scrolling in the comment section of this news article, i've only seen people either being concerner/shocked, and some sarcastically talking about recycling or something. Nothing about masturbation.

And if your criticism of lemmy is that it's being reddit with elitism, then why try to gatekeep the way people are going to react to an article on c/science? Are we all supposed to have degrees in chemistry or biology before making a comment?

Believe it or not people take heavy news a million different ways and react differently. People ending up making a masturbation joke after discussing microplastics in testicles (i assume this is what happened) harm nothing and no one.

People having a laugh isn’t the problem.

There is a real problem with the thread format of social media however.

My proof is I can’t find the “in this discussion relevant” thread of masturbation jokes because time has moved on and so did the discussion. [Edit: your comment is only 1h old, so not sure whats up]

We need a much better way to organize our speech and discussions because a single scroll page sorted by time, or contextless votes ain’t doing it.

I actually noticed that some of my comments are reacted very different towards depending on the time of day, what side of planet earth is awake at the time.

There is an argument to be had that certain troll farms love to drown discussions in shitposts and maybe we should be more mindful of the patterns.

But to say we should crack down on any form of jokes, which are an important part of our human expression that goes too far, thats what i disliked about r/science

Doors over there. Feel free to leave.

We just need to turn up the UV lights voltage and melt the plastic out. Is that something we could look into?

We are the plastic eating bacteria.

If we knew of bacteria that cleanly ate plastic, we probably wouldn't be riddled with micro plastics 😉

It’s making men infertile. theres even a shortage of viable sperm today around the world

In regards to humans, progress is being made. In coming years, expect greater clarity about effects on our bodies such as:

• inflammation
• oxidative stress (an imbalance of free radicals and antioxidants that damages cells)
• immune responses
• genotoxicity – damage to the genetic information in a cell that causes mutations, which can lead to cancer.

TL;DR yes, cancer. It also fucks with wildlife (blocking intestines, giving off poison)

Good chance it probably is, possibly increase chance for asthma, chance for heart attack, another is it probably makes us infertile probably a good thing depending how you think of it.

Don't forget Antimicrobial resistance (AMR)!

Plastic will probably only make us infertile while climate change will kill us AND already stop us from reproducing (or do you feel a kid born today has a good perspective on it's future?).

Other great source of plastics are synthetic fabrics. It releases a lot of micro particles in the water during washing and drying cycles.

Plastic was never meant to be recycled.

to grow plastic infused plants, of course

Controlled Release Fertilizers (CRF) are coated with a tiny layer of polymer which allow to release nutrients in a very timely and targeted way to various crops (trees, flowers, some cash crops) and used in closed environments such as potting plants or greenhouses.

So it has its use. Guess we'll need to find an alternative to using polymers now (among a ton of other work).

Plastics are also used extensively in the electricity sector as insulation for conductors, support structures, etc.

We need our vendors of these products to start addressing this issue, and unfortunately I don't think this is going to come from the consumer end. Maybe for alternative insulating liquids for transformers and whatnot like with Cargill FR3 or Shell MIDEL products, but clearly more needs to be done. Schneider Electric is a good example of a company leading the way

There are certain industries, like medical, that would probably be one of the last, if ever, to do away with plastic, simply due to the upsides. The only option we have as a species is to create a truly biodegradable, non-toxic, easily obtainable and cheap to produce alternative.

Haha who am I kidding, we are fucked, plastic manufacturers go brrrrrrrrr.