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Researchers discover why plastic sheds dangerous fragments
- latexr 2y agoText is short and clear enough that it warrants a full read, but for those who visit the comments first: > If you look at a piece of plastic through a powerful microscope, you'll see alternating layers of hard material and soft material. […] > [The researchers] discovered that the process [of forming microplastics] begins in the soft layers, which grow weaker over time due to environmental degradation and can break off even when the plastic is not under stress. By themselves, these soft pieces break down quickly in the environment. Problems arise when the failure of a soft layer allows hard layers to break off.
- docmechanic 2y agoI’m eager to see research confirm whether microplastic contamination is harmful for humans. Given that 'These can be smaller than a virus -- just the right size to disrupt cells and even alter DNA.’, I’m not too hopeful that this is harmless.
- pmags 2y agoI too would love to see a follow-up study. Unfortunately the research was done at Columbia University, which has suffered massive arbitrary grant freezes....
- pojzon 2y agoIt would be a disastrous blow to oil indystry if everyone agreed we have to move away from both plastic and oil. We produce more and more plastic each year, every new law reducing oil consumption is greated with doubling the amount of plastic we produce. Microplaatic is in our brain now, causing damage that is irreversable. Freezing grants is just one of many reasons why we need to put stop to that cancer which is oil industry.
- rowanG077 2y agoCould you send me some links for the irreversible damage that micro plastics cause in the brain.
- lazide 2y agoThat’s about as likely to happen as everyone deciding to stop doing illegal drugs because they’re bad for us.
- ycombinatrix 2y agoPlastic is a fantastical space age material and we never gave it the fear or respect it deserves. Its usage should have been regulated from the beginning. Disposable plastic shopping bags are kind of insane if you think about it.
- sawjet 2y agoArbitrary?
- ykonstant 2y agoYes.
- lupusreal 2y agoIf only Columbia was a private university with a 15 billion dollar endowment, then they wouldn't need the government's permission to poke at some plastic.
- etrautmann 2y agoThis is a ridiculous bad faith talking point. That's not how endowments work, nor would it be possible for universities to spend them down for very long. Scientific research is an engine of innovation in the US, and it's penny wise pound foolish to attempt to save money by cutting of NIH and NSF dollars.
- lupusreal 2y agoPrivate universities can, in fact, fund their own researchers.
- etrautmann 2y agoNo - these universities do not have the funds required to sustainably conduct research at the scale that it currently does.
- lupusreal 2y agoThey absolutely do have the funds required to sustain research. If they're spending their own money instead of the government's, then maybe they would have to be a bit selective and cut out the crap, but that wouldn't be such a bad thing anyway.
- etrautmann 2y agoThat's not how most basic science works. It's easy with hindsight to identified research that didn't work or seemed dumb at the outset, but some small percentage of exploratory projects turn out to be major advances. Studying algae ion channels was not intended to be applied research but ended up with the discovery of green fluorescent protein, which won a nobel prize and opened the door to immunohistochemistry, optogenetics, and other crucially important biomedical advances. There are countless examples like this. It's trivially easy to find failed research too... but that's the process. It's only expensive if you ignore all of the innovation that comes downstream of the initial grant process.
- docmechanic 2y agoYes, I read that 75% of scientists in the U.S. are considering leaving due to grant freezes and politicization.
- Etheryte 2y agoIf I recall correctly from the previous big discussion on the front page about microplastics, the one about a spoonful of the stuff in your brain, the general takeaway was that it's pretty universally agreed upon that it's bad, the medical community is mostly disagreeing over just how bad it is.
- lazide 2y agoAlso what plastics we even mean, and which ones are bad and which are indifferent. Using ‘plastic’ as a category is about as precise as ‘metal’.
- cogman10 2y agoAsbestos is chemically inert. Yet it causes lung cancer. Why? The answer is simply that it continually damages the cells in the lung due to it's needle like structure. I assume (but critically don't have proof) that if we find a cancer link to plastics it will be due to a similar sort of structural interaction. I don't think the specific type of plastic matters, though I'm sure some will be worse than others.
- lazide 2y agoIn this specific case, very unlikely that plastics as a whole cause cancer due to some structural form issue. Saying ‘microplastics’, to compare to asbestos, is similar to saying ‘silicon’. Asbestos is a particular form of crystalline tube shaped silica (aka silicon dioxide). Many other forms of silicon are both cancer causing, and completely inert. I suspect plastics will similarly have only small portions that are really nasty. We’re making a huge variety of novel types though every day. Which is part of the concern. what we call ‘plastic’ has such a huge variety of molecular weights and compositions it’s like trying to find common ground between say nickel, stainless steel, and uranium. We already know some plastics cause cancer, and some precursors to the same plastics cause cancer. And a bigger issue IMO is plasticizers which modify the plastics structure to make them more malleable and less brittle.
- userbinator 2y ago
- whatever1 2y agoWe are observing uptick in colon cancers. One of the theories is that microplastics might be contributing to it
- forgotoldacc 2y agoThe difficult part is that microplastics are so widespread that it's difficult/impossible to even find a control. There really isn't an animal alive that doesn't have some degree of microplastics in their body.
- veunes 2y agoWe've basically turned microplastics into the new baseline condition of life on Earth
- veunes 2y agoHonestly, what struck me most is how passive this whole process is. I always pictured microplastics coming from wear-and-tear or active grinding, but the idea that plastic can just sit there and quietly shed nano-shrapnel over time is pretty unsettling.
- justanotherjoe 2y agoYeah and all the store of plastics in all the landfills and waters everywhere is shedding as we speak. I mean, its bad, but what can you do.
- mandmandam 2y ago> what can you do. We could stop the manufacturers from producing more and more of the stuff every year. That would be a pretty important step.
- trallnag 2y agoBurn the plastic instead of dumping it
- flakeoil 2y agoIf you look at some plastic that has been outside in the sun for a while (a year or five) such as a toy or a plastic bag, it gets very fragile. If it's thin like a plastic bag, just the wind can break it apart. For thicker plastic parts, probably rain is enough to flush off the outer layer or powdered plastic every now and then.
- veunes 1y agoNow that you say it, I'm picturing all those old sun-bleached plastic chairs or toys that basically crumble if you touch them
- adrian_b 2y agoThe important point is that this mechanism works only for the so-called semi-crystalline plastics. Even if they are less frequently encountered, there are also completely amorphous plastics and completely crystalline plastics, and these appear to not be prone to fragmentation into micro-plastics. The conclusion is that there should be efforts to develop alternative plastics to the more frequently used semi-crystalline plastics, which have this serious disadvantage of generating persistent micro-plastic fragments. Therefore this article offers a potential solution to the micro-plastic problem, which might work, like when freons have been replaced with less harmful refrigerating agents, even if those may have a slightly less refrigeration efficiency.
- OutOfHere 2y agoThe sooner we stop producing and consuming plastic in all its forms, the better for all life on Earth. There was life before plastic - it used wood, glass, metal, and natural fabric. It was not that long ago, certainly within my life.
- userbinator 2y agoLife in 1850 was definitively NOT "better".
- codr7 2y agoThis is a pretty meaningless statement. Where? To whom? According to what metric?
- abenga 2y ago46% of children didn't see their 5th birthday in the early 1800s. It had gone down by 1890, but still in the mid thirties. Romanticizing those days is extremely silly.
- codr7 2y agoI'm sure there were aspects of life back then that could be said to be better than today. More human contact, more time in nature, less technology, less stress, less pollution and so on.
- abenga 2y agoThose aspects are mostly irrelevant if half of people who are born die before they enjoy them. More time in nature => this is neutral, not necessarily a positive, depends if you like that. Less technology => definitely a negative, I know when I'd rather have been born if this is the only change. Less pollution => Depending on the cutoff, most people today suffer less pollution than then. I'd rather the current global levels of pollution than actually cooking with coal/wood in my kitchen. The latter will probably kill you faster.
- userbinator 2y agoThe actual article is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58233-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58233-3 Since hitting the market 75 years ago, plastic has become ubiquitous -- and so, presumably, have nanoplastics 1950? Polyethylene and nylon appeared in the 1930s. Celluloid in the mid-1800s. We have been exposed to "nanoplastics" (including things like petroleum jelly and other hydrocarbon fractions) for more than a century, with very very little evidence it's "dangerous".
- elric 2y agoIt has become vastly more ubiquitous, probably by several orders of magnitude. More of it ends up in the environment than is broken down, so it's still accumulating. It's moving up throughout the food chain. We've certainly seen evidence of hormone disruption caused by some plastifiers. I suspect many more negative effects will become more apparent as time goes on and "dosage" increases in various organisms.
- zonkerdonker 2y agohttps://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00405-8#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20microplastic%20levels%20were%20about%2050%,samples%20from%20a%20person's%20liver%20and%20kidneys https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00405-8#:~:text=O... Full article is paywalled, but the point remains. Point is that scale matters, obviously. Almonds contain trace amounts of amygdalin, you can eat a handful of almonds every day of your life, but if I asked you to eat a kg in one sitting, you're not gonna have a good time. Plastics have gone from niche to absolutely ubiqutous worldwide in ~100 years. Even if it turns out to be totally and completely harmless to humans and every other animal, wouldn't you want to know that for sure?
- someothherguyy 2y ago> Full article is paywalled https://archive.ph/XJ7ug https://archive.ph/XJ7ug It seems kind of crazy to look at history and believe that exogenous matter accumulating in tissues and cells doesn't have a negative effect, but I guess we have to wait to see.
- 2y ago
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoI still wonder when we will see the emergence of evolutionary adapted life to this. Bacteria able to diggest plastic. Mikrobial lifeforms using plastic as a sort of shield from detection ("think of a dissease") using mayflylarva like structures made of microplastics to shield from detection by white blood cells. I also curious wether misfiring defense detection due to plastic residue is responsible for allergic reaction disease on the rise in recent years. It would start where the plastic arrives- in the colon.