Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Microplastics were found in sea salt several years ago. But how extensively plastic bits are spread throughout the most commonly used seasoning remained unclear. Now, new research shows microplastics in 90 percent of the table salt brands sampled worldwide.
Of 39 salt brands tested, 36 had microplastics in them, according to a new analysis by researchers in South Korea and Greenpeace East Asia. Using prior salt studies, this new effort is the first of its scale to look at the geographical spread of microplastics in table salt and their correlation to where plastic pollution is found in the environment.
"The findings suggest that human ingestion of microplastics via marine products is strongly related to emissions in a given region," said Seung-Kyu Kim, a marine science professor at Incheon National University in South Korea.
[...] The new study, she says, "shows us that microplastics are ubiquitous. It's not a matter of if you are buying sea salt in England, you are safe."
The new study estimates that the average adult consumes approximately 2,000 microplastics per year through salt. What that means remains a mystery.
A separate study by the University of York in Britain that sought to assess the risks of microplastics to the environment, published Wednesday, concluded not enough is known to determine if microplastics cause harm.
[...] That new study, funded by the Personal Care Products Council, an industry trade group, was published in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.
Boxall added that the focus on microplastics may divert attention from worse environmental (and more easily identifiable) pollution problems, such as small particles released from car tires.
-- submitted from IRC
Related Stories
Desalination pours more toxic brine into the ocean than previously thought
Technology meant to help solve the world's growing water shortage is producing a salty environmental dilemma.
Desalination facilities, which extract drinkable water from the ocean, discharge around 142 billion liters of extremely salty water called brine back into the environment every day, a study finds. That waste product of the desalination process can kill marine life and detrimentally alter the planet's oceans, researchers report January 14 in Science of the Total Environment.
"On the one hand, we are trying to provide populations — particularly in dry areas — with the needed amount of good quality water. But at the same time, we are also adding an environmental concern to the process," says study coauthor Manzoor Qadir, an environmental scientist at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Hamilton, Canada.
I would take some salt, but it probably contains microplastics.
The state of desalination and brine production: A global outlook (DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.12.076) (DX)
Microplastics in water not harmful to humans, says WHO report
Microplastics are increasingly found in drinking water, but there is no evidence so far that this poses a risk to humans, according to a new assessment by the World Health Organization.
However, the United Nations body warned against complacency because more research is needed to fully understand how plastic spreads into the environment and works its way through human bodies.
There is no universally agreed definition of microplastics but they are generally considered to be smaller than half a millimetre across.
Plastic production has grown exponentially in recent decades and is predicted to double again by 2025, said the report, which means more beads and threads are breaking down into minute particles and winding up in water supplies, pipes, cups, throats and bellies. Studies suggest bottled drinking water even contains minuscule elements of the polymers used in the container and cap.
Also at CNN.
Related: Car Tyres Cause 55% of Microplastic Waste, According to Study
Paper on Microplastic's Harm to Fish Will Likely be Retracted
Microplastics Found in 90 Percent of Table Salt
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 21 2018, @07:00AM (10 children)
I have never understood the sea salt fad. WTF people??? Have you never been to the beach?
We get seagull shit, cigarette butts, leaking diapers, dog turds, red tide, diesel fuel, and so much other junk. You want that in your food?
I want my salt from igniting sodium in chlorine gas. I guess I'll settle for something dug from deep underground, but I won't like it. Sea salt is right out. NOPE NOPE NOPE.
The real horror is when it ends up in packaged foods that I like. Triscuits is a sad example. They are tasty, there is no generic clone, and now... the box proudly proclaims that they contain filthy sea salt. OK, they didn't say "filthy", but we know. I can almost smell the seagull shit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 21 2018, @07:45AM
I have seen generic Triscuits clones at Kroger and ALDI. I can't vouch for the taste.
I don't think you get much cigarette butts or diesel fuel in sea salt. The microplastics are bad enough on their own.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 21 2018, @11:28AM
It's the same idiocy that says, "Oooh, 'raw sugar' that's brownish must be better for you" or even "I'll eat something 'natural' like honey (aka "bee vomit") over evil HFCS, even though honey basically contains similar proportions of glucose and fructose as HFCS with a few percent trace compounds." These idiots end up even being fed the same shit by companies with new names -- e.g., many products today contain "evaporated cane juice." It's 'juice' so it must be good for you, right? Except what is it? Basically sugar in a slightly different form. One of the big yogurt companies was even sued over deceptive labeling -- claiming "no added sugar" when its second ingredient was "evaporated cane juice."
It's all bullshit... Or seagull shit. And yes, some sea salt tastes slightly different from purer crystallized sodium chloride because of trace minerals (or seagull shit), but chances are if you're putting enough salt on your food to taste a big difference, you're putting too much salt on your food.
The "post-truth" era has affected hippy earthy crunchy food labeling in different ways -- trying to sell the same shit to people for four times the price by claiming it's "natural" when it's the same shit. My favorite is "uncured" meats. 97% of them are still cured -- because storing uncooked meat for long times is usually a recipe for deadly bacteria. They's just cured with stuff like "celery powder" which will be listed prominently in ingredients, which contains the same nitrates the hippy morons are trying to avoid.
Read an article a little while back that measured nitrate levels in "uncured" products compared to standard normal.products -- and in most cases, the "uncured" products contained significantly more nitrates, likely because when you use bullshit like "celery powder" instead of pure chemical salts, you need to use more of it to ensure food safety because your curing agent has too much variability.
Anyhow, serves the chemophobic "natural foods" morons right. Hopefully they die early of excessive nitrate consumption due to buying BS "uncured" meats soaked in seagull shit.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Pslytely Psycho on Sunday October 21 2018, @11:47AM (3 children)
As a truck driver, I picked many a load of salt from Salt Lake City. They mine it at the edge of the Great Salt Lake and it sits in piles while the birds add some whiteness to it and garbage is blown into from the wind. Not likely many dirty diapers but air pollution and rain full of air pollution as there is an oil refinery in the area as well. Salt mined from underground also sits above ground in huge piles before it's processed. Many of those locations have other mining or industrial activities nearby contributing to local pollution...and it all gets into the salt.
Yeah, purdy gross.
But most things can have a disgusting side. The stench near a sugar refinery will gag you, a strong stomach is required for meat packing or poultry production and the cereal plants in Cedar Rapids smell like burned eggs.
Oddly enough, most waste treatment plants smell better than most food production.
Yes nature is a filthy beast.
Have I ruined eating entirely for you yet?
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by koick on Sunday October 21 2018, @07:30PM (2 children)
It reminds me of hearing stories of people seeing all that corn growing in Iowa thinking, "Wow!, we eat a lot of corn!". When actually, except for rare, small fields of sweet corn, what you see is "field corn" [wikipedia.org], which is primarily used as livestock feed and ethanol production (with very little of it, after grinding down, consumed by humans directly).
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Monday October 22 2018, @07:38AM (1 child)
Both. Food grade is evaporated from the lake, while the industrial salts are mined from the basin.
They are shipped separately as food grade can't be in the same trailers as commercial grade. And you pick them up at separate docks on opposite sides of the plant.
It's still purdy gross!
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pslytely Psycho on Monday October 22 2018, @07:51AM
I've been retired a long time, and looking back at my photo album, I confused a plant in the Midwest with the SLC plant. You are correct, SLC salt is industrial.
Getting old sucks.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday October 21 2018, @12:38PM
There's no way sea salt could be bad. It's got electrolytes! [standardvitamins.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 21 2018, @02:50PM
Do you usually go around smelling seagull butts?
(Score: 3, Funny) by woodcruft on Sunday October 21 2018, @05:48PM
You are right on the money, AC.
Of course, we also know what else goes on in the sea...
FISH F*CK IN IT!
Purveyors of sea salt should be forced to label their product: "Contains: NaCl, microplastics, seagull shit & fish semen."
Let's see what that does for sales...
:wq!
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday October 22 2018, @02:33PM
This categorization was clearly not made by anyone who understands chemistry because the sea has iodine in it. Iodized salt was made for the people inland who didn't eat enough fish to get enough iodine that the fish got from the ocean.
I thought that Himalayan sea salt was a stupid thing. Hey marketing department! The oceans haven't risen that much. But all it really means is it is Himalayan salt that didn't have iodine added so it gets binned as sea salt.
(Score: 1) by Barenflimski on Sunday October 21 2018, @07:39AM
Maybe sea salt and micro-plastic taste better. I get that its gross that there is stuff in my salt, but micro-plastics?
The thing is that we all know there is shit in our food, we just don't want to hear about it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Blymie on Sunday October 21 2018, @09:51AM (6 children)
If you read the original study summary, not the National Geographic story -- you'll see that at no time was "table salt" mentioned. Nope. Instead, they looked at rock salt, lake salt, and sea salt... and touted themselves as the first study that could accurately trace the sources of each.
No "90%" of table salt was mentioned, in fact I didn't even see a 90% figure! But even if it was 90%, it was 90% of the above salts OR a claim that 90% of all table salt is one of the above.
If you live in North America, almost ALL table salt comes from salt mines from old inland seas. It's been buried for millennia. It has no issues with plastic, none, nada. And that's what most Americans, Canadians, and I suspect Mexicans and others eat.
Maybe things are different in the EU... although I suspect we can dig up our salt, and ship it boxed to the EU cheaper than other methods of salt reclamation.
So OK, fine.. sea salt is borked. But we already *knew* that anyhow, right? Because table salt has something else in it. Iodine.
In Canada, it's law. Iodine MUST be added to table salt. In the US, it's not law -- but fairly standard. And why?
Well, you can NOT, absolutely not get enough iodine without marine life... and no, an occasional tuna sandwich won't cut it. And without enough iodine?
Birth defects. Issues with the thyroid. Issues for children.
So all these hippies and their sea salt, are likely not getting enough iodine in their diet as well... and now we find out they're getting a shit tonne of plastic.
Sigh.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 21 2018, @11:14AM (1 child)
When you buy your salt, what sort of container does it come in?
I'm looking at the Saxa salt container sitting here on the table in front of me, the salt is probably from a mine in Cheshire, England, was laid down in the Triassic, 220 million years ago...no plastic (that is, unless some of the more outré theories about the dinosaurs are true..)
Pity, the container is made of plastic (HDPE with a noticeably rough to touch surface finish, both external and internally) and that the salt it contains has been crushed into fine abrasive crystals..
Sure, we're talking microscopically small abraded quantities, but it all adds up..
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday October 22 2018, @03:27PM
Unless you're buying individual pre-filled salt shakers, most salt that I see comes in cardboard cylinders or paper sacks. Sometimes small metal cans too. Can't recall ever seeing bulk salt in plastic, though I'm sure it exists...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Sunday October 21 2018, @01:25PM (2 children)
Clickbait? Not really. The summary adds a bit of alarmism that's not present in the study, but the study is bad enough [acs.org]. According to the abstract, they did analyze table salt, with most of their samples being brands that claim to be "sea salt". Which makes sense, because "prehistoric" sea salt out of a mine will not contain any microplastics. So there's no reason to analyse it, because the findings are already known.
The takeaway from the study is what we already know: Asia is a disaster. Most plastic entering the ocean comes down Asian rivers (with Africa in second place). This comes from having large populations with no effective waste disposal systems.
You know, if second- and third-world countries want the first world to pay for CO2 pollution, I think we should insist that they pay for plastic pollution. IMHO, plastics in the oceans are a far more serious environmental threat than the (seriously over-hyped) AGW happening from CO2.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday October 21 2018, @11:15PM
Try again.
You'll discover the 'civilized' way to waste disposal is to 'export' the waste to Asia and Africa.
We'll, China says now [nbcnews.com] 'you can keep you garbage':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 23 2018, @03:06AM
No reason? If you're a real scientist it'll be one of your control/comparison groups. And if it still shows up plastic then either you're doing stuff wrong or maybe your paper needs a different title...
But if you're a "publish crap career scientist" then you leave stuff like that decades later for a more "definitive study" before you retire.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by woodcruft on Sunday October 21 2018, @01:42PM
In the UK we get most of our daily iodine requirement from milk.
Apparently this happened largely by accident. During the '30s it was decided by the government ministry, to specify what feed for cows should contain & I guess some vet thought it should contain iodine, so it did.
As a result, excess iodine was expressed in the cow's milk which was then drunk by humans.
Result: goitre, cretinism and hypothyroidism prevalence dropped like a stone!
I listened to a clinical epidemiologist talk about it on the BBC World Service. She also mentioned that she had looked at IQ results for kids. The children of vegan mothers tended to have lowered IQs and she reckoned it was due to subclinical congenital cretinism. ie. because mum didn't drink milk they were short of iodine. During the winter months the average person gets some 70% of their iodine from milk; it's less during the rest of the year because the cows are out to pasture and hence consuming less man-made feed.
So we're on a downward trend: braindead 'dedicated follower of fashion' mother becomes vegan to 'save the planet' and produces even more braindead progeny.
Fermi's Paradox is because of vegans ;)
:wq!
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday October 21 2018, @10:25AM (1 child)
How much does sriracha contain?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 21 2018, @10:27AM
https://www.seasalt.com/fusion-sriracha-salt.html [seasalt.com]
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Sunday October 21 2018, @12:17PM (2 children)
Title cribbed from National Geographic is intentionally misleading. If you go past the article in Nat Geo to the actual study, this is explicitly regarding various brands of Sea Salt.
.
Do any searh for sea salt or sea salt vs. table salt for piles of comparisons of the two as separate and distinct.
.
This is not about standard refined common table salt.
.
AFAIK Sea Salt, while all the rage, is nowhere close to ousting normal table salt in the cupboards of Ma and Pa Kettle.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday October 21 2018, @12:37PM (1 child)
https://www.quora.com/How-is-it-legal-to-list-sea-salt-as-an-ingredient-in-foods [quora.com]
Quora man says sea salt isn't regulated and you can call any kind of salt "sea salt".
If that's the case, then the faker stuff could be the safer option. Go ahead, crush up some activated charcoal into some salt and call it bespoke.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 21 2018, @02:04PM
This is assuming that microplastics are bad for you. I would assume they are, but I doubt that we'll ever get a non-biased statistically significant controlled study.
🌻🌻 [google.com]