3 ms·
I think there's an issue of burden of proof at play. If these microplastics were a drug, they would need to go through an expensive and onerous vetting process
by advael 2y ago
I think there's an issue of burden of proof at play. If these microplastics were a drug, they would need to go through an expensive and onerous vetting process that consists of both safety testing and efficacy testing for a particular indication for it to be legal to sell someone if and only if a doctor specifically prescribed it for that person. Even if you believe, as I do, that efficacy testing shouldn't stop people from voluntarily accessing potential cures, safety testing doesn't strike me as unreasonable
These microplastics are crossing the blood-brain barrier in a significant portion of the population without most people even intentionally ingesting them. Hell, it's hard to avoid if you try. Our society slathers this stuff over everything. In my lifetime I've seen a giant swath of packaging for food go to plastic from some other material, presumably to cut costs. I recently bought a new oven and I guess they put those stupid plastic phone screen covers over the glass panes on both sides of the oven door. Do they just ship all glass with this stuff applied to it now?
The burden of proof to ensure these things are safe should be on the companies selling them. The companies that make these substances already have vast research arms for designing the polymers, and if they were held to even the FDA's standards for drug safety we would have a lot more studies about this stuff. These companies are also heavily subsidized by governments, which might even be part of why downward pressure on price seems to make everyone go to plastics. Like why exactly is it cheaper, even if you don't bake in the entire R&D budget of inventing them, to use novel polymers made as byproducts of petroleum than it is to make glass or cardboard packaging?
We should, in the same way that we do for pharmaceuticals, hold these orgs to a standard of demonstrating that this bioaccumulation doesn't cause some kind of harm, because the alternative is that some researcher needs to come up with a specific claim of harm, fund a study despite there being significant pressure from these orgs to never do such studies, and certainly never publish if the results might credibly make them look bad, and somehow translate that into making bespoke positive policy prescriptions that would likely be fought tooth and nail by same. That expectation is not a sane default
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- mapt 2y agoMost of the direct human exposure seems to come from polyester, which we have raced to make the dominant clothing and bedding fabric.
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- advael 2y agoMassively subsidizing anything to do with oil has certainly caused all these byproducts to be super artificially cheap, so with the governments with globe-spanning military empires absorbing most of the cost and ensuring not even the mildest threat of accountability for "externalities" in an economy designed to reward single-minded monetary optimization, it was pretty inevitable that things made of oil would get pervasive everywhere Maybe we should convince government to do less of those things somehow?
- mapt 2y agoI mean, yes. But also: Polyester is just so cheap that any feasible oil tax wouldn't amount. For the past several years a large fraction of people have literally been inhaling every lungful of air through a frangible polyester microfiber that they wear around their mouth & nose. We tear these fabrics to shreds and then manually extract the lint from the dryer with our bare hands so it won't start a fire. Putting the finest dispersal mechanism we have, micro-spun fibers, directly into our lungs, and not even thinking about the consequences, seems like maybe it's an orthogonal bad choice we are making which could have orthogonal solutions.
- advael 2y agoOn one hand, I strongly agree that some mitigations are personally achievable and that this is smart to do. Personally, I preferentially buy natural fibers (cheaper than you might think if you thrift 'em), and I cold wash and hang dry the polyester garments I do own However, I am also wary of the push to view mitigations or "consumer behavior" generally as a means to actually deal with this kind of problem at scale. Like the whole carbon footprint thing BP was pushing for a while. Still in the public lexicon, doesn't do jack shit about real emissions at scale, but great for gotchas on activists. We have significant poison control and food quality control regulations because people can't really develop all the expertise necessary to vet all their own stuff, and it's a huge drain on society to make them do so rather than just solve that coordination problem centrally. Also, monopolistic consolidation has made even very organized boycotts dubiously feasible in forcing change in companies who respond more to their investors than their customers. To me, governments exist to solve exactly this kind of problem, even though there are many other areas in which I would like them to mind their own business. In this case a lot of why petrochemicals are so cheap is because the cost of doing business for oil companies is heavily subsidized, so removing those subsidies wouldn't even require a new tax, and that money could be productively spent on lots of stuff, like maybe medical research even