Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Elizabeth Gearhart: And now we're on to our final guest, Yidian Liu with Polygonsystems.com helping us all be healthier by taking all those nasty little microplastics out of the water.
[00:00:17] Yidian Liu: So welcome.
Thank you for having me here. I want to ask everyone a question. Do you all familiar with microplastics? Microplastics are any plastic particles that are smaller than 5 millimeters in diameter. And there's also nanoplastics, which are smaller than 1 micron to give a scale. So my hair is around 200 micron or so in width. So like, a nanoplastic is like 1 20th of this size. The problem is they're too small. Right. So it's very impossible, probably, to see them with our naked eye. But they're in our drinking water, they're in our blood, they're everywhere.
[00:00:55] Richard Gearhart: So if we drink bottled water from plastic containers, is there microplastics in that water?
[00:00:59] Yidian Liu: Great question. Let's take a guess. How many micro nanoplastics are there in a bottled water?
[00:01:07] Elizabeth Gearhart: I'm gonna say half a million.
[00:01:10] Yidian Liu: Half a million. Okay, aggressive.
[00:01:14] Richard Gearhart: I'm gonna say a lot. I don't know. I have no idea.
[00:01:17] Yidian Liu: It is between 90,000 to two 40,000 nanoplastics.
[00:01:24] Richard Gearhart: So if you were to, like, put it all together, all the particles together, and look at it on the table, what size would that be? Like the head of a pin, or would it be substantially more?
[00:01:33] Yidian Liu: Probably much smaller, because we're talking about nanoplastics.
[00:01:37] Elizabeth Gearhart: So where does it go in your body? Does it go into your cells? So it goes down your throat, into your stomach when you drink it. So then where does it go? Does it stay there?
Does it distribute throughout your digestive system, or what does it do?
[00:01:49] Yidian Liu: Great question. It is smaller than the cells itself. So it actually get transported across your body, and it enters your brain, your cell, your blood, and then it's in your. When you have a baby, the baby sometimes carried microplastics. It's kind of scary.
[00:02:05] Elizabeth Gearhart: Yeah.
[00:02:05] Yidian Liu: And then, you know, like, pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars, try to have drugs that can go into your brain, and then sometimes fail. The microplastic or nanoplastic got into the brain, the organs, before all of the drugs got there.
[00:02:19] Elizabeth Gearhart: Are they inert or can they emit chemicals?
[00:02:22] Yidian Liu: Great question again. Like, the plastic itself depends on this type. Can be inert, but some of them have, like, pigments and other chemicals added to them. So plastic becomes a vector for all of the other things, what kind of
[00:02:34] Speaker D: sickness can result from ingesting microplastic?
[00:02:39] Yidian Liu: It's very hard to draw, like a direct line between how much microplasty you have taken versus any syndromes. But there's correlation because it makes some of the organs, like flammable. It makes reproductivity less so people have those kind of directions.
[00:02:57] Elizabeth Gearhart: So how do you measure it? What do you use to analyze it?
[00:03:00] Yidian Liu: So for very basic microplastic, we can use fluorescent microscope. We kind of dye plastic in a special dye and it shines under very special weight length. And we can quantify, okay, 200 microplastic per liter of water, or 50. And if you want to have a very detailed understanding, you have to use those advanced equipment such as ftr, gc, Ms. And those are not really available in most labs.
So that's why we actually do this kind of analysis for people, just in case they're curious about their water.
[00:03:33] Richard Gearhart: So if there was one thing you wanted people to know about microplastics, what would you tell them?
[00:03:39] Yidian Liu: I would say try to avoid having plastics in your diet before anything is concrete in the research.
[00:03:47] Richard Gearhart: So, for example, if I have to make a choice between drinking bottled water and tap water, which would be healthier
[00:03:53] Yidian Liu: for me, I would drink from my filtered water in the fridge, because my tap water I tested is actually doesn't have much microplastic, but has other heavy chemicals as well.
[00:04:04] Richard Gearhart: So you would drink filtered water? I would drink filtered water from the tap. You think that that's probably healthier than drinking bottled water? Because we drink a lot of bottled water, we're trying to avoid all the chemicals in the tap water.
[00:04:16] Elizabeth Gearhart: So for the filtered, that goes through chemicals too, to filter out.
[00:04:20] Yidian Liu: So sometimes when you install those kind of inlet system, they are like RO systems or like the active charcoal systems, and those are pretty regular system you can use and get rid of a lot of heavy chemicals and plastic. Bottled water might be clean when it was dispensed into the bottle, but you don't know how long the bottle is being transported. Exposed to different kinds of condition or temperature, it may release plastic. So that's why I no longer drink water from like plastic bottles.
[00:04:49] Richard Gearhart: If plastic water bottle heats up like it's in the sun, I think it's probably leaching even more.
[00:04:55] Yidian Liu: Have you thought about sometimes why does it taste a bit weird? Yeah, might be because of the plastic and all the.
[00:05:02] Elizabeth Gearhart: So I can't bring my bottled water in the plastic bottle with me. So should I be using a stainless
[00:05:07] Yidian Liu: steel Water bottle for that, stainless steel cloth bottles. Those are great, except I was looking
[00:05:12] Elizabeth Gearhart: up stainless steel bottles, and they're lined with chemicals.
[00:05:16] Richard Gearhart: Lots of times they have like a resin type of covering.
[00:05:21] Elizabeth Gearhart: So you're kind of.
[00:05:21] Richard Gearhart: I guess this is a very difficult problem.
Want a glass of water, right?
[00:05:25] Speaker D: You know, what does your company do to collect and filter?
[00:05:30] Yidian Liu: So our system is developed for larger commercial applications and municipality applications. At the beginning, we're looking at how in the nature anything that is capturing smarter pollutants. And we find out this kind of green infrastructure made of wetlands. And all of their plant roots are very fibrous, and they can capture a lot of the small, smaller contaminants, including microplastic. We're like, amazing idea. Why can't we just have floating wetlands everywhere in the river or in wastewater treatment plants? And we try to incorporate in our design. So I have like this kind of wetland in my apartment for a few weeks trying to filter microplastic. They keep dying, right? And then we realize, okay, we want to imitate the quality structure of aquatic plant root, but we don't really want real plant plants because they die. So we innovated this fibrous silicone filter media that basically has the same hydrophility quality as the aquatic plant route, has the same shape, width, and width.
So you can also physically entangle microplastic. And then we test it with a lot of like, overdose microplastic water. We have more than 99% of removal rate for the microplastic. We introduce the water, and we're like, okay, we're gonna have this installed in, like, commercial wastewater in the pools in municipality, so that microplastic doesn't leach into the broader waterways.
[00:07:00] Richard Gearhart: So is leaching into municipal water plants, is it? There's a lot of plastic that actually finds its way into that water. Does that come from runoff from garbage dumps or how does plastic get into. And I thought it was all rain that came down, right? You know, and then flows through the ground, and that goes into the water supply. But there's plastic in there too.
[00:07:22] Yidian Liu: There are so many avenues. So the airborne plastic is one of the avenues. And there's also, you know, ties of the car when they wear off on the road and got washed into open channels that also get collected in wastewater treatment plant and laundry. A lot of clothing fibers are made of synthetic material. They also go into wastewater.
[00:07:42] Elizabeth Gearhart: So does a person's body excrete the plastic? Have you checked, like, urine samples to see how much is in there?
[00:07:49] Yidian Liu: We do have a clinic reaching out to us saying, like, can we send you urine samples to test? Microplastic. We're like, we're not ready for that yet.
[00:07:59] Elizabeth Gearhart: Yeah, I wonder how much.
[00:08:00] Speaker D: I remember reading about what they did with how do they recycle tires? They ground them up and they use them to create artificial turf for football fields. Then they discovered that kids who fell on the turf were inhaling a rubber powder which has all kinds of chemicals in it. So it was actually worse than leaving the tires to burn in some hole where they'd been burning for years. But I would imagine if you don't properly dispose of the plastic you collect, you don't want to end up recycling it.
[00:08:35] Elizabeth Gearhart: I'm sure AI will solve it and
[00:08:36] Richard Gearhart: find There you go.
Anyway.
[00:08:39] Elizabeth Gearhart: Well, thank you very much. This has been Yidian Lu and Your company is polygonsystems.com if you enjoyed this
[00:08:47] Richard Gearhart: episode, subscribe to the podcast and leave a quick review.
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