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/
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)
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.
So maybe a good % of the population could be doing more fine without the micro plastics?
Not suggesting to have humans consume concentrated concoctions of plastics, but however ethically science allows.
What if there's some kind of plastic cliff that most species in the universe don't survive?
We worry about virus epidemics, global warming, asteroids, etc.
http://onemoregeneration.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Life...
Plastics also break down to simpler hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide with prolonged exposure to sunlight. Unfortunately, these gaseous small molecules are greenhouse gases, but they don't persist for as long.
"Production of methane and ethylene from plastic in the environment"
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Policy-by-platitude is a bad strategy.
Some bacteria will survive.
Again, probably wrong, not at all an opinion to be taken as fact, just a gut feeling. History tells us that there will at least be SOMETHING perceived as normal today that is later discovered to be not okay, anyway. Plastic, social media, hell, maybe even EV after 50 years of batteries rotting in landfills.
And if the exposure is as universal as it sounds, then we can place some upper bounds on the amount of harm. With asbestos, the exposure was somewhat limited, but had greater consewuences. With plastics, we are all getting it.
So as far as I can tell, the “upper bound” of harm is reproductive collapse of our species?
Always a great way to start a sentence. (Intended in jest.)
My guess is that it is never replaced, and instead, we will pour time and money into treating whatever (if any) issues microplastic consumption cause instead. Theorizing for fun, it’s pretty bleak though hah
