4 ms·

This is the canary of plastic pollution similar to we knew about global warming in '70s. We know it's only going to get worse, but we're happy to ignore it unti

by agilob 3y ago

This is the canary of plastic pollution similar to we knew about global warming in '70s. We know it's only going to get worse, but we're happy to ignore it until it gets really bad.

Log_out_ 3y ago
I'm more worried about the output of life that is capable of devouring plastics being toxic becoming widespread?
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  I'm pretty ignorant of biology, but it would be wild if plastic consuming fungi/bacteria became widespread. Imagine all the plastic bits of your car getting "moldy" if you leave it outside too long.
chiefalchemist 3y ago
These plastics are going to follow tobacco and alcohol. First, don't worry about it... Then, some is ok... Wait! Less than some is ok... Wait again!! Next to nothing is ok... Fuck!!! Avoid this shit at all costs.
- ajross 3y ago
  > These plastics are going to follow tobacco and alcohol. No. Demographics can show you with extremely small error bars the aggregate health effects of smoking and (heavy) drinking. If there was an effect of that magnitude from other variables, we'd know for sure. Microplastics and pthalates and other related contaminants are real, and deserve study. But let's not get ahead of ourselves with the doomerism. We surely don't know the whole story, but we know pretty well that the effect is less than smoking/obesity/etc. because it would be there in the data if so.
  - djbusby 3y ago
    That's like step #2 from above.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    But one of the hypothesized effects, with mechanistic evidence from cell cultures and animal models, is obesity. I don’t see how one can be confident about the presence or absence of population-level effects.
  - jrajav 3y ago
    How many cycles do we have to go through of "oh, recklessly dumping this substance into the ecosystem probably doesn't have any ill effects, and you should prove it does before being such a negative nelly"? Just once, I'd like to sacrifice consumerism at the altar of my and my family's internal organs, versus the other way around. We're a few decades late to finally be putting full product lifecycle accountability in the laps of manufacturers everywhere.
    - ajross 3y ago
      > How many cycles do we have to go through of "oh, recklessly dumping this substance into the ecosystem probably doesn't have any ill effects, and you should prove it does before being such a negative nelly"? Because to be blunt, and even to adopt your inflammatory frame, "recklessly dumping substances into the ecosystem" has been Generally Accepted As Safe for literally thousands of years. For everything particular you want to shout about, there are thousands or tens of thousands of human impacts that went just fine. We have 8 billion of us out there, demanding zero impact just isn't going to happen. So... do you freak out about watering your garden with a well? Ever use fertilizer or lime? Eat food at a restaurant with a grill? Buy a cut of meat wrapped in wax paper? Use anything made of smelted metal? Use a refrigerator? I mean, just think about the crazy alien cultures going on in that sourdough starter in that fridge! Everything impacts the environment. Everything leaks. You square this by measuring impacts and doing the science, not by shouting on the internet. I'm sure that's not as satifying, and tends frustratingly not to have the villains you clearly want to see. But it's the only way that actually works.
      - Supermancho 3y ago
        > "recklessly dumping substances into the ecosystem" has been Generally Accepted As Safe for literally thousands of years. For hundreds of thousands, substances that have negative effects (eg human corpses) were disposed of far from populations, precisely because humans learned that consequences quickly. Humans have been cognizant of causation, when they could detect it, for longer than thousands of years. Yes the black plague took awhile to figure out. As we saw with cigarettes, society is always trending to keeping the status quo. Often, to society's own detriment over the short term, along the span of human existence. > We have 8 billion of us out there, demanding zero impact just isn't going to happen. That's not relevant.
  - njovin 3y ago
    All the science I've seen has shown a strong correlation between increased levels of phthalates and a wide range of fertility problems in human males and females. The terrifying thing is that phthalates in mothers not only cause developmental issues in the reproductive systems of their offspring, but the offspring then carry the same risks to _their_ offspring, even if they have reduced phthalate exposure post-birth, meaning you need 2 "clean" generations to clear out the contamination properly. I think a lot more studies are starting to look at this and I predict we're going to see a rapid increase in regulation of plastics once the generational impact becomes clearer.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      >meaning you need 2 "clean" generations to clear out the contamination properly. Is that actually confirmed or were the studies just not long enough to determine whether the effects persist for more generations?
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    > "No. Demographics can show you with extremely small error bars the aggregate health effects of smoking and (heavy) drinking. If there was an effect of that magnitude from other variables, we'd know for sure. Microplastics and pthalates and other related contaminants are real, and deserve study." How can you be so confident that a) the effects would be so clear, and b) we'd know for sure the cause of those effects was microplastics? We have an increase in early onset cancer, since the 1990s, more than can be explained by just earlier detection: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-022-00672-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-022-00672-8 and "There is a mysterious epidemic of kidney disease called chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology (CKDu) that is occurring in many parts of the world. Unrelated to known risk factors such as diabetes and hypertension, CKDu mostly affects the young and middle-aged" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8437007/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8437007/ and "Driven principally by aging [...] For most of human history, Parkinson has been a rare disorder. However, demography and the by-products of industrialization have now created a Parkinson pandemic" - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30584159/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30584159/ And the obvious ones like heart disease - if you can claim a group of diseases are caused by "old age" and another group by "obesity and bad diet" - would we know if microplastics were a cause, an exacerbator, a trigger?
    - ajross 3y ago
      None of those substantiate an effect of similar magnitude to smoking, though. Those are all (pretty much by definition, since it's newly-published work) detections that just barely rise above the threshold needed to be confident enough to publish. Needless to say if we were living 10 years less[1] because of some unknown contaminant in our environment, we'd know. As always, xkcd makes the point best: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/ The world isn't falling apart. You're just digging around to find enough "maybes" to P-hack your way into believing it. [1] About the right order of magnitude for smoking all by itself.
  - chiefalchemist 3y ago
    Let's think about it from an evolutionary sense. Plastics aren't natural, not even close. Any yet they are *everywhere* and seeping into *everything*. There's nothing doom-tastic about being smart and practical. Furthermore, due to the ubiquitous nature of these chemicals we'll never be able to be certain of their ill effects. There will be no way to rule out other things so their assumed innocence will persist. Why so much risk?
jdietrich 3y ago
Nearly 500 years ago, Paracelsus wrote "All things are poisonous and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not poisonous". He was correct then and he is still correct today, but we stubbornly refuse to accept the first law of toxicology. Broiling, frying and baking makes food more toxic. There's absolutely no getting away from that fact. As soon as you apply high heat to a food, you're performing a poorly-controlled chemical synthesis that produces all sorts of toxic stuff - acrylamide, acrolein, heterocyclic amines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, you name it. The risk isn't particularly high, but it's real. Most people have perfectly reasonably decided that they are willing to take that very modest risk in preference to exclusively eating raw foods. Some people aren't willing to take that risk and it is their right to do so, but anyone proposing a ban on the sale of cooked food on public health grounds would be rightly dismissed as a lunatic. The plastics that we use (within and without the food industry) aren't significantly toxic and they're incredibly useful. Without plastics, the food available to you would be more expensive and much less varied. A lot of work has gone into minimising the harms and maximising the benefits of plastics and other synthetic chemicals and that work continues. The villainisation of plastic is based on prejudice, not science. Some people have decided to hate or fear plastics and are trying to concoct an argument that they are devastatingly dangerous, but that effort has yielded little other than rumour and guilt-by-implication. Yes, we produce a lot of plastic, because it's very useful. Yes, some of that plastic does get into the environment and can in some cases bioaccumulate. Yes, some species of animals have been meaningfully harmed by plastics, primarily because they are unable to distinguish macroplastics from food and actively seek out and eat pieces of plastic that they then cannot digest. No, there is no evidence that the levels of microplastics or free plasticisers in the environment are significantly harmful to human health or ecosystem health, nor any plausible mechanism by which that could be true or become true in the foreseeable future. Plastics are not the next CO2 or the next tetraethyllead. They are far too well-studied to hold any significant surprises. Many, many researchers have spent their careers actively trying to prove that plastics are terrible (by fair means or foul), all to no avail.
- Sammi 3y ago
  The first half of this post was so refreshingly level headed. The second half was not. The First half argued plastics are useful yet they might be somewhat poisonous. The second half then suddenly insisted we cannot believe plastics are poisonous. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

by agilob 3y ago

This is the canary of plastic pollution similar to we knew about global warming in '70s. We know it's only going to get worse, but we're happy to ignore it until it gets really bad.

Log_out_ 3y ago

I'm more worried about the output of life that is capable of devouring plastics being toxic becoming widespread?

AlexandrB 3y ago
I'm pretty ignorant of biology, but it would be wild if plastic consuming fungi/bacteria became widespread. Imagine all the plastic bits of your car getting "moldy" if you leave it outside too long.

chiefalchemist 3y ago

These plastics are going to follow tobacco and alcohol. First, don't worry about it... Then, some is ok... Wait! Less than some is ok... Wait again!! Next to nothing is ok... Fuck!!! Avoid this shit at all costs.

ajross 3y ago
> These plastics are going to follow tobacco and alcohol. No. Demographics can show you with extremely small error bars the aggregate health effects of smoking and (heavy) drinking. If there was an effect of that magnitude from other variables, we'd know for sure. Microplastics and pthalates and other related contaminants are real, and deserve study. But let's not get ahead of ourselves with the doomerism. We surely don't know the whole story, but we know pretty well that the effect is less than smoking/obesity/etc. because it would be there in the data if so.
- djbusby 3y ago
  That's like step #2 from above.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  But one of the hypothesized effects, with mechanistic evidence from cell cultures and animal models, is obesity. I don’t see how one can be confident about the presence or absence of population-level effects.
- jrajav 3y ago
  How many cycles do we have to go through of "oh, recklessly dumping this substance into the ecosystem probably doesn't have any ill effects, and you should prove it does before being such a negative nelly"? Just once, I'd like to sacrifice consumerism at the altar of my and my family's internal organs, versus the other way around. We're a few decades late to finally be putting full product lifecycle accountability in the laps of manufacturers everywhere.
  - ajross 3y ago
    > How many cycles do we have to go through of "oh, recklessly dumping this substance into the ecosystem probably doesn't have any ill effects, and you should prove it does before being such a negative nelly"? Because to be blunt, and even to adopt your inflammatory frame, "recklessly dumping substances into the ecosystem" has been Generally Accepted As Safe for literally thousands of years. For everything particular you want to shout about, there are thousands or tens of thousands of human impacts that went just fine. We have 8 billion of us out there, demanding zero impact just isn't going to happen. So... do you freak out about watering your garden with a well? Ever use fertilizer or lime? Eat food at a restaurant with a grill? Buy a cut of meat wrapped in wax paper? Use anything made of smelted metal? Use a refrigerator? I mean, just think about the crazy alien cultures going on in that sourdough starter in that fridge! Everything impacts the environment. Everything leaks. You square this by measuring impacts and doing the science, not by shouting on the internet. I'm sure that's not as satifying, and tends frustratingly not to have the villains you clearly want to see. But it's the only way that actually works.
    - Supermancho 3y ago
      > "recklessly dumping substances into the ecosystem" has been Generally Accepted As Safe for literally thousands of years. For hundreds of thousands, substances that have negative effects (eg human corpses) were disposed of far from populations, precisely because humans learned that consequences quickly. Humans have been cognizant of causation, when they could detect it, for longer than thousands of years. Yes the black plague took awhile to figure out. As we saw with cigarettes, society is always trending to keeping the status quo. Often, to society's own detriment over the short term, along the span of human existence. > We have 8 billion of us out there, demanding zero impact just isn't going to happen. That's not relevant.
- njovin 3y ago
  All the science I've seen has shown a strong correlation between increased levels of phthalates and a wide range of fertility problems in human males and females. The terrifying thing is that phthalates in mothers not only cause developmental issues in the reproductive systems of their offspring, but the offspring then carry the same risks to _their_ offspring, even if they have reduced phthalate exposure post-birth, meaning you need 2 "clean" generations to clear out the contamination properly. I think a lot more studies are starting to look at this and I predict we're going to see a rapid increase in regulation of plastics once the generational impact becomes clearer.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    >meaning you need 2 "clean" generations to clear out the contamination properly. Is that actually confirmed or were the studies just not long enough to determine whether the effects persist for more generations?
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  > "No. Demographics can show you with extremely small error bars the aggregate health effects of smoking and (heavy) drinking. If there was an effect of that magnitude from other variables, we'd know for sure. Microplastics and pthalates and other related contaminants are real, and deserve study." How can you be so confident that a) the effects would be so clear, and b) we'd know for sure the cause of those effects was microplastics? We have an increase in early onset cancer, since the 1990s, more than can be explained by just earlier detection: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-022-00672-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-022-00672-8 and "There is a mysterious epidemic of kidney disease called chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology (CKDu) that is occurring in many parts of the world. Unrelated to known risk factors such as diabetes and hypertension, CKDu mostly affects the young and middle-aged" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8437007/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8437007/ and "Driven principally by aging [...] For most of human history, Parkinson has been a rare disorder. However, demography and the by-products of industrialization have now created a Parkinson pandemic" - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30584159/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30584159/ And the obvious ones like heart disease - if you can claim a group of diseases are caused by "old age" and another group by "obesity and bad diet" - would we know if microplastics were a cause, an exacerbator, a trigger?
  - ajross 3y ago
    None of those substantiate an effect of similar magnitude to smoking, though. Those are all (pretty much by definition, since it's newly-published work) detections that just barely rise above the threshold needed to be confident enough to publish. Needless to say if we were living 10 years less[1] because of some unknown contaminant in our environment, we'd know. As always, xkcd makes the point best: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/ The world isn't falling apart. You're just digging around to find enough "maybes" to P-hack your way into believing it. [1] About the right order of magnitude for smoking all by itself.
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Let's think about it from an evolutionary sense. Plastics aren't natural, not even close. Any yet they are *everywhere* and seeping into *everything*. There's nothing doom-tastic about being smart and practical. Furthermore, due to the ubiquitous nature of these chemicals we'll never be able to be certain of their ill effects. There will be no way to rule out other things so their assumed innocence will persist. Why so much risk?

jdietrich 3y ago

Nearly 500 years ago, Paracelsus wrote "All things are poisonous and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not poisonous". He was correct then and he is still correct today, but we stubbornly refuse to accept the first law of toxicology. Broiling, frying and baking makes food more toxic. There's absolutely no getting away from that fact. As soon as you apply high heat to a food, you're performing a poorly-controlled chemical synthesis that produces all sorts of toxic stuff - acrylamide, acrolein, heterocyclic amines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, you name it. The risk isn't particularly high, but it's real. Most people have perfectly reasonably decided that they are willing to take that very modest risk in preference to exclusively eating raw foods. Some people aren't willing to take that risk and it is their right to do so, but anyone proposing a ban on the sale of cooked food on public health grounds would be rightly dismissed as a lunatic. The plastics that we use (within and without the food industry) aren't significantly toxic and they're incredibly useful. Without plastics, the food available to you would be more expensive and much less varied. A lot of work has gone into minimising the harms and maximising the benefits of plastics and other synthetic chemicals and that work continues. The villainisation of plastic is based on prejudice, not science. Some people have decided to hate or fear plastics and are trying to concoct an argument that they are devastatingly dangerous, but that effort has yielded little other than rumour and guilt-by-implication. Yes, we produce a lot of plastic, because it's very useful. Yes, some of that plastic does get into the environment and can in some cases bioaccumulate. Yes, some species of animals have been meaningfully harmed by plastics, primarily because they are unable to distinguish macroplastics from food and actively seek out and eat pieces of plastic that they then cannot digest. No, there is no evidence that the levels of microplastics or free plasticisers in the environment are significantly harmful to human health or ecosystem health, nor any plausible mechanism by which that could be true or become true in the foreseeable future. Plastics are not the next CO2 or the next tetraethyllead. They are far too well-studied to hold any significant surprises. Many, many researchers have spent their careers actively trying to prove that plastics are terrible (by fair means or foul), all to no avail.

Sammi 3y ago
The first half of this post was so refreshingly level headed. The second half was not. The First half argued plastics are useful yet they might be somewhat poisonous. The second half then suddenly insisted we cannot believe plastics are poisonous. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯