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Ok, we get it, microplastics are everywhere and have been for most of our lifetimes. Can someone explain why this is a bad thing or even IF it is a bad thing?

Ok, we get it, microplastics are everywhere and have been for most of our lifetimes. Can someone explain why this is a bad thing or even IF it is a bad thing? As far as I can tell, humans have been dying from the same illnesses for the past 100-200-300 years, except we're living longer than ever and dying more from lifestyle illnesses now. Are we just assuming that eating microplastics is bad? Why not assume it's good? I mean, I haven't seen any evidence for either outcome and the stress and worry about eating them is probably worse for our health than the microplastics themselves. Edit: I'm not sure why downvoting this comment helps. I'm not saying microplastics are good or bad for human health, just that we get scary articles all the time telling us how they are everywhere, but no one saying anything yet about their harm (or harmlessness).

perfunctory 6y ago
> Why not assume it's good? Yeah, let's just assume that everything is good by default. "Before It Was Dangerous, Lead Was The Miracle Metal That We Loved" https://www.npr.org/2016/04/06/473268312/before-it-was-dangerous-lead-was-the-miracle-metal-that-we-loved?t=1608642388719 https://www.npr.org/2016/04/06/473268312/before-it-was-dange...
- _Microft 6y ago
  We even x-rayed feet to see if shoes fit. The shoe industry of course rejected health concerns: "Representatives of the shoe retail industry denied claims of potential harm in newspaper articles and opinion pieces. They argued that the devices' use prevented harm to customers' feet that otherwise would have resulted from poorly-fitted shoes.", from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope
  - mk89 6y ago
    Man, that's a brilliant idea! So sad it's dangerous...!
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    TBH if the rays only hit the feet (which wasn't the case with this machine, it was far from "tight" and radiation escaped in all directions), total health concern would be smaller. Hands and feet can tolerate bigger radiation doses than our internal organs. Muscle and bone is not that sensitive, most damage will be on skin. https://www.env.go.jp/en/chemi/rhm/basic-info/1st/03-02-07.html https://www.env.go.jp/en/chemi/rhm/basic-info/1st/03-02-07.h...
    - XorNot 6y ago
      Metastasized melanoma will still kill you just as dead.
    - daniel-cussen 6y ago
      Yeah worst case just cut them off. In any case shoe salesmen are actually in the business of telling customers their shoe fits even when it doesn't. A relative who was a shoe salesman in the forties told me if the shoe was too small, tell them it'll fit in the morning because feet swell in the afternoon. If the shoe was too big say it had to have a distance between the toe and the end of the shoe of about one finger width. In reality you should actually try on shoes until one actually fits comfortably. I highly doubt this machine was actually used for finding better-fitting shoes as opposed to being a magical contraption used to give authority to the shoe salesman so he could sell more, more expensive shoes faster and with less work.
EinwegPlastik 6y ago
Downvoting never helps. Anyway you should read the article before you comment. Its described in the article itself that microplastic attracts/collects toxins (heavy metals etc.). We already know that plenty of animals are dying because of plastic as well. Also general speaking, while we live longer everyday, it still can mean that we live longer but worse due to microplastic and its affects on us. Sleep issues perhaps? Alzheimer perhaps? Depression? For me personally speaking, this feels very unnatural (and i don't like this word at all normally) and its sickening to know that we produce a product and it is now floating in our bloodstreams and it doesn't need to be there. We have had millions of years of an selfs sustainable ecosystem and we arrive, produce an enormous amount of plastic and taint our own environment in such an idiotic way. It is now everywhere. We found it in rainwater, on mountain tops etc. 1950 0 tones of plastic production per year vs. 2015 350 Million tons. It also weirds me out a little bit to see that other people actually don't care or don't see any issues with it.
- saberience 6y ago
  It's not that I don't care. However, I object to the huge amount of media/news stories driven by fear which leads to a generalized anxiety and depression about basically everything. If you read the modern news and take it at all seriously, you will live in a constant fear of doing just about anything. Drinking water? You're drinking scary microplastics. Walking outside? Don't do that, the air pollution is going to give you cancer or other nasty lung diseases. Stay in and have a meal? Don't eat bread/carbs/sugar/red meat/tuna/legumes/anything processed, that will give you heart disease or cancer too, inflammation. etc etc etc. Basically everything you can put into your body or do with your time has been associated with death or otherwise making you sick and what can the average person do about it? Basically fucking nothing. The average person can do nothing about microplastics except be afraid of them. Also the average person cannot afford to have a healthy diet or avoid plastic and in addition, their diets are usually so bad that even if microplastics have any deleterious health effect, it's liable to be several orders of magnitude less bad than the effects of junk food or alcohol. All the above goes to say why I think microplastics are something for scientists to worry about now because I believe the psychological impacts of all this fear are far worse than the thing itself. Anxiety and depression, undoubtedly made worse by all the fear driven media kill more people every year or otherwise reduce quality of life far more than I believe microplastics do.
taneq 6y ago
I gave you an upvote because you’re asking a reasonable question. One answer is that snippets of organic compounds are often carcinogenic and/or bioactive, so they’re scarier than (say) metal filings that just dissolve in short order (try a magnet on “iron fortified” cereal! Turns out iron’s fairly bioavailabile when combined with vitamin C.)
lm28469 6y ago
> Why not assume it's good? Yes, like lead in gas/paint, radium in lipstick, freon, asbestos... why not assume it's good, it never backfired... Feel free to read the thousands of studies on the subject (spoiler alert: none are concluding micro-plastics are good for us nor the environment in general) https://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=microplastic+effect+human&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart https://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=microplastic+effect+huma... > As far as I can tell, humans have been dying from the same illnesses for the past 100-200-300 years We're talking long term effects of a very recent thing that potentially affects every single one of us. unless you have a crystal ball or studies backing up your skepticism this line of thought isn't very logical. It's like a 22 years old telling you smoking cigarettes is fine because he doesn't have a lung cancer or reduced lung capacity _yet_
- saberience 6y ago
  I was asking whether it might be good as a provocative question asked in the more philosophical sense. I don't assume they are good, but I do object to simple fear-mongering over yet another new thing to be afraid of in our world, especially when most other things appear to be orders of magnitude more dangerous to us than microplastics, e.g. drinking alcohol, traffic fumes/air pollution.
  - lm28469 6y ago
    > I do object to simple fear-mongering over yet another new thing to be afraid of in our world Well, we're fucking up big times and have plenty of reasons to be worried, if your house is on fire calling the firefighters isn't fear mongering. > most other things appear to be orders of magnitude more dangerous to us than micro-plastics, e.g. drinking alcohol, traffic fumes/air pollution You can chose not to drink alcohol or not to smoke. You can't chose not to ingest micro plastic. And you're right, air pollution is a similar issue, should we ignore rising issues because we're already dealing with existing ones ? By the way, nobody is telling you to be scared. Micro plastics in placenta is, apparently, a fact, micro plastics being dangerous to us is a fact, chose how you feel about it but don't shoot the messenger.
Frost1x 6y ago
In the anthropocene era, sometimes we should err on the side of caution. If our human activities can reshape the Earth significantly and such changes can last for very long periods of time, we likely shouldn't proceed gung-ho on those fronts but do so slowly gathering as much knowledge as we can. We used to pump lead into all sorts of things and throw CFCs into the environment but we realized later these are bad for most us Earth dewllers. At the time, we didn't have abundant evidence of the negative effects and that got us into trouble. Maybe microplastics are harmless but it may be a wise assumption to assume they are and proceed slowly and cautiously. Turning these things backwards may be incredibly difficult to nearly impossible (e.g. Chernobyl). Scale is very important for experimenting if something is harmful or not. Its better to experiment with these things at small scale before rolling processes out globally. Some effects are only clear at full scale though, unfortunately.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ballenf 6y ago
  Ironically, plastics and other hydrocarbons now substitute for many of the uses of lead: pipes, paint, gasoline additives, etc. So to say we should have moved slowly to plastics would probably mean lead would have been around for a lot longer. I'd happily take the wager that removing lead from the environment around us was the right move. I might lose the bet, but I think it's a reasonable position.
  - EinwegPlastik 6y ago
    Huh? i assumed we went from lead to copper and not straight to plastic
    - withinboredom 6y ago
      Then we'd just complain about an overabundance of minerals in our body.
      - 6y ago
morlockabove 6y ago
Most things are bad by default.
nmstoker 6y ago
I think you raise a fair point here regarding the unproven harm/benefit. The same default to "it must be bad" happened with mobile phone radiation. If people are going to be in business of unsubstantiated claims then that one always struck me as rich: you could just as easily imagine a scenario where the extra heat improves blood flow thus enhancing cognitive ability! (to be clear I'm not seriously suggesting this) It's reasonable to discuss this with an open mind even if the vast majority of human environmental impact have been negative for life (eg pesticides, lead, CFCs etc)
- XorNot 6y ago
  There's a difference between no known mechanism (and the effect being completely swamped by the environment) versus actually having a contaminant persist in the body, which historically is usually the precursor of larger effects. I.e. asbestos is harmless, and would be harmless if didn't remain in the lungs, and we just breathed it back out. Hell, you can handle most radioactive isotopes quite safely provided they don't enter the body in a persistent way.
Knufen 6y ago
As a medicinal chemist working on human reproduction I can give a little perspective (though not as much as a bio chemist with knowledge of human reproduction). These things are very hard to quantify, but all studies so far points to microplastic being bad. Not poisonous like lead, or deadly like uranium in ceramics. Instead they are a bit more sneaky. While plastic in itself is not so bad, all the other stuff in plastic is. Take BPA [1], a known endocrine disruptor. It is especially bad for humans in the early stages of development and has life long effects. Boys will have less testosterone (leading to multiple knock off effects) and girls will have earlier puberty, more breast and other types of cancer. Because the doses are so low the effect are not typically seen in individuals. Instead we detect them on population scale. An example is the testosterone levels of men is dwindling each year [2]. Of course correlation does not equal causation, but more and more studies are pointing to chemical disruption. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21605673/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21605673/ [2] https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/92/1/196/2598434?login=true https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/92/1/196/2598434?login...
- Orthw2020 6y ago
  I wonder if reduced testosterone will in turn lead to voting in even more liberal/socialist governments in the west? After all, lead poisoning was suggested as one of the possible reasons for the decline of the Roman empire.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - magic-chicken 6y ago
    What? Are you suggesting that left-leaning voters have a lower level of testosterone than right-leaning voters? > After all, lead poisoning was suggested as one of the possible reasons for the decline of the Roman empire. What are you trying to imply here? Microplastic -> Low Testorone -> Socialist government -> Decline of civilisation?
    - tomp 6y ago
Proven 6y ago
Perfectly reasonable questions. Upvoted. It's a slow day over at The Guardian, it seems.
klmadfejno 6y ago
For the same reason we spent a year testing COVID vaccines. You don't want to put something of unknown effect into your body. You especially don't want to put something unknown into everyone's body all at once. It's not "good vs. bad" it's "safe vs. not safe". It's also about emergent properties that aren't apparent until you've hit a certain scale. Fish with plastic heavy diets have more tumors and liver problems. It would be pretty shocking if there wasn't an inflection point at which we see some heavy consequences for humans as well in terms of plastic concentration. Maybe we won't reach that level practically for a long time, maybe we will. I lean towards thinking we won't see too drastic of a consequence in the next 200 years (not backed up by anything) but I'd still say it's definitively a problem.
okprod 6y ago
Every time there's a microplastics article on HN, there's someone who has to posit that ingesting pounds of plastic may not be bad.
- whalesalad 6y ago
  More advanced civilizations are watching us remotely - in galaxies far far away - and giggling at our discourse.
Bancakes 6y ago
Our bodies did not evolve around microplastics, so we're allowed to be biased against microplastics. So, waiting for some studies that microplastics are harmless (p-values < 1e10-5 only, please).
trianglem 6y ago
In a nutshell it’s endocrine description and certain plastics acting as estrogen mimics. You’re getting downvoted because this comment is eerily similar is length, structure and content to the top comment on other HN stories about micro plastics.
qmmmur 6y ago
Obviously if on average everything gets better you still don't ignore potentially long term harmful effects. It's clear that microplastics have been infiltrating our systems dormantly since microplastics have been around and so its probably a good idea to find out why so that we dont construct a world in which we are entirely dependent on them if they do turn out to have a significantly bad long term effect. Oh wait, that's already the world we live in.
JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
Thank you for saying this, I have had the same concerns and been afraid to voice them. It surely depends on the plastic type for sure. The reason we used polypropylene beakers in our lab is because it is one of the most benign and unreactive substances on earth. Other plastics may not be as benign as that but on the whole that is one of the great things about plastic and why it builds up in oceans etc. Nothing can degrade it so the bacteria in your gut are probably just meh about it. I can’t think of a way it could cause a problem to have little bits of it in your digestive system along with all the other substances we eat. Plasticizers that leach out from the micro plastics maybe, but I have to think that there are so many things we should be more concerned about in our food. The dose of plasticizer from the macro plastics we store and transport all our food in seems like it would be a much bigger issue. BPA and other xenoestrogens should have leached out of micro plastics long before they get micro right?
TedShiller 6y ago
It’s bad because it will only increase from here. Let me know if you want to volunteer to be on a microplastic heavy diet so we can be sure it’s not bad.
agarden 6y ago
Sperm count. It has been dropping precipitously over the handful of decades. Many men are already infertile and if the sperm count continues to fall at the rate it has been, most will be infertile before this century is done. There is reason to believe that plastics may be a contributor to this phenomenon: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/24/toxic-america-sperm-counts-plastics-research#:~:text=A%202014%20study%20of%20the,because%20they%20are%20so%20ubiquitous https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/24/toxic-americ.... https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero

perfunctory 6y ago

> Why not assume it's good? Yeah, let's just assume that everything is good by default. "Before It Was Dangerous, Lead Was The Miracle Metal That We Loved" https://www.npr.org/2016/04/06/473268312/before-it-was-dangerous-lead-was-the-miracle-metal-that-we-loved?t=1608642388719 https://www.npr.org/2016/04/06/473268312/before-it-was-dange...

_Microft 6y ago
We even x-rayed feet to see if shoes fit. The shoe industry of course rejected health concerns: "Representatives of the shoe retail industry denied claims of potential harm in newspaper articles and opinion pieces. They argued that the devices' use prevented harm to customers' feet that otherwise would have resulted from poorly-fitted shoes.", from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope
- mk89 6y ago
  Man, that's a brilliant idea! So sad it's dangerous...!
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  TBH if the rays only hit the feet (which wasn't the case with this machine, it was far from "tight" and radiation escaped in all directions), total health concern would be smaller. Hands and feet can tolerate bigger radiation doses than our internal organs. Muscle and bone is not that sensitive, most damage will be on skin. https://www.env.go.jp/en/chemi/rhm/basic-info/1st/03-02-07.html https://www.env.go.jp/en/chemi/rhm/basic-info/1st/03-02-07.h...
  - XorNot 6y ago
    Metastasized melanoma will still kill you just as dead.
  - daniel-cussen 6y ago
    Yeah worst case just cut them off. In any case shoe salesmen are actually in the business of telling customers their shoe fits even when it doesn't. A relative who was a shoe salesman in the forties told me if the shoe was too small, tell them it'll fit in the morning because feet swell in the afternoon. If the shoe was too big say it had to have a distance between the toe and the end of the shoe of about one finger width. In reality you should actually try on shoes until one actually fits comfortably. I highly doubt this machine was actually used for finding better-fitting shoes as opposed to being a magical contraption used to give authority to the shoe salesman so he could sell more, more expensive shoes faster and with less work.

EinwegPlastik 6y ago

Downvoting never helps. Anyway you should read the article before you comment. Its described in the article itself that microplastic attracts/collects toxins (heavy metals etc.). We already know that plenty of animals are dying because of plastic as well. Also general speaking, while we live longer everyday, it still can mean that we live longer but worse due to microplastic and its affects on us. Sleep issues perhaps? Alzheimer perhaps? Depression? For me personally speaking, this feels very unnatural (and i don't like this word at all normally) and its sickening to know that we produce a product and it is now floating in our bloodstreams and it doesn't need to be there. We have had millions of years of an selfs sustainable ecosystem and we arrive, produce an enormous amount of plastic and taint our own environment in such an idiotic way. It is now everywhere. We found it in rainwater, on mountain tops etc. 1950 0 tones of plastic production per year vs. 2015 350 Million tons. It also weirds me out a little bit to see that other people actually don't care or don't see any issues with it.

saberience 6y ago
It's not that I don't care. However, I object to the huge amount of media/news stories driven by fear which leads to a generalized anxiety and depression about basically everything. If you read the modern news and take it at all seriously, you will live in a constant fear of doing just about anything. Drinking water? You're drinking scary microplastics. Walking outside? Don't do that, the air pollution is going to give you cancer or other nasty lung diseases. Stay in and have a meal? Don't eat bread/carbs/sugar/red meat/tuna/legumes/anything processed, that will give you heart disease or cancer too, inflammation. etc etc etc. Basically everything you can put into your body or do with your time has been associated with death or otherwise making you sick and what can the average person do about it? Basically fucking nothing. The average person can do nothing about microplastics except be afraid of them. Also the average person cannot afford to have a healthy diet or avoid plastic and in addition, their diets are usually so bad that even if microplastics have any deleterious health effect, it's liable to be several orders of magnitude less bad than the effects of junk food or alcohol. All the above goes to say why I think microplastics are something for scientists to worry about now because I believe the psychological impacts of all this fear are far worse than the thing itself. Anxiety and depression, undoubtedly made worse by all the fear driven media kill more people every year or otherwise reduce quality of life far more than I believe microplastics do.

taneq 6y ago

I gave you an upvote because you’re asking a reasonable question. One answer is that snippets of organic compounds are often carcinogenic and/or bioactive, so they’re scarier than (say) metal filings that just dissolve in short order (try a magnet on “iron fortified” cereal! Turns out iron’s fairly bioavailabile when combined with vitamin C.)

lm28469 6y ago

> Why not assume it's good? Yes, like lead in gas/paint, radium in lipstick, freon, asbestos... why not assume it's good, it never backfired... Feel free to read the thousands of studies on the subject (spoiler alert: none are concluding micro-plastics are good for us nor the environment in general) https://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=microplastic+effect+human&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart https://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=microplastic+effect+huma... > As far as I can tell, humans have been dying from the same illnesses for the past 100-200-300 years We're talking long term effects of a very recent thing that potentially affects every single one of us. unless you have a crystal ball or studies backing up your skepticism this line of thought isn't very logical. It's like a 22 years old telling you smoking cigarettes is fine because he doesn't have a lung cancer or reduced lung capacity _yet_

saberience 6y ago
I was asking whether it might be good as a provocative question asked in the more philosophical sense. I don't assume they are good, but I do object to simple fear-mongering over yet another new thing to be afraid of in our world, especially when most other things appear to be orders of magnitude more dangerous to us than microplastics, e.g. drinking alcohol, traffic fumes/air pollution.
- lm28469 6y ago
  > I do object to simple fear-mongering over yet another new thing to be afraid of in our world Well, we're fucking up big times and have plenty of reasons to be worried, if your house is on fire calling the firefighters isn't fear mongering. > most other things appear to be orders of magnitude more dangerous to us than micro-plastics, e.g. drinking alcohol, traffic fumes/air pollution You can chose not to drink alcohol or not to smoke. You can't chose not to ingest micro plastic. And you're right, air pollution is a similar issue, should we ignore rising issues because we're already dealing with existing ones ? By the way, nobody is telling you to be scared. Micro plastics in placenta is, apparently, a fact, micro plastics being dangerous to us is a fact, chose how you feel about it but don't shoot the messenger.

Frost1x 6y ago

In the anthropocene era, sometimes we should err on the side of caution. If our human activities can reshape the Earth significantly and such changes can last for very long periods of time, we likely shouldn't proceed gung-ho on those fronts but do so slowly gathering as much knowledge as we can. We used to pump lead into all sorts of things and throw CFCs into the environment but we realized later these are bad for most us Earth dewllers. At the time, we didn't have abundant evidence of the negative effects and that got us into trouble. Maybe microplastics are harmless but it may be a wise assumption to assume they are and proceed slowly and cautiously. Turning these things backwards may be incredibly difficult to nearly impossible (e.g. Chernobyl). Scale is very important for experimenting if something is harmful or not. Its better to experiment with these things at small scale before rolling processes out globally. Some effects are only clear at full scale though, unfortunately.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ballenf 6y ago
Ironically, plastics and other hydrocarbons now substitute for many of the uses of lead: pipes, paint, gasoline additives, etc. So to say we should have moved slowly to plastics would probably mean lead would have been around for a lot longer. I'd happily take the wager that removing lead from the environment around us was the right move. I might lose the bet, but I think it's a reasonable position.
- EinwegPlastik 6y ago
  Huh? i assumed we went from lead to copper and not straight to plastic
  - withinboredom 6y ago
    Then we'd just complain about an overabundance of minerals in our body.
    - 6y ago

morlockabove 6y ago

Most things are bad by default.

nmstoker 6y ago

I think you raise a fair point here regarding the unproven harm/benefit. The same default to "it must be bad" happened with mobile phone radiation. If people are going to be in business of unsubstantiated claims then that one always struck me as rich: you could just as easily imagine a scenario where the extra heat improves blood flow thus enhancing cognitive ability! (to be clear I'm not seriously suggesting this) It's reasonable to discuss this with an open mind even if the vast majority of human environmental impact have been negative for life (eg pesticides, lead, CFCs etc)

XorNot 6y ago
There's a difference between no known mechanism (and the effect being completely swamped by the environment) versus actually having a contaminant persist in the body, which historically is usually the precursor of larger effects. I.e. asbestos is harmless, and would be harmless if didn't remain in the lungs, and we just breathed it back out. Hell, you can handle most radioactive isotopes quite safely provided they don't enter the body in a persistent way.

Knufen 6y ago

As a medicinal chemist working on human reproduction I can give a little perspective (though not as much as a bio chemist with knowledge of human reproduction). These things are very hard to quantify, but all studies so far points to microplastic being bad. Not poisonous like lead, or deadly like uranium in ceramics. Instead they are a bit more sneaky. While plastic in itself is not so bad, all the other stuff in plastic is. Take BPA [1], a known endocrine disruptor. It is especially bad for humans in the early stages of development and has life long effects. Boys will have less testosterone (leading to multiple knock off effects) and girls will have earlier puberty, more breast and other types of cancer. Because the doses are so low the effect are not typically seen in individuals. Instead we detect them on population scale. An example is the testosterone levels of men is dwindling each year [2]. Of course correlation does not equal causation, but more and more studies are pointing to chemical disruption. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21605673/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21605673/ [2] https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/92/1/196/2598434?login=true https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/92/1/196/2598434?login...

Orthw2020 6y ago
I wonder if reduced testosterone will in turn lead to voting in even more liberal/socialist governments in the west? After all, lead poisoning was suggested as one of the possible reasons for the decline of the Roman empire.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- magic-chicken 6y ago
  What? Are you suggesting that left-leaning voters have a lower level of testosterone than right-leaning voters? > After all, lead poisoning was suggested as one of the possible reasons for the decline of the Roman empire. What are you trying to imply here? Microplastic -> Low Testorone -> Socialist government -> Decline of civilisation?
  - tomp 6y ago

Proven 6y ago

Perfectly reasonable questions. Upvoted. It's a slow day over at The Guardian, it seems.

klmadfejno 6y ago

For the same reason we spent a year testing COVID vaccines. You don't want to put something of unknown effect into your body. You especially don't want to put something unknown into everyone's body all at once. It's not "good vs. bad" it's "safe vs. not safe". It's also about emergent properties that aren't apparent until you've hit a certain scale. Fish with plastic heavy diets have more tumors and liver problems. It would be pretty shocking if there wasn't an inflection point at which we see some heavy consequences for humans as well in terms of plastic concentration. Maybe we won't reach that level practically for a long time, maybe we will. I lean towards thinking we won't see too drastic of a consequence in the next 200 years (not backed up by anything) but I'd still say it's definitively a problem.

okprod 6y ago

Every time there's a microplastics article on HN, there's someone who has to posit that ingesting pounds of plastic may not be bad.

whalesalad 6y ago
More advanced civilizations are watching us remotely - in galaxies far far away - and giggling at our discourse.

Bancakes 6y ago

Our bodies did not evolve around microplastics, so we're allowed to be biased against microplastics. So, waiting for some studies that microplastics are harmless (p-values < 1e10-5 only, please).

trianglem 6y ago

In a nutshell it’s endocrine description and certain plastics acting as estrogen mimics. You’re getting downvoted because this comment is eerily similar is length, structure and content to the top comment on other HN stories about micro plastics.

qmmmur 6y ago

Obviously if on average everything gets better you still don't ignore potentially long term harmful effects. It's clear that microplastics have been infiltrating our systems dormantly since microplastics have been around and so its probably a good idea to find out why so that we dont construct a world in which we are entirely dependent on them if they do turn out to have a significantly bad long term effect. Oh wait, that's already the world we live in.

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago

Thank you for saying this, I have had the same concerns and been afraid to voice them. It surely depends on the plastic type for sure. The reason we used polypropylene beakers in our lab is because it is one of the most benign and unreactive substances on earth. Other plastics may not be as benign as that but on the whole that is one of the great things about plastic and why it builds up in oceans etc. Nothing can degrade it so the bacteria in your gut are probably just meh about it. I can’t think of a way it could cause a problem to have little bits of it in your digestive system along with all the other substances we eat. Plasticizers that leach out from the micro plastics maybe, but I have to think that there are so many things we should be more concerned about in our food. The dose of plasticizer from the macro plastics we store and transport all our food in seems like it would be a much bigger issue. BPA and other xenoestrogens should have leached out of micro plastics long before they get micro right?

TedShiller 6y ago

It’s bad because it will only increase from here. Let me know if you want to volunteer to be on a microplastic heavy diet so we can be sure it’s not bad.

agarden 6y ago

Sperm count. It has been dropping precipitously over the handful of decades. Many men are already infertile and if the sperm count continues to fall at the rate it has been, most will be infertile before this century is done. There is reason to believe that plastics may be a contributor to this phenomenon: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/24/toxic-america-sperm-counts-plastics-research#:~:text=A%202014%20study%20of%20the,because%20they%20are%20so%20ubiquitous https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/24/toxic-americ.... https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero