Plastics, let alone microplastics, are a rather small problem that seem to get a lot of airspace.
There are no established health effects of microplastics. There are magnitudes worse health problems in e.g. both under and overnutrition that cause a lot less panic and fuss.
> There are no established health effects of microplastics.
It'd be more true to say, "There are no established significant health effects of microplastics on humans." FWIW, the article you linked to doesn't say "no effects", but "limited evidence for significant adverse health impacts".
When reading research papers, ‘significant’ is usually meant to mean ‘statistically correlated’ which varies from our typical lay definition of ‘very impactful’, which would be described using the term ‘effect size’
Micro plastics is like CO2. Spread out everywhere, can't be sequestered or reversed.
Rather than saying it's not a problem now — it's worth saying what's the threshold beyond which health complications begin (that number can't be infinity), and based on current growth levels how far we're off from it. If that's like at current rate of growth we still have 5000 years, then yeah I would agree with you and ignore the news. But just saying retrogressively that there is no conclusive evidence based on what we're eating so far – unfortunately sounds only politically correct, without considering the spirit of doing science (exploring the horizons / where the limits are).
A lot of issues like you mention can be a big problem on the population level, but not in an individual level if you're conscious of what you eat. This doesn't seem to be the case with microplastics, they seem to be in everything.
You might call it panic to minimize it, and you'd be right to do so if we here were in charge of nutrition for a population; but I'm guessing most of us are in charge of our own nutrition and maybe a family's, so the information to deal with that is pretty valuable.
Can someone ELI5 this for me: how would microplastics passing through a digestive system end up in "proteins*"? Are they being stored directly in the fats, within cells, between muscle fibers...?
(* the article seems to be using the term "protein" in the culinary sense, not the molecular sense).
You know how mercury bioaccumulates up the food chain? It looks like microplastics are similar [1] [2], and they are everywhere in the food web [3]. It's even in the bottled water [4].
(edit: yes, yes, no surprise it's in the bottled water, maybe we shouldn't be selling bottled water if it's full of microplastics? Less bottled water, more water dispensers everywhere)
There was another posting within the last few months that showed the particular microplastic they studied fit into the same ‘lock’ per lock/key of a biological molecule interaction and prevented the desired molecules from working together. It could be that or a different mechanism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38322944
The article only reports number of microplastics without reporting mass. This is particularly difficult to interpret when fibers are responsible for so much of the total:
Notably, across all samples, nearly half (44%) of the identified microplastics were fibers, which is consistent with other studies suggesting that fibers are the most prevalent form of microplastic in the environment.
Are 4 fibers of 50 micron length 4 times more dangerous than one 200 micron long fiber? There's no discussion of it in the article, but reporting microplastics by number of countable particles carries that implication.
I wonder how much of this stuff we inhale from our dryer exhaust when washing outdoor/athletic wear? I used the lint from my dryer as a fire-starter once and it definitely smelled like burning plastic.
Stop driving? Most microplastic in water come from tires.
I've been trying to make small moves away from car infrastructure in my town and the response is, well, less than positive.
We already tacitly accept that cars are one of the biggest causes of death. Reducing car infrastructure to reduce microplastics, where we don't even really know the harm, seems far far more challenging.
And also synthetic clothes. According to the study they found more plastic fibres than plastic particles in many samples.
These get released when you launder your clothes, ending up in the drain water and ultimately the ocean.
Solution? Buy clothes with natural fibres (cotton, wool, etc) instead of plastics. And wash your clothes in a modern washing machine with a microfibre filter on its drain outlet.
What town is that? It seems like the success of diversifying away from cars depends on the place and how it grew. LA, for example, grew at the time of peak automobile infrastructure investment and it's basically unrecoverable at this point. There are probably other reasons why places like LA are so locked in to cars now, but that's the one that seems obvious to me.
If you donate blood as soon as possible from your last blood donation (per federal regulations), you can remove 50% of your microplastic content per year. Some studies have also shown that going to saunas/sweat lodges also lower your microplastic content.
I don't think becoming vegetarian helps. From the article:
> The study found evidence that food processing is a likely source of microplastic contamination, as highly processed protein products (like fish sticks, chicken nuggets, tofu, and plant-based burgers, among others) contained significantly more microplastics per gram than minimally processed products (items like packaged wild Alaska pollock, raw chicken breast, and others).
The graph makes sense to me, processed (plant-based or factory-breaded) and shrimp seem to be the main ones. Buy fresh and you’ll be alright is what I read from this.
I sometimes have this feeling that in the future, when all of the science on this stuff is well established, our future enlightened society will simply take the view that plastic is poisonous. I think it'll be the same way that we think of lead, mercury, etc: like "wash your hands if you touch the stuff" levels of poisonous. I would not be surprised if society makes this shift in the next 20-30 years. Some of the recent results are really nuts:
It goes on and on. There are studies showing it gets into the placenta, harms animals, affects behavior, stays in your system forever, bioaccumulates all the way up the food chain and makes its way into every organ, and so on. This is all within the last few years. It seems like bottled water is a vector for this stuff very similar to lead pipes, and tires are a vector similar to leaded gasoline, and that the evidence is basically all there and all that is needed is a big epidemiological "smoking gun" study to put it all together.
Of course not every single thing one could possibly call "plastic" need be equally unsafe. Probably some better plastic will be devised which is safer for use in tires and etc. Still, I think there will be a society-wide push against so-called "plastic", in general. People will probably push to replace everything made of plastic with something else: replacing saran wrap with parchment paper, Tupperware with glass, etc.
I'm not super interested in defending this rigorously as it's really just a hunch, but I'm curious if this is what happens.
> I sometimes have this feeling that in the future, when all of the science on this stuff is well established, our future enlightened society will simply take the view that plastic is poisonous. I think it'll be the same way that we think of lead, mercury, etc
I don't.
The effects of lead or mercury poisoning are fast-acting and obvious. All the links you provided talk about the release of plastics into the world, but the details on how that affects things are sketchier than say , mercury poisoning , because the symptoms are slowly accruing and ambiguous compared to lots of other environmental contaminants.
>Notably, across all samples, nearly half (44%) of the identified microplastics were fibers, which is consistent with other studies suggesting that fibers are the most prevalent form of microplastic in the environment.
Seems like one could live on a vegan diet and still be consuming a lot of plastic fiber. My favorite blankets, rugs, and t-shirts are all 100% polyester.
Even if I managed to use avoid plastics at home, plastic lint is everywhere in public too.
An even stranger but annoying problem is even if you buy 100% cotton, the stitching is usually a polyester. It is difficult to buy cotton threads for home sewing
Avoiding synthetics in clothing is indeed difficult. I buy 100% natural fibers where I can, but sadly often the best one can do is ~90% natural ~10% synthetic.
100% cotton would seem to be widely available? Certainly for shirts, t-shirts, jumpers, trousers, socks. I don't wear anything other than cotton really for those items.
For some reason they have started putting stretchy stuff into cotton jeans - maybe style, or maybe (my pet theory) that good quality cotton is no longer economic for jean production, and so they have to use rougher cotton, which needs the stretchy stuff to be comfortable enough to wear.
We are burning huge amounts of fossil fuels to run the economy. This economic boon leads to longer lifetimes, at a huge but externalized and delayed cost.
> it seems like most people are doing... just fine?
Where do you live?
Outside of affluent areas, I think most people these days would laugh at such an absurd claim. We are not fine, physically or mentally.
Our soil isn't fine. Our air isn't fine. Our water isn't fine - not our wells, our rivers, our lakes, our oceans, or even our icecaps. Our species are being made extinct at 1000x the background rate of extinction. Anyone fine with this is on the ignorant side of blissful.
Are you claiming that declining fertility is due to plastic, rather than to increasing wealth, education of women, and access to contraception? If so, then I'm going to have to ask you for a) a source and b) a plausible mechanism.
Readit News
There are no established health effects of microplastics. There are magnitudes worse health problems in e.g. both under and overnutrition that cause a lot less panic and fuss.
https://www.undp.org/kosovo/blog/microplastics-human-health-...
It'd be more true to say, "There are no established significant health effects of microplastics on humans." FWIW, the article you linked to doesn't say "no effects", but "limited evidence for significant adverse health impacts".
This seems concerning: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9885170/
Deleted Comment
Micro plastics is like CO2. Spread out everywhere, can't be sequestered or reversed.
Rather than saying it's not a problem now — it's worth saying what's the threshold beyond which health complications begin (that number can't be infinity), and based on current growth levels how far we're off from it. If that's like at current rate of growth we still have 5000 years, then yeah I would agree with you and ignore the news. But just saying retrogressively that there is no conclusive evidence based on what we're eating so far – unfortunately sounds only politically correct, without considering the spirit of doing science (exploring the horizons / where the limits are).
You might call it panic to minimize it, and you'd be right to do so if we here were in charge of nutrition for a population; but I'm guessing most of us are in charge of our own nutrition and maybe a family's, so the information to deal with that is pretty valuable.
An equally true statement is that there is no established safe concentration of microplastics in tissue.
(* the article seems to be using the term "protein" in the culinary sense, not the molecular sense).
[1] https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/08/30/microplastics-could...
[2] https://www.uri.edu/news/2023/08/microplastics-infiltrate-al...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38917410
(edit: yes, yes, no surprise it's in the bottled water, maybe we shouldn't be selling bottled water if it's full of microplastics? Less bottled water, more water dispensers everywhere)
The bottled water that comes in plastic bottles? Not that surprising?
Notably, across all samples, nearly half (44%) of the identified microplastics were fibers, which is consistent with other studies suggesting that fibers are the most prevalent form of microplastic in the environment.
Are 4 fibers of 50 micron length 4 times more dangerous than one 200 micron long fiber? There's no discussion of it in the article, but reporting microplastics by number of countable particles carries that implication.
Is there any way to remove microplastics from a person/animal once already ingested?
What technology if any is being worked on to help alleviate this?
I've been trying to make small moves away from car infrastructure in my town and the response is, well, less than positive.
We already tacitly accept that cars are one of the biggest causes of death. Reducing car infrastructure to reduce microplastics, where we don't even really know the harm, seems far far more challenging.
And also synthetic clothes. According to the study they found more plastic fibres than plastic particles in many samples.
These get released when you launder your clothes, ending up in the drain water and ultimately the ocean.
Solution? Buy clothes with natural fibres (cotton, wool, etc) instead of plastics. And wash your clothes in a modern washing machine with a microfibre filter on its drain outlet.
Not a realistic solution. The vast majority of people will take the microplastics over not driving.
> The study found evidence that food processing is a likely source of microplastic contamination, as highly processed protein products (like fish sticks, chicken nuggets, tofu, and plant-based burgers, among others) contained significantly more microplastics per gram than minimally processed products (items like packaged wild Alaska pollock, raw chicken breast, and others).
Note the tofu and plant-based burgers.
- You eat a credit card sized amount of plastic every week: https://nautil.us/you-eat-a-credits-card-worth-of-plastic-ev... - 93% of bottled water has plastic in it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16793888 - Plastic containers, even "safe" ones, release plastic into food: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36532812 - Car tires are depositing plastic everywhere, including oceans: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37726539
It goes on and on. There are studies showing it gets into the placenta, harms animals, affects behavior, stays in your system forever, bioaccumulates all the way up the food chain and makes its way into every organ, and so on. This is all within the last few years. It seems like bottled water is a vector for this stuff very similar to lead pipes, and tires are a vector similar to leaded gasoline, and that the evidence is basically all there and all that is needed is a big epidemiological "smoking gun" study to put it all together.
Of course not every single thing one could possibly call "plastic" need be equally unsafe. Probably some better plastic will be devised which is safer for use in tires and etc. Still, I think there will be a society-wide push against so-called "plastic", in general. People will probably push to replace everything made of plastic with something else: replacing saran wrap with parchment paper, Tupperware with glass, etc.
I'm not super interested in defending this rigorously as it's really just a hunch, but I'm curious if this is what happens.
I don't.
The effects of lead or mercury poisoning are fast-acting and obvious. All the links you provided talk about the release of plastics into the world, but the details on how that affects things are sketchier than say , mercury poisoning , because the symptoms are slowly accruing and ambiguous compared to lots of other environmental contaminants.
I agree we should do something about it.
Seems like one could live on a vegan diet and still be consuming a lot of plastic fiber. My favorite blankets, rugs, and t-shirts are all 100% polyester.
Even if I managed to use avoid plastics at home, plastic lint is everywhere in public too.
For some reason they have started putting stretchy stuff into cotton jeans - maybe style, or maybe (my pet theory) that good quality cotton is no longer economic for jean production, and so they have to use rougher cotton, which needs the stretchy stuff to be comfortable enough to wear.
I know PFAS are hormonal disrupters in research but it seems like most people are doing... just fine?
We are burning huge amounts of fossil fuels to run the economy. This economic boon leads to longer lifetimes, at a huge but externalized and delayed cost.
> it seems like most people are doing... just fine?
Where do you live?
Outside of affluent areas, I think most people these days would laugh at such an absurd claim. We are not fine, physically or mentally.
Our soil isn't fine. Our air isn't fine. Our water isn't fine - not our wells, our rivers, our lakes, our oceans, or even our icecaps. Our species are being made extinct at 1000x the background rate of extinction. Anyone fine with this is on the ignorant side of blissful.
https://ourworldindata.org/cancer
But certain biomarkers in average are oddly doing ok. It's weird.
So maybe a good % of the population could be doing more fine without the micro plastics?