carbonizing its electrical grid by mid-century. It boils down to replacing the existing natural-gas fired electrical capacity with a combination of wind, solar, and … great big batteries. You need the batteries because solar and wind are intermittent power sources.
That’s my reading of the law.
Literally, the law calls for the construction of “energy storage” facilities. While there are ways of storing electrical energy other than batteries, practically speaking, I’m pretty sure that means batteries of some type.
Source: Wikipedia
For example, Dominion (Virginia’s main electric utility) already owns the largest pumped-storage facility in the world, the Bath County Pumped Storage Station (shown above, per Wikipedia). That site stores energy by using electricity to pump water uphill from one reservoir to another, and then generates electricity as needed by allowing that water to flow downhill through generating turbines.
Sites suitable for pumped-storage facilities are few and far between. And other alternatives to batteries tend to be grossly inefficient (e.g., converting electricity to hydrogen, and back again). So it’s not beyond reason to expect that most of the energy storage that is required to be in the pipeline by 2035 will be battery-based storage of some sort.
The point of this post is to ask whether that seems even remotely feasible and plausible.
And, surprisingly — to me at least — the answer is yes. Yes, it does seem feasible to produce the required battery-based storage in that timeframe. Producing and installing (my guess for) the amount of battery capacity required to be in the works by 2035 would be the equivalent of adding grid-connected battery capacity required for manufacturing 400,000 Chevy-Bolt-size electric vehicles. That much, over the course of more than a decade. Where Virginia’s current stock of EVs is about 56,000 registered EVs.
Roughly speaking, on a per-year basis, those grid-based batteries will add as much to the demand for batteries as the current manufacture of EVs does. Given the rapid growth in EVs, and concomitant expansion of world battery manufacturing capacity, filling that amount of demand, in that timeframe, seems completely feasible to me.
That involves some serious guesswork on my part, due to the way the law was written (next section). But if that’s anywhere in the ballpark, then yeah, then Virginia’s path toward a carbon-free grid isn’t outlandish at all.
1. By December 31, 2035, each Phase I Utility shall petition the Commission for necessary approvals to construct or acquire 400 megawatts of energy storage capacity. ... 2. By December 31, 2035, each Phase II Utility shall petition the Commission for necessary approvals to construct or acquire 2,700 megawatts of energy storage capacity.
Source: Commonwealth of Virginia statute, emphasis mine.
Virginia law appears to call for our public utilities to build or buy at least 3,100 megawatts of electrical storage capacity as part of this process.
Those of you who are well-versed on the difference between energy and power will have already spotted the problem. Megawatts is not a measure of electrical storage capacity. So the law is written oddly, or possibly incorrectly, no matter how you slice it.
Power is a rate of energy flow per unit of time. In particular, for electricity, the watt is a unit of power, not an amount of energy. The electrical unit of energy is the watt-hour.
E.g., the brightness of an old-fashioned incandescent light was determined by its wattage. But the amount of energy it used was based on its wattage, times the amount of time it was turned on, or total watt-hours used to light it.
When in doubt, just remember that you pay your public utility for the energy you use. And in Virginia, we pay about 12.5 cents per thousand watt-hours. (A.k.a. kilowatt-hours. Or KWH.)
Returning to the Bath County pumped storage facility referenced above, it has a peak power output of 3,000 megawatts, and a total storage of 24,000 megawatt-hours. Doing the math, if it starts out full, that facility can run at full power for eight hours before all the water has been drained from the upper reservoir.
But if that pumped-storage facility had been built with an upper reservoir ten times that size, or one-tenth that size, it would still produce 3,000 megawatts. But under those scenarios, the total energy storage could be anything from 1,200 to 120,000 megawatt-hours.
In other word, the section of Virginia statute that specifies the energy storage requirements does not actually specify an amount of energy storage. It specifies the (instantaneous) amount of power that those facilities must provide (megawatts).
I don’t know whether that’s a mistake, or whether they actually had something in mind. The nomenclature — megawatts — is what is used to size power plants. But that makes sense. Power plants produce electrical power, by transforming something else (coal, gas, sunlight, wind) into electricity. The assumption with gas and coal-fire plants is that they could produce that power for an indefinitely long period of time.
By contrast, electrical storage facilities don’t produce power, they simply store and release it. Telling me the amount of (instantanous) power they can release says nothing about how much energy they can store. It says nothing about how long they can keep up that power flow. Unlike gas and coal-fired power plants, there’s an expectation that they can only keep up that rate of power release for a relatively short period of time.
Beyond this confusion between units of power and units of energy, something about the energy storage part of the statute still does not quite add up. Per the U.S. Energy Information Agency, Virginia’s grid has a peak summertime output of about 30,000 megawatts (reference). So the Commonwealth seems to be requiring that new energy storage facilities have to be able to supply about 10% of peak load. Which, along with the existing Bath pumped-storage facility, would mean that total storage capacity would be able to supply 20% of peak summertime load. But for no more than eight hours (the amount of time that the existing Bath facility can run flat-out at 3000 megawatts.)
By contrast, the fossil-fuel-fired equipment that must be retired by 2045/2050 accounts for about 65% of current generating capacity, as of 2020. Acknowledging that nighttime demand is below peak daytime time, it still seems like a breezeless summer night would still result in more electricity demand than the Virginia grid could produce.
So they’re cutting it pretty close, that’s all I’m saying. Sure, we’re on a multi-state grid. Sure power can flow in from out-of-state. But if we’re having still and sultry summer nights, it’s a pretty good bet that all our neighboring states are as well.
I guess I should take the 3,100 as a minimum. Nothing bars out electric utilities from producing more than that.
So let me assume a storage capacity, since the law does not actually specify one. And let me do that by patterning the new facilities on the characteristics of the existing Bath pumped-storage facility.
Let me then assume that the 3,100 megawatts of “storage” means that the new storage facilities have to match the existing Bath facility, and produce at that rate of power for eight hours. That would require about 25,000 megawatt-hours’ worth of battery capacity.
My Chevy Bolt, by contrast, has about 60 KWH of battery storage. Doing the arithmetic, and rounding, that’s enough battery capacity to manufacture 400,000 Chevy Bolts.
Virginia already has about 56,000 EVs registered in-state (reference). So that would be enough battery capacity to produce a seven-fold increase in EVs on the road, in Virginia, in a more-than-decade timespan.
Absent some huge unforseen bottleneck in the current ramp-up in battery production, that seems completely feasible. Not cheap. But clearly feasible.
It’s fashionable to say that we aren’t doing anything about global warming.
While I would agree that we aren’t doing enough, and we aren’t doing it fast enough, the planned conversion of the electrical grid to carbon-free electricity (in just under half the U.S. states) is an example of a material change that is in the works.
Source: National Conference of State Legislatures.
There’s pretty clearly a red-state/blue-state divide in plans for a carbon-free grid. And it’s possible that the next time Republicans take power in Virginia, or nationally, they’ll put a stop to grid de-carbonization. In exactly the same way that they killed the Obama Clean Power Plan. That was a set of EPA rules that would require all states to have some plan in place for reducing the C02 emissions from their electrical grids. In effect, it was a national plan for decarbonizing the grid, with states given the freedom to implement those reduction targets as they saw fit. Republicans did their best to block it, and Republicans eventually successfully killed it once Trump took power (reference).
When you look at the details, the statement that we are unwilling to do anything about global warming is not true. In the U.S., in terms of Federal and state policies that could matter, Republicans are unwilling to do anything about it.
I have to admit, at first blush, Virginia’s plans for decarbonizing its grid seem kind of nuts. But when I looked in detail, well, it’s not so nutty after all. In the grand scheme of things, what’s nutty is all the states — in white and brown above — that have absolutely no plans, whatsoever, to address this issue.
And if so, can Virginia copy them?
The short answer is, yes and no.
Yes, they seem to have a carbon-free electrical grid. They are the only state in the U.S. to be able to make that claim.
But not, we can’t copy them. They are the gateway for hydroelectric power generated in Quebec to enter the U.S. And they have significant hydroelectric power generated within the state.
They’ve done other things as well. But hydroelectric power is the backbone of Vermont’s carbon-free grid. And that’s not going to help Virginia meet its 2045 goal of having its own carbon-free electrical grid.
Instead, weirdly enough, near as I can tell, without explicitly saying so, Virginia has made a big bet on batteries as the backbone of our system. In 2020, our legislature laid out an explicit path for converting our generation to wind and solar. But unlike hydroelectric, those are intermittent sources — they require something to store the energy. Rationally, the same legislation requires construction of specific amounts of “energy storage facilities” to match.
The legislation doesn’t spell it out, but near as I can tell, with current technology, the only thing on the table with the potential to store that much energy is batteries. Big batteries, for sure. At least, at the scale and distribution required for an entire state’s electrical grid.
I guess the takeaway is this: I thought I was taking a big step by buying an EV. Running my car off batteries seemed like a real leap forward. But, as it turns out, twenty years from now, Virginia’s entire electrical grid is going to be running off batteries, half the time.
Or, at least, that’s how I read the plan, as laid out in Commonwealth of Virginia statute, Section 56-585.5. Generation of electricity from renewable and zero carbon sources
Continue reading Post #1952: Does Vermont really have a carbon-free electrical grid?
This post walks through the process of replacing the “non-replaceable” battery inside a cheap cylindrical dashcam, like the one pictured above.
It’s not hard to do. I did two identical cameras. The second one took about 20 minutes. Both repairs were successful.
You don’t even have to read this post to figure it out. You can get the gist of the steps by scrolling through the pictures below.
If I learned anything from this, it’s that if I ever buy another dashcam, I’m going to be sure it’s the type that uses a capacitor instead of a battery.
Continue reading Post #1951: Replacing the battery in a cheap cylindrical dashcam.
My advice: Don’t shelter your bee hotel for the winter. Let it freeze along with everything else. This post explains why.
Last year, for the first time, I hung up a bee hotel. This is a set of nesting tubes designed to make it easier for solitary/native bees, such as mason bees, to reproduce. It seemed to be quite successful, per the picture below. Ultimately I ended up with about 15 nesting tubes filled.
I left that up through the summer and fall, and, per common internet advice, moved it to a sheltered location once winter set in. In this case, I moved it to the inside of a detached, totally unheated garage.
Moving a bee hotel to a sheltered location, for the winter, is probably not a good idea. Despite that being widely suggested by seeming experts. That’s because if your sheltered area is even a little warmer than the outdoors, I think it entices the bees to emerge too early.
That’s what appears to have happened this year. For my particular Home Depot bee hotel, the nesting tubes that were filled by mason bees last spring …
… are all now empty.
Consistent with that, my wife noticed some bees on her crocuses this morning. Which was odd enough to stand out. Because, among other things, not much is blooming right now except crocus and daffodil. And it’s not all that warm out yet. The upshot is that it seems a little early to be seeing bees out and about.
I’m betting that those were “my” bees. And I’m betting that I did them no favors by (inadvertently) waking them up too early, this year. If I put up a bee hotel again this year, I’m just going to leave it alone. I’m now of the opinion that bees ought to overwinter at exactly the temperatures they’ll face out-of-doors.
Experts say that mason bees should emerge when blossoms are open, and daytime temperatures consistently reach 55F (reference).
By those benchmarks — blooms and temperature — my bees are at least three weeks too early. That’s based on these observations.
Blossoms: Slim pickings. At present, only the crocuses, daffodils, and maybe a scattered other few species blooming. There are a few cherry trees here and there, in this area, in blossom. For reference, the earliest recorded peak bloom date for the national cherry trees is March 15, with April 1 being a typical date (reference March 15 to the National Park Service). Separately, a harbinger of spring in many areas is forsythia, but our forsythia isn’t even close to blooming yet.
Temperatures: Still too cold. We’ve had a couple of days where the high exceeded 55F, but those are still few and far between. We are not consistently 55F and higher. But we’re closing in on that.
Source: Weather underground.
And based on our historical weather averages, you wouldn’t expect consistent 55F and higher days for another two-three weeks or so.
Source: Analysis of NOAA weather data for Dulles Airport (Sterling, VA).
All of that, plus my experience last year, tells me that my little batch of bees emerged the better part of a month too early. Call it three weeks, minimum.
Finally, these bees don’t live very long. They emerge, eat, mate, and die within a span of a few weeks. They’re now out of sync with their species in general, and they’re going to be dead before the rest of the local mason bee population emerges. So, if they all survive, their procreation will be as described in the section title.
I’m not a bee expert, but I’ve spent a lot of time observing the habits of bugs, since I took up gardening during the pandemic. The one universal rule is that everything in the garden — plants and bugs alike — operates on temperature, and on degree-days.
By keeping this bee hotel in an unheated garage, I kept it warmer than the ambient outdoor temperatures. I suspect that, one way or the other, this caused my bees to emerge earlier than is optimal, for their species.
If I do this again this year, I’m going to leave the bee hotel outside all winter. The bee larvae may not much like the cold, but they need to stay in sync with outdoor temperatures, in order to emerge at the right time.
Source; All the pictures for this post are from Gencraft.com AI, with the prompt of “a bee, wearing a stocking cap and scarf”.
Edit: In the end, I gave it another go, doing it better this time, as explained in Post #G24-008. This year, my bee hotels are ugly, but properly constructed (closed-ended tubes roughly 6″ long), as shown above. Well over half the tubes are now filled, as of this writing (4/22/2024). I’m just going to leave them be until its time to take them down and put them in an emergence box next spring.
Original post follows.
Am I going to put up bee hotel this year? Not sure, but at this point, I’d say, no not. Probably not going to put up another bee hotel this year. For the following reasons.
First, these bees don’t pollinate my garden. They’re out and about early in the year, and they are gone by the time my garden crops or flowers need pollination. So when you hear about “attracting bees to your garden to get better yields”, they ain’t talking about mason bees. The earliest-blossoming food I grow is peas, and my recollection is that mason bees do their thing well before (e.g.) the peas blossom. Apparently they are good for orchards. Which would make sense, as fruit trees blossom early. (And mason bees are orchard bees, or orchard bees are mason bees, or something, I’m not entirely sure. I don’t have an orchard.)
Second, I’m trying to grow the kinds of plants that (the internet tells me) make good natural nesting sites for these bees. But that whole enterprise is looking a bit sketchy at the moment. I’ve started down that path, by not mowing my wildflower beds yet.
You’d think, well, that’s got to be dead easy, just grow some plants and leave them. Just don’t mow.
But its not that simple.
Mason bees need medium-sized hollow stalks to nest in. (Or equivalent.) That seems right by my experience so far. Sturdy annuals will sometimes leave behind big, ugly stems. Looks about the right size.
But that’s the point where anything ceases to be easy.
In a nutshell, you have to keep them for two years, they’re ugly, they get in the way, and you have to defend them from the deer. I’m not going to go through the details. I can boil it down to this.
Do I really want to use my time and attention to try to protect some ugly weed stalks from ravenous end-of-winter marauding deer? For a couple of years, yet (the literal same batch of stalks, I mean.) And somehow work around them, while prepping the beds for this year’s flowers. And in the end, really have no clue whether they are effective or not.
I have a lot of sunk cost in this whole bee-hotel thing, not in the sense of buying the Home Depot wooden bee hotel, but mostly in the time and effort gathering and cutting bamboo, in anticipation of annul replacement of the nesting tubes in that hotel.
In addition, rehabbing that Home Depot hotel for re-use could be a fair bit of work. I should replace the bamboo nesting tubes each year. This year — with the off-the-shelf unit — that means breaking the existing glued-in tubes out first.
I think I’ll see how hard the rehab is, first, then decide on next steps after that.
But as of right now, I’m not seeing a huge benefit to anybody or anything in being a mason bee hotel keeper for another year. I should let them find their equilibrium vis-a-vis the local flora. Might tweak the flora to try to help them out, if I can figure out how to do it. But I think I’m going to punt on maintaining a manufactured bee hotel.
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.
[Thumpity-thump.]
[Thumpity-thump.]
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Seems like every week I read another story about microplastics.
At some point in all that reading, it dawned on me that I didn’t actually know what microplastic is. Sure, micro meaning small, and plastic, meaning plastic. But that’s as deep as my understanding went.
Turns out, there are good reasons for my confusion. The term “microplastic” is used for everything from shreds of plastic you can see, down to nano-scale bits that you’d need an electron microscope to see. From the plastic chips left over from recycling, down to aerosol-sized microscopic fibers. The microplastic in your tap water (fibers, mostly polyester) really isn’t the same stuff as the microplastic in your bottled water (particles, mostly bits of PETE or HDPE plastic).
Let me narrow down my interest to microplastic in my tap water. Or maybe, microplastic in the air I breathe.
What’s that all about? What is it, exactly? How much is there? Will my water filter remove it? How about an air filter? Is it harmful in the concentrations I’m routinely exposed to?
Weirdly, for something that seems to be in the news a lot, I could not find out much in the way of hard facts. In this post, I at least begin to pin down why I’m not finding answers to those basic questions.
Other than the fact that my Brita water filter promises to remove most of it. Whatever it is. I think.
Source: Brita.com, data for the “elite” filter, not their standard filter.
The popular press on this issue yields a coherent if superficial story about the environmental danger of microplastic.
It’s invisible. Municipal tap water, for example, typically contains bits of plastic that are too small to be seen with the naked eye. It is not present in enough density to give the water a cloudy or turbid appearance. Nor does it affect the smell or taste of the water.
It’s everywhere. These bits are too small to be filtered out completely by typical municipal water plants. And once you start looking for it, you can find some amount of microplastic almost everywhere. Not just tap water, but: Bottled water. Bottled soda. Even in things that are bottled in glass bottles. Animal tissue. Breast milk. Rivers. The oceans. Fish. The soil. The air. The clouds.
(Ah, yeah, in addition to eating and drinking it, you breathe it in the form of floating dust particles.)
It might be bad for you. I haven’t yet come across hard evidence one way or the other, at levels seen by the average U.S. resident, but the most common analogy is with asbestos. Exposure to asbestos fibers is associated with cancer presumably because the fibers were small enough to enter cells and perturb DNA replication. A lot of microplastic is in the form of fibers, some of which are likely small enough to enter cells. So this is a plausible if unproven concern.
And that combination makes it hard to sort fact from fiction. Look at the phrases in red above. In the internet-driven world, you know what means. It means that “microplastic” is an ideal and practically inexhaustible source of click-bait. Between the people who make their living out of scaring you, and the people make their living out of mindlessly repeating stuff they gathered off the internet, let’s just say that the facts appear thin on the ground.
On top of which, everybody hates on plastic. Even as we, collectively, use vast amounts of it. So you’ve got some degree of axe-grinding dressed as fact-finding, thrown into the mix.
To be clear, I’m not dismissing this as a threat. This, even though our public health authorities don’t seem to have any handle on it. But that has happened before (think, leaded gasoline). Sometimes widespread harm is only understood well after-the-fact.
Three things make me hesitate before I freak out over microplastic.
Thing 1: It’s not as if plastic is a new thing. We’ve been using lots of plastic, for a long time, here in the U.S., and world-wide. Whatever-it-is that microplastic does to you, chances are that it’s been doing that to you, to a greater or lesser degree, all your life.
Up until COVID, U.S. life expectancy had been increasing consistent with its historical trend. So whatever it is that plastic in the environment is doing to us, it’s small enough not to perturb that trend. It doesn’t mean it has no effect, it just strongly suggests that the population-level health effects, at typical exposure rates, are likely small.
There needs to be one major caveat there: Assuming it isn’t just slowly accumulating. And we’re only now beginning to reap what we’ve been sowing for the past N decades. Haven’t stumbled across any evidence suggesting that, so far.
Thing 2: It’s not as if having harmful material in your air or drinking water is new, either. For example, Virginia requires that all public water supplies are tested, and that those test results be made public. So I know there’s lead in my drinking water, but the 90th percentile of water samples in my town showed 1.5 parts per billion, lead. That’s low enough that I cross it off my list of things to worry about. (Source: 2022 water quality report testing 2021 water, Town of Vienna).
Thing 3: This is a newly-recognized potential health hazard, and that means that there are no answers to even the most basic questions. This really wasn’t on the public-health radar screen a decade ago, near as I can tell.
Suppose, for example, you wanted to see the equivalent of the report shown above, but for the microplastic content of your local tap water. How much is there, in parts-per-million or parts-per-billion, and does that exceed some safety threshold? You would discover that:
Believe it or not, I don’t get paid by the word. So let me just state some key facts that I think I’ve learned, without citation as to sources, then cut to the chase regarding health effects.
A few observations.
First, taken as a whole, this likely explains why nobody routinely tests tap water for it. There’s no standard definition of it. There’s no hard evidence of human harm, let alone some agreed-upon maximum threshold for safety. It takes specialized equipment and techniques to measure. And there’s a good chance of contamination from the testing lab.
Second, there’s some obvious potential for mischief in reporting the presence of microplastic in (fill-in-the-blank), in that this stuff is everywhere. That is, there’s going to be a background level of microplastic in any testing lab. If you don’t net that out, you’ve got the potential to report finding microplastic in pretty much anything you care to test.
That is, do factory workers get sick from breathing in high levels of synthetic fibers?
Historically, workers in cotton mills suffered from a high incidence of brown lung. This was the result of chronic exposure to high levels cotton dust, or to the dust of other organic fibers (jute, hemp, and so on.)
Is there anything to suggest that the same thing happens with chronic exposure to high levels of fragments of synthetic fibers?
Short answer: Yes, starting with Flock Workers Lung (.pdf). This was recognized around the year 2000, in workers in Massachusetts plants that produced nylon flocking for use in producing velour-type fabrics. In those plants, long nylon fibers were chopped into short lengths. Inhaling airborne nylon fiber fragments led to inflammation, reduced lung function, and asthsma-like symptoms.
Whether polyester fiber fragments increase risk of lung cancer in factory workers is still an open question. One study of a quarter-million female textile workers in Shanhai, China found no association between synthetic fiber exposure and cancer (reference). By contrast, a study of one large industrial plant in France found that greater exposure to fiber dust was associated with increased risk of developing lung cancer (reference), but the dust was from a mix of fibers, including asbestos.
The upshot of this is that heavy exposure to large amounts of airborne synthetic fibers can mess up your lungs fairly badly. This is definitely true for nylon, and may be true for other synthetic fibers. (Several studies suggest to me that nylon fibers are particularly noxious, for reasons that appear related to what they release as they break down.)
This should come as no surprise, as chronic exposure to large amounts of almost any type of dust causes lung problems. Sometimes the diseases have names, such as black lung for coal dust, mesothelioma for asbestos, siliconiosis (sp?) for silicon dust, and so on. Sometimes, fiber will damage the lungs, but there is no specific name, for example, damage caused by breathing wood dust in a woodworking environment. Name a dust, and an excess probably causes problems. Toner? Yep. Fiberglass? Yep. And so on.
No. Not that I found.
First, it’s a good bet that most people will have some microplastic in their lungs. One small study in London (reference), using lung tissue samples that had been removed from people for various reasons. It looks like they found a small number of microplastic particles in every sample they tested, although the number was not hugely higher than the background rate in the test lab. By contrast, another study (reference) found 24 microplastic fibers total, in a sample of about 100 bits of lung tissue, but those fibers were more likely to be found in tumors than in normal lung tissue.
But in terms of linking population-level exposure to disease rate, I haven’t seen much. And the studies of factory workers suggest why. Where there appears to be an association between synthetic fiber exposure and cancer, say, we’re talking about modest increases (50% higher risk) for relatively rare cancers. If the massive exposure you’d get from working in a textile mill has only a modest impact, you may not be able to see much impact from the vastly lower exposure of the general population.
That said, there are some hints. There was a nice in-vitro study where polyester fibers inhibited the healing of lung “organoids”. And one of the studies of lung tissue found that plastic fibers were more likely to be found in lung tumors than in healthy lung tissue.
This is just a note-to-self that I now need to look up how water filtration works.
With COVID, I got up to speed on how air filters and N95 masks filter out aerosols. It’s not at all obvious, and it’s nothing like passing material through a fine-mesh filter.
For example, the hardest particle to capture is about 0.3 microns. That’s why N95 masks are rated as producing a 95% reduction in 0.3 micron particles. They actually produce a greater reduction in particles both larger and smaller than 0.3 microns.
I’m pretty sure that water filtration cannot possibly work the same way. For example, 3M Filtrete material takes advantage of Brownian motion of particles in the air, in order to bring the most difficult-to-capture particles (0.3 micron) into contact with the electrostatically-charged filter material. Well, that’s not going to work in a dense fluid like water. Brownian motion won’t move particles far enough.
But I just plain don’t know. For example, the Brita filter at the start of this posting is rated for capturing particles in the 0.5 to 1.0 micron (micrometer) range. Is this like an air filter, so I can be assured that it captures even higher percentages of particles larger and smaller than that? Or does that mean it simply doesn’t capture particles below 0.5 microns?
I just have a hunch that if you poured water through an N95 mask, it wouldn’t filter the water. But I need to get up to speed on the basic science.
