#environmental problems | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

inkskinned · 1 year

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the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.

capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.

now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.

and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.

and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.

and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".

it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"

#this was much longer i had to cut it down for legibility #but i do want to say i am aware this post doesnt touch on human rights violations as a result of fast fashion #that is because it deserves its own post with a completely different tone #i am an environmental educator #so that's what i know the most about. it wouldn't be appropriate of me to mention off-hand the real and legitimate suffering #that people are going through #without doing my research and providing real ways to help #this is a vent post about a thing i'm watching happen; not a call to action. it would be INCREDIBLY demeaning #to all those affected by the fast fashion industry to pretend that a post like this could speak to their suffering #unfortunately one of the horrible things about latestage capitalism as an activist is that SO many things are linked to this #and i WANT to talk about all of them but it would be a book in its own right. in fact there ARE books about each level of this #and i encourage you to seek them out and read them!!! i am not an expert on that i am just a person on tumblr doing my favorite activity #(complaining)#and it's like - this is the individual versus the industry problem again right because im blaming myself #for being an expert on environmental disaster (which is fucking important) but not knowing EVERYTHING about fast fashion #i'm blaming myself for not covering the many layers of this incredibly complicated problem im pointing out #rather than being like. yeah so actually the fault here lies with the billion dollar industries actually.#my failure to be able to condense an incredibly immense problem that is BOOK-LENGTH into a single text post that i post for free #is not in ANY fucking way the same amount of harm as. you know. the ACTUAL COMPANIES doing this ACTUAL THING for ACTUAL MONEY.#anyway im gonna go donate money while i'm thinking about it. maybe you can too. we can both just agree - well i fuckin tried didn't i #which is more than their CEOs can say

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greenfue · 2 years

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DR.Ahmed Hany: Alternative Path for Environmental Problems

Since the seventies of the last century there have been many conferences for the environment with many disappointments because the main polluters have been breaking their promises to finance the environmental reform needed for the planet to survive and/or to transfer modern technologies. Most probably that situation will continue in the future. The poor countries have to deal with the…

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#Climate Changes #DR.Ahmed Hany #Environmental Problems

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thedisablednaturalist · 9 months

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People who are worried they aren't helping with climate change or any other big world problem bc they do something like make video games or art or are a cashier at a grocery store:

You are helping. You are making the art that helps me, an environmentalist actively working to restore biodiversity and ecosystems, get through each day. You are helping those of us on the front lines enjoy living or take a well-needed break. The person loading my groceries into my car is making it so I can eat that week and have enough energy to do my work. If you want to do more, you can volunteer, donate, and boost the voices of local community leaders working to protect and restore the local ecosystems, but don't feel bad if you can't. We are all in this together.

#the only people who should feel bad are the ones actively contributing to the problem more than anyone else is #i mean rich people who take private jets not you who threw away a plastic bottle instead of recycling it #and fill up their giant swimming pools during droughts (and dont even swim in them!!!)#i personally chose my field bc i didnt want to stand by as all this bad crap happened #and because i love being outdoors and i love critters #but everyone elses jobs are important too #even people who cant work are valuable bc you give us a reason to fight for a better world for you #eventually i may have to stop working if my health gets worse but that doesnt mean i wont be valuable #i hope this makes sense #ramble #conservation #environmentalism #save the earth

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ochipi · 1 month

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I’m on an archaeology test site and came across an old garbage dump. As in plastic coke bottles and beer cans.

This makes me so sad, it’s so bad for the environment but also, this is what we will be remembered by to future generations.

In the future, our trash will be found for example at sorting companies. But loose finds, things that could have been re- or up-cycled don’t need to be the thing that defines us. The effort of digging a hole, hiding your trash and clearing your tracks is bigger than just holding on until the next trash can.

Just be sensible peeps. This doesn’t have to be humanity’s representation

#archaeology #history #archaeology problems #field archaeology #environment #environmentalism #planet earth #recycle

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screwpinecaprice · 9 months

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AT with @dragonuva!

This absolute unit, Imp Steven. 😁 I super love drawing himmmm!

Just some more rambling about the possible future of my regular commissions under the cut.

As my laptop got (fixed?) adjusted recently, I've used this opportunity to try out if it can now handle regular commission work. It started to show something's up on the mild rendering process but the lag and laptop heating didn't actually got that bad until a bit further in the full rendering process. Still has a limitation it seems. I'm planning on testing it a second time on a different piece, then I'll decide whether regular commissions will be fully back the next month or not.

#AT #Dragonuva #su #my shiz #steven quartz universe #steven universe #SU #Imperfect Steven #Dgfgggdsdfhhhh Though the technical stuff kinda messed up the drawing flow it was still def fun drawing this 😁#Okey that bg.. though my laptop did start like it's threatening to self combust while drawing it. It's not the laptop's fault ho #w messy that is. I'm just a hit and miss with backgrounds if I don't spend like a week on it. Lol 😅😅😅#It's definitely the amount of rendering that it can't handle.#And perhaps the amount of layers too #Which is a problem cause I normally use 350+ layers when a piece is fully rendered+has more than 2 character or/and has an environmental bg #I think I actually would have a lot to ramble about but I also think I had to actually get some sleep rn lol #I really should stop posting stuff while practically half asleep. 😅#monster Steven

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a-mole-of-iron · 11 months

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Yes, we can stop climate change - and solve ecological problems in general

In the last few years, I have seen again and again a particular social response to climate change that can leave human civilization just as devastated as denying or ignoring climate change: and that is doomism, and fellow-traveler ideas of eco-fascism and eco-austerity. Make no mistake: climate change is a very serious issue that can cause noticeable damage to Earth and a hell of a lot of damage to humanity, but people absolutely love to take it to lurid extremes, like "Mad Max hellworld" and "Earth becoming the second Venus by 2100". In this post, I'm just going to lay out numerous reasons why the situation is far from hopeless, why sensationalized narratives of climate change are just a petty excuse for inaction, why "we'd better start taking mud baths to get used to being in the ground" rhetoric is incredibly dangerous (not to mention a betrayal of the weak and vulnerable by the strong and well-off), and why, ultimately, things aren't as dire as "the common wisdom" proclaims - so that people can stop feeling crushed by hopelessness, and start solving all of the very, very real environmental problems the way they're already being solved. All my examples will be sourced from the IPCC reports and real-world accomplishments in eco-restoration, via an extremely helpful blog called Doomsday Debunked, which just reprints all the IPCC and IPBES findings that doomist media and activism deliberately omits.

Most of this post is adapted from one I already made before elsewhere - but perhaps on Tumblr it's going to become more popular and widespread. I'm going to split it into three different sections: climate change mitigation, biodiversity recovery, and why "green austerity" is not a brilliant idea, will not save anything, and is ultimately an outdated falsehood that emerged from a place of insufficient knowledge and understanding. Almost all paragraphs contain links to sources/more info, but they may be hard to see in some custom Tumblr themes - be sure to mouse over if you want to find the links.

CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION AND YOU: how renewable energy really can save the world!

Here's the biggest thing first: Climate Action Tracker, which is a pretty damn respectable source, has slashed off 1.1 to 1.5 degrees Celsius off its average warming projections since 2010, according to their own records. Hell, in 2018, three degrees of warming was a pledge, and four degrees was the expected upper limit; now three degrees is expected if the current level of fossil fuel consumption continues without any reduction - and two degrees is the policy target, while optimistic projections are inching closer to 1.5 degrees. And to "achieve" 5 degrees Celsius of warming, which is misleadingly described by journalists as "business as usual" when by our current day it's anything but, we would need an economic mobilization from now to 2100 to burn all the coal that we can possibly burn. With coal plants shutting down in reality simply due to being unprofitable, I don't have to tell you how "realistic" and "plausible" that is. The takeaway from this is simple: the Paris Agreement and environmental activism work, and I really don't see them winding down unless we let doomism reign supreme.

A specific example of policy and technology that can seriously reduce climate change is the amazing growth of solar power over the last 10 years. I am old enough to remember the early 2000s, when solar photovoltaics (the panels that convert sunlight directly into electricity) were an unproven, esoteric, and expensive technology, and people meant solar water heaters when they said "solar power"… but nowadays? There is literally predictions that if solar energy keeps growing at current rates, and considering it already beats fossil fuels on price, it might simply price out gas, coal, and oil before 2050, rendering them entirely obsolete. Even now, investment into coal or gas power plants is seen as an incredibly stupid thing to do, because they might become "stranded assets" - too expensive to run, and unable to even recoup their initial cost.

The clathrate gun/Arctic methane bomb hypothesis has been effectively disproven at the current time. The release of methane from clathrates is endothermic, meaning it takes in more heating than it releases; a direct opposite of a gunshot/explosion, which is an exothermic reaction. More modern research also turned up the fact that methane has been seeping upwards at a constant rate for millennia now - we just didn't monitor it. Seabed disturbance could possibly upturn some of the clathrates, but ocean warming alone simply can't do it - it would take thousands of years of warming for the temperature change to propagate to the kind of depth that methane clathrates are found at.

The hypothesis of runaway greenhouse effect has effectively been disproven too: with a more powerful greenhouse effect, Earth's albedo grows just as fast as the heat-trapping capacity, meaning runaway warming is highly unlikely and the only cause are human industry CO2 emissions, which can be obsoleted by renewables and thus stopped.

The biggest threat from climate change as it is now appear to be extreme weather events; for example physically straining heatwaves, or severe floods from large amounts of rainfall. And those are serious problems. But heatwaves can be deal with by adapting our environments - the most obvious example being to plant some trees instead of layering our cities in concrete. Similarly, flood management isn't some arcane art; we know how to do it. It's just been ignored due to complacency and budgetary stinginess.

The expectations of social collapse from climate change are… overstated, let's say. The IPCC's own worst-case scenario is NOT "Earth as a lifeless desert" or "collapse of human society"; the situation IPCC associated with three-degree warming is that hundreds of millions risk being displaced by sea level rise and temperatures in the tropics getting too hot for comfortable life with no weather difficulties (NOT THE SAME as "you go out at any point during the summer, you die in ten minutes"), and the UN Sustainable Development Goals will be left in ruins. In other words, the poor people of the world will go back to starving and suffering, and the rich, especially in the West, will for the most part retain their quality of life. And so to me, as a non-Western, not-ultra-rich person, doomism is a personal affront, and doomism from solarpunks and environmentalists is a grave betrayal.

Speaking of the IPCC reports: the last one states with decent confidence that as soon as we stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, temperatures will begin to drop. Just think on this for a minute.

The "1970s MIT supercomputer that predicted the collapse of civilization by 2040"? That computer was not just less powerful than a smartphone from five years ago - it modeled the world as a single pixel, primitive even by the standards of the day. (Link to article that features actual model comparisons, via browser-based Javascript emulation. 'Nuff said.)

The so-called "deep adaptation" paper that managed to put people into therapy by its sheer grimness? Junk science that was rebuffed by Michael Mann - the author of the "hockey stick graph" of global temperatures, so not a climate denier by any means - in a four-letter tweet.

Earth turning into a second Venus by 2100? Yeah. That's… not gonna happen. We literally don't have enough fossil fuels to induce a greenhouse effect this bad, at any timescale, and I don't know if we could do it even if we started importing dry ice from space and cracking carbonate minerals for their carbon content to deliberately destroy the planet for some stupid reason.

And just because I feel like mentioning it: no, Earth can't run out of oxygen for us to breathe, barring an invasion of Galactus or some other planet-devouring alien.

BIODIVERSITY + CONSERVATION: lies, damned lies, and statistics

The infamous notion that we are heading for a world without insects was based on a study where half the map was blank, and some countries only counted the domestic honeybee (which relies on humans to thrive). Not all plants need insects to pollinate them, either. But at the same time, overuse of insecticides in agriculture is a serious issue with many adverse effects, and it has to be fought against. There is currently a campaign in Europe with this aim. Native grass lawns in cities help a lot too, more than you would think at first.

Similarly, there is a general notion that we are "in the middle of a sixth mass extinction", except we're not "in the middle". We're in the beginning of one. Now, if we all start/keep behaving like the Glukkons from the Oddworld series of games, or the Blargs from the first Ratchet & Clank game, for a few hundred more years - then we're totally going to face an impoverished biosphere with half or more known species dead. But if we do that, I'd say extinction of species would be far from our only problem.

The number one agricultural land use that drives deforestation is grazing cattle and growing crops to feed them; cropland and cities simply don't compare. Ergo, just by shifting to plant-based diets supplemented by lab-grown meat cultures and sustainable fish, we can rewild nearly 30% of Earth. And climate impacts there can be reduced too, if you simply buy local.

For a reforestation success story on a massive scale, look no further than the Loess Plateau.

Conservation success stories are actually plentiful; however, they do not get aired on the news because good news does not draw in views, clicks, and outrage. You can just go through this article on Doomsday Debunked to see how successful nature conservation can actually be.

The only two biomes that are most endangered by climate change are coral reefs (which would be replaced by the more resilient sponge reefs at 3 degrees of warming or around that), and the mountain glaciers, which will take thousands of years to recover, unlike the polar ice caps that'll be back in a couple of decades. But even corals have shown more resilience than expected before, so the scale of devastation is not nearly as huge as people might imagine.

GREEN AUSTERITY: "Friendly fire! Stop shooting, you pointy-eared leaf lover!"

A common, in fact extremely common, idea is that the only way to save the planet is accepting massive reductions to our quality of life - and by "massive" I mean "living in dugouts and doing subsistence agriculture while literally billions of people die for lack of warmth and medicine". Not only is this unacceptable, it's also a complete lie. The best way for someone living in the car-dependent, fossil-fuel-hungry sprawl of North America to reduce their carbon footprint is actually moving to a country with walkable, bikeable cities and good public transportation, like the Netherlands… or preferably, reforming and rebuilding their own local environment to this standard that used to exist in NA before its suburbanization that included zero public transport due to auto industry lobbying. NotJustBikes is an entire YouTube channel that explains this better than I ever could.

Another common idea is that building enough renewable generation capacity is just not possible with existing resources here on Earth. But consider this for a moment: when we mine metals and make them into electric engines or batteries, they don't go anywhere, with the only possible exception being metal flaking off due to corrosion. The metals composing wind turbine generators, electric vehicle motors, and batteries, or silicon composing the solar panels, remain in place and can be recycled several times, if not infinitely. Oil and coal that our current civilization burns for fuel EMPHATICALLY CANNOT be recycled - the entire problem we have is that they turn into carbon dioxide and clog our atmosphere, while soot and other exhaust fumes damage the health of people living in cities. Getting rid of 99% or more of fossil fuel infrastructure doesn't seem like that hard of a choice when you remember that feeding a renewables-based infrastructure requires a far more modest production capacity.

The issue of soil depletion from intensive agriculture is not only exaggerated by the negative/doomist framing (no, we are NOT going to run out of topsoil in 60 years!) - it's also a problem of mismanagement rather than an inherent agricultural problem. Stop oversaturating fields with fertilizer, introduce polyculture and crop rotation, and you'll see how much better things can get.

Similar to the above: the production of fertilizer does not require fossil fuels, no matter what some people might be saying. The three types of fertilizer are nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium. All of those are abundant chemical elements on Earth, and circulate through the biosphere freely; nitrogen is the 70% of our atmosphere and cannot possibly run out, and phosphate with potassium are abundant in the Earth's crust. The only direct use of fossil fuels in fertilizer production is the Haber-Bosch process that condenses nitrogen from the air into ammonia, and guess what molecule it needs for that? Hydrogen, which is the stronger half of the elements composing hydrocarbon fuels and which we could have in abundance by simple electrolysis of water!

Related to the above: it is beyond ridiculous how cow manure is dumped into rivers or similar by most modern farmers, when with right subsidies it could be transformed into cheap-as-free fertilizer to be used in agriculture. Someone should go create subsidies for large-scale composting...

Surprisingly enough, even consistent economic growth - which I am not a fan of by any means - can be achieved on a finite planet, because economic growth is all in what you count and how you count it. If we calculate economic growth not by production, but by improvements in human condition and condition of ecosystems (i.e. an economy that grows with the growth of trees), then we'll see that right now some world regions (like, again, North America) are failing as much as countries poor in money, but also that there is an enormous space for growth measured in sustainable prosperity.

The much-touted problem of water wars is an actual problem only for regions way, way inland. Any coastal countries have access to efficient desalination; it's not 1850 anymore. Water doesn't disappear from the world after people use it in cities and industries, it goes right back into the soil/atmosphere/rivers and oceans, so we can't "run out of water".

Interesting fact: we don't actually require any particularly specialized carbon capture technology to remove all the excess CO2 from the atmosphere, and will not require us to divert society's resources to expensive machinery. The old adage about the best carbon capture technology that's called "planting trees" still holds - and what's even more interesting is that there actually are even better methods that are not much more complex… and produce other things for the environment and for civilization in the process.

CONCLUSION

To sum things up: yes, the situation is serious, and "already bad enough" as Michael Mann put it (admittedly, he's been leaning into negative framing himself… but it can't be all positive, the problems of climate change really are dangerous, especially to the world's poor), and there's been a lot of environmental damage due to industries and rich consumers deliberately ignoring the externalities/knock-on effects of their resource use - but it's not nearly as horrifically bleak as some people presume. Right now there is great momentum behind climate action - which, yes, is partially propelled by increasingly hostile weather, but also by an understanding that social progress, democracy, and collective action are vital to build any form of a decent society, as well as by seeing new opportunities rise from cheaper renewable energy, better cities, and other innovations that will both stop climate change and make life actually worth living no matter where you might be. And in these conditions, throwing in the towel or surrendering to eco-austerity or even eco-fascist thinking is the worst possible action any one person can take. The green, sustainable, egalitarian future is not merely a dream or flight of fancy - it's eminently attainable if only we keep pushing for it and help eachother achieve it. But of course, there are people who stay up nights thinking how to take that future away from us, and now that climate change denial is no longer tenable, with more and more people believing their own eyes, the doomism and inactivism have become their primary, perhaps only, means of holding onto their power…

I hope this post will be helpful to people here who find themselves in the grip of doomism and hopelessness. I expect some people to disagree, but I prefer to believe the sources like the IPCC, IPBES, Climate Action Tracker, and all the climatologists behind these organizations' reporting - who've been closely watching both the worsening extreme weather from climate change, and the emergence of all the simple, usable, life-improving technologies and social practices to combat it. If we don't believe these people, then really, who can we believe? And if you do trust their reports on all the positive things being done and planned for environmental needs, it is not simply an idea that we can deal with climate change and restore, then protect our environment - it's objective reality, it's respectable science, and thus, it's good hard common sense.

More information: Doomsday Debunked (layman explanations and positive framing, also covering a ton of other "not actually the end of the world" topics for scared people), Carbon Brief (more technical and a bit less brazenly optimistic, but showing things like the absolutely crazy speed of renewable energy development), Not Just Bikes (an urbanist YouTube channel showing how cities can be improved, not made poorer, in the process of reducing fossil fuel use and car dependency).

#climate change #global warming #solarpunk #bright green environmentalism #hope #reasons for hope #psa #problem solving #debunking doomsday #long post

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magnetothemagnificent · 10 months

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"No but you see my cat whose sole purpose is to hunt native snakes and rodents isn't the issue when talking about the environmental effects of outdoor cats!"

#outdoor cats #farm cats #farm cats are literally a huge part of the problem lmao #they are not part of nature #environment #environmentalism

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glittergroovy · 1 year

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Hi loves I only have $109 in my account after buying groceries yesterday…

I’m waiting to hear back from jobs still. My only source of income currently is from online surveys & that does not add up to much at all.

Any help (tips, reblogs etc) in getting by until I land a job is extremely appreciated!

Venmo: @Grubcore

Ko-fi: grubcore (you can look through some of my art on here!)

#ebegging #I’m canceling all my future therapy appointments bc I can’t afford them rip #groceries and subway fares are pretty much all I’m buying #HOPEFULLY I’ll hear back from some jobs I applied to soon but idk I’ve been searching for months with no luck 🫠#hard to get a job in NYC it’s so competitive even for min wage ones & i don’t have a degree #not glitter text #all my work experience is specific to environmental science n it’s impossible to find *paid* work like that in nyc without a degree at least #it’s all park volunteering I need something that pays & I don’t have to stand to do (POTS syndrome)#disabled trans college dropout problems

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aeide-thea · 11 months

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06-07-23 Why Patagonia helped Samsung redesign the washing machine

Samsung is releasing a wash cycle and a new filter, which will dramatically shrink microfiber pollution.

Eight years ago, Patagonia started to study a little-known environmental problem: With every load of laundry, thousands (even millions) of microfibers, each less than 5 millimeters long, wash down the drain. Some are filtered out at water treatment plants, but others end up in the ocean, where fibers from synthetic fabric make up a surprisingly large amount of plastic pollution—35%, by one estimate. Fragments of your favorite sweatshirt might now be floating in the Arctic Ocean. In a collaboration that began two years ago, the company helped inspire Samsung to tackle the problem by rethinking its washing machines. Today, Samsung unveiled its solution: A new filter that can be added to existing washers and used along with a “Less Microfiber” cycle that Samsung also designed. The combination makes it possible to shrink microfiber pollution by as much as 98%.

[…] Patagonia’s team connected Samsung with Ocean Wise, a nonprofit that tests fiber shedding among its mission to protect and restore our oceans. Samsung shipped some of its machines to Ocean Wise’s lab in Vancouver, where researchers started to study how various parameters change the results. Cold water and less agitation helped—but both of those things can also make it harder to get clothing clean. “There are maybe two ways of increasing the performance of your washing machine,” says Moohyung Lee, executive vice president and head of R&D at Samsung, through an interpreter. “Number one is to use heated water. That will obviously increase your energy consumption, which is a problem. The second way to increase the performance of your washing machine is to basically create stronger friction between your clothes . . . and this friction and abrasion of the fibers is what results in the output of microplastics.” Samsung had already developed a technology called “EcoBubble” to improve the performance of cold-water cycles to help save energy, and it tweaked the technology to specifically tackle microfiber pollution. “It helps the detergent dissolve more easily in water so that it foams better, which means that you don’t need to heat up your water as much, and you don’t need as much mechanical friction, but you still have a high level of performance,” Lee says. The new “Less Microfiber” cycle, which anyone with a Samsung washer can download as an update for their machine, can reduce microfiber pollution by as much as 54%. To tackle the remainder, the company designed a filter that can be added to existing washers at the drain pipe, with pores tiny enough to capture fibers. They had to balance two conflicting needs: They wanted to make it as simple as possible to use, so consumers didn’t have to continually empty the filter, but it was also critical that the filter wouldn’t get clogged, potentially making water back up and the machine stop working. The final design compresses the microfibers, so it only has to be emptied once a month, and sends an alert via an app when it needs to be changed. Eventually, in theory, the fibers that are collected could potentially be recycled into new material rather than put in the trash. (Fittingly, the filter itself is also made from recycled plastic.) When OceanWise tested the cycle and filter together, they confirmed that it nearly eliminated microfiber pollution. Now, Samsung’s challenge is to get consumers to use it. The filter, which is designed to be easily installed on existing machines, is launching now in Korea and will launch in the U.S. and Europe later this year. The cost will vary by market, but will be around $150 in the U.S. The cycle, which began to roll out last year, can be automatically installed on WiFi-connected machines.

#microplastics #textiles #laundry #environmental #science #patagonia #samsung #i'm. so excited.#also i HAD been silently judging patagonia a little for their heavy use of synthetics but. they ARE walking the walk actually.#(will say that ime the feel of natural fibers is just. better.)#(like. wool has an astonishing ability to keep you warm-but-not-sweaty at a bizarrely wide range of temps)#(whereas like. the synthetic fleece tops i still have are like. immediately cozy‚ sure‚ but you WILL get sweaty if you get warm)#(like being in‚ you know‚ a plastic bag!)#(so like. even if they Fix the Microplastics Problem i have no regrets abt switching my allegiance to woolens)#(but. still fucking THRILLED they might fix the microplastics problem.)#does make you feel like. i'm unavoidably a humanities person but. what are humanities ppl doing that matters this much.#like fundamentally if you really want to do good in the world you probably SHOULD become a scientist of some kind.#that said‚ science would almost certainly not be improved by my participating in it‚ so like. what can you do.#really hugely awed by & appreciative of scientists tho.#anyway. obvs this is really just a press release and we gotta see how this plays out but.#!

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