this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
105 points (92.7% liked)
Science
6900 readers
137 users here now
General discussions about "science" itself
Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I haven’t done any real labwork in about a decade, so probably a dumb question, but wouldn’t repeat distillation be a viable option for a control like that? Or are you suggesting the gloves might’ve been the culprit?
I know you’ll always get some nanoplastics carried over through aerosol droplets able to survive, but I’d naively expect you could still get a few orders of magnitude cleaner than the ordinary DI tap.
My conpletely uneducated hobbyist guess would be that that would not work, because somewhere during the repeat distillation process you would be adding in more microplastics. Unless your entire setup, down to every fitting, is made of glass and completely sterilized of any microplastics then under the influence of heat youd simply be adding in more particulates. Also, as soon as its exposed to air then its exposed to the microplastics you exhale. If you store it in a mason jar with a gasket, or god forbid a plastic jug, or even a rubber stopper on a glass jar all introduce microplastics.
Yeah that's not too hard. Plenty of glass labware, including fittings. I doubt there is a significant number of microplastics in filtered air. And you could create water from plenty of reactions with sufficiently pure components.
You don't need to have absolutely zero microplastics, just as near as you can get for comparison.
But that's also a difficult question right, is there really an insignificant number of nano/microplastics in filtered air of filtered water? From what I've heard in cloud development, small particles can float along with water vapor, no clue how this would work in Destillation for instant.
I'm no expert on microplastics, but i do work in science so i do see papers getting around how plastics keep popping up in unexpected places. Sure a DM2 lab is expected to be super clean and safe and all, but idk. Maybe im also just a bit scared-biased