Links for Thursday, October 25, 2018: edible cotton, microplastics in every nook and cranny, healthcare pollution, and Chicago tylenol murders

Edible cotton is coming

And I just can’t help but think about picking it out of my teeth. I know, I know, it’s the seeds that are edible. Still.

Microplastics are everywhere. In salt. In your poop.

I’ve been to Strataca in Hutchinson, Kansas, an old salt mine-turned-storage facility and tourist destination. I highly recommend it. One of the curiosities of Strataca is the ancient, undecomposed trash, having spent the last century in 70 degree dry air without UV light. So it was interesting that rock salt in this study was relatively free of microplastics:

“In another indicator of the geographic density of plastic pollution, microplastics levels were highest in sea salt, followed by lake salt and then rock salt.”

And levels varied according to geography, mostly in parallel with the amount of plastic pollution in the environment:

“…those from Asian brands were especially high, the study found. The highest quantities of microplastics were found in salt sold in Indonesia. Asia is a hot spot for plastic pollution, and Indonesia—with 34,000 miles (54,720 km) of coastline—ranked in an unrelated 2015 study as suffering the second-worst level of plastic pollution in the world.”

Why does this matter? Well, besides the very depressing thought that we’re polluting the planet with infinite amounts of unbiodegradable trash, plastic contains chemicals that fool our bodies into acting weird because we misinterpret those chemicals as signals. And while I worry that this will turn into some kind of fetishized quest for microplastics that will detract from bigger issues like the source of all that plastic pollution in the first place, the idea that there is invisible plastic in our environment that we’re almost powerless to avoid is…kind of scary.

Nine percent (9%!) of national greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to the healthcare sector

The Chicago “Tylenol Murders” of 1982 are still unsolved

Just like 40% of murders overall.

And did you know that Tylenol comes from the chemical name for acetaminophen? aceTYLaminophENOL

Wichita has a bike share!

Bike Share ICT is official. Errr...was official on May 4. But since I've been out of town in sunny San Diego (stay classy), I haven't had a chance to post on it.

That speaker is Becky Tuttle of Health ICT (and who's soon *sniff* leaving for the YMCA), who was the driving force behind getting this done. 

Did you know...

That Bike Share ICT is using no (as in zero) taxpayer funds? Check out the sponsors on the homepage.

That bike shares are associated with a reduction in traffic congestion, even when car lanes are converted to bike lanes?

That bike share users are far less likely to be injured than people riding their own bikes?

That bike lanes and bike share are associated with an increase in life expectancy, even for people who don't use them, presumably because of reduced air pollution?

The reason I'm excited about bike share is that my body was made for movement. When we see people in motorized wheelchairs, we feel bad for them. When that fancy motorized wheelchair says "BMW" on the hood, we envy them. That's dumb.

I need one of two things in a commute: Either make it fast, or make it slow. That is, I want it done and over with quickly, like when I ride my bike to my local grocery store (~1 mile away), or I want it to last long enough for me to get something done, like the guy Cal Newport writes about it Deep Work who bought a round-trip ticket to Tokyo so he'd have undistracted time to finish a book (thus giving it the biggest carbon footprint of any book, ever).

Driving a car usually accomplishes neither. Most people can maintain a 10 mph average on their bikes without killing themselves, at least after some practice. So 10 miles takes an hour, 5 miles takes thirty minutes, 1 mile takes six minutes, etc. You can start using this to budget your time. The library's 2.5 miles away (15 minutes). The grocery store is one mile away (6 minutes). It saves me less than three minutes on that ride to the grocery store. The amazing thing is that the times are so short. In my car clown days, I was accustomed to allowing 15 minutes wherever I went, short trip or long trip. Commuting by bike makes me more thoughtful. But even when I tell you it takes me 45 minutes to commute one-way by bike to work some days, does that sound like a lot of time to you? What if I told you that the average American spends three hours a day on social media? What if I told you the average American spends five hours and four minutes of each day watching TV? What if I told you that 79% of Americans don't meet the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, which encourage 2.5 hours a week of vigorous activity? 

What if I told you that, if you would only ride your bike to work, none of that would matter?

Yeah, you'll sweat a little on your Bike Share bike. On hot days, you'll sweat a lot. Trust me: if the Olympics awarded medals for sweating, I'd be in the running for the gold, year-in and year-out.

I'm the Usain Bolt of perspiration.

If there's an eightfold difference in sweating between people, I'm so far on the "eight" end of that spectrum that I'm practically a "nine."

But that little hint of sweat you carry around: that's your reminder that you've done something with your day. While everyone else was phone-droning for three hours or watching five hours of TV, you were at least getting something done. You were getting your body to and from work, or the grocery store, or the post office, at the same time that you were making yourself healthier and making the planet *this much* healthier. And you saved money, too.