alt Hacker NewsSo basically the gloves that kitchen staff now must wear means we get an extra dose of micro plastics? Yikes.
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It says similar.
“ Stearates are salts, or soap-like particles. Manufacturers coat disposable gloves with stearates to make them easier to peel from the molds used to form them. But stearates are also chemically very similar to some microplastics, according to the researchers, and can lead to false positives when researchers are looking for microplastic pollution.”
Stearates aren’t microplastics. Maybe we need to be concerned with stearate pollution too.
> So basically the gloves that kitchen staff now must wear [..]
Genuine question: we used to simply wash our hands well before preparing food.
At what point did the wearing of disposable gloves become "better"?
The transparent disposable food-service gloves are usually polyethylene so I wouldn't think they would have the exact same false-positive result as the nitrile gloves. Microscopic particles of stearates are what's on these nitrile gloves, not actual polymer dust or excess abrasive losses.
Maybe a different false-positive particle type in significant amounts is on the polyethylene ones ?
Pure stearates in micro amounts would be expected to be related to mild food-grade soaps, which do end up dissolving in water or oil and do not remain solid like a relatively immobile polymer particle would do.
The stearates aren't microplastics, they aren't polymers, but they have chemical/spectroscopic similarity that results in them confusing the microplastics assays.
In the article it explains that what they release are not microplastics
How tricky the whole topic is
Funnily, I believe the glove mandates for food prep are actually anti-hygiene.
Unlike bare skin, you can't really feel when your gloves are contaminated. So you are less likely to replace gloves when you should. With bare hands, you can feel the raw chicken juices on you, so it's pretty natural to want to wash your hands right after handling the raw chicken.
Gloves are important in medicine, but that's with proper use where doctors and nurses put on new gloves for every patient. That doesn't always happen.