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this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Betcha scrubbing them in the sink does too. It's just harder to set up a controlled study.
Yeah I wish they would have done that. Would be interesting to see. Hand washed plastic containers are subjected to much more mechanical scrubbing action, but much less heat.
My dish sponge is plastic.¯_(ツ)_/¯
Dishwashers usually wash hotter than you do in the sink & reuse the water, so I'd imagine they also produce more microplastic in the process.
Hotter yes, but no plastic-on-plastic scrubbing. And not reusing the water wouldn't change the amount of plastic, it would just be diluted in a larger amount of water. My guess would be, larger particles. But I can see why that would have to be its own, more complicated study. Because so many more variables.
Do you know that water with microplastics doesn't cause even more microplastics? Seems reasonable to me - the existing microplastic should be ground even finer, and also cause more microplastic to be ground off.
Interesting thought, we'll have to include it in our study. I posit that the microparticles from hand washing will be larger anyway, because method, and will include plastic from the scrubber as well as the containers.
There's a good chance! Really depends on the impact of temperature, though since we're still waaaaay below the melting point of plastic, intuitively I'd agree with you.
So where do we get our funding? I'm thinking about a billion, if we call it The Big Beautiful Golden Study, sponsored by plastic and dishwasher manufacturers.
No no no, you have to think about it differently. Neither of those industries will want to sponsor something like this. Instead we have to go with their natural enemies - and was is the opposite of plastic (i.e. what is non-plastic)? Obviously concrete!