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Microplastics shed by food packaging are contaminating our food, study finds
- FugeDaws 1y agoIs this going to be one of those things where in a 100 years people laugh at us for putting everything in plastic like we look back at romans etc using lead and mercury for stuff
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoAnd ironically the best way to get the plastics out of our systems is blood letting. So in the future, we are the backwards ones, and the modern peoples use leeches to make themselves healthy.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- __alexs 1y agoLead is so obviously bad for that we have known it for thousands of years.
- FugeDaws 1y agoyet as late as the 19th century lead was in make up
- moooo99 1y agoThe time it takes us from finding out something is dangerous to finally doing something about it is astonishingly long. Lead, Asbestos, CFCs, PFAS, etc
- simplify 1y agoYes. Humans in general are very bad at dealing with delayed consequences.
- EasyMark 1y agoAnd we have a President currently trying to bring back clean, beautiful asbestos (it's still used in a few places actually). A wonder material, good for protecting against hot stuff.
- tessierashpool 1y agoThe EPA is currently reviewing its ban on asbestos.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cjrp 1y agoIt's not uncommon for the pipe supplying mains water to (older) houses in the UK to still be lead.
- graemep 1y agoIts not really common either. much as been replaced. In areas where it is common the pipes are often old enough that the lead is covered with limescale sealing it off from the water (lead pipes would now be many decades old), and I have read that water supplies in some areas have additives to seal off lead too. You can also have your supply tested (free AFAIK).
- bamboozled 1y agoDoes lead leach into the water like plastic pipes do ?
- WillAdams 1y agoYes, depending on alkalinity and so forth --- see Flint, Michigan in the news a while back, or on-going efforts to remove solder containing lead from the plumbing aisle.
- skeezyboy 1y ago[dead]
- dtech 1y agoYes, the only reason we are ok with some old lead pipes left is because they're coated in scale build up. As long as that's not disturbed it's not dangerous anymore.
- peanutz454 1y agoOld lead pipes had hard untreated water flowing through them. The lead pipes would internally (normally) be coated with salts, and the lead did not (normally) leach into water. But soft water does not have calcium or magnesium in high enough quantities. Also, even with hard water, pressure changes could loosen the scale deposits. Microplastic risk is not anywhere close to lead, we should not even be discussing these two things in the same paragraph. Lead is bad because it mimics calcium and iron in our body, binding to proteins, sneaking into bones, causes anemia, disrupts brain function... Plastic is inert, it is made of long chains of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. These long chains do not break down easily. Microplastic, while it does not pass through the body, and can accumulate in organs, its impact is still under study. We aren't ingesting high doses. BUT, bad pipes may leach other stuff. Some additives in certain plastics seem to mimic hormones and potentially disrupt them. Some additives are carcinogenic. (but only in high doses I guess). Certified modern pipes are safer.
- uncircle 1y ago> Lead is so obviously bad Yeah, though I’m much more concerned about those that are not so obviously bad, that we still don’t know how terrible they are. You know, the unknown unknows.
- nativeit 1y ago…and yet we actively used it in water pipes, painted our walls with it, and poisoned the air by putting it in gasoline—all in the 20th-century.
- __alexs 1y agoIt's almost like the net benefit of lead was actually quite high or something.
- swayvil 1y agoHow does this obvious badness manifest, exactly? I can drink water from a lead pipe all day and suffer not even a headache. EDIT I'm serious. What is the obvious manifestation? Because the manifestations I've heard of aren't so obvious.
- westward 1y agoAnd it wasn't until the 1970s that the US banned lead paint in houses. 200 years after Ben Franklin wrote that it was bad. Like, clearly plastics are bad. And yet, humans like the convenience, the utility.
- qqtt 1y agoAlso, as a reminder, leaded gas (avgas) is still used all over the United States pumping lead into the environment. If you live near an airport you are especially at increased risk of lead exposure in the environment.
- Plasmoid 1y agoThe FAA finally approved 100UL gas for small airplanes. I'm not sure how widely it's available now.
- ToucanLoucan 1y agoAlso also, shit tons of poor folk all over the country live in homes full of lead pipes and paint that their landlords are too cheap to fix. Asbestos too, though that's less threatening as long as it's not being actively fucked with.
- zdragnar 1y agoGenerally speaking, it's better to cover up asbestos than it is to remove it. Remediation attempts can easily go wrong, moving the asbestos from "hidden and staying put under tiles" to "free floating dust in the air and your lungs". One of my parents' friends got mesothelioma from doing just that.
- sevensor 1y agoThis is just for general aviation though. Jet fuel has no lead in it. Not that this means it’s healthy, just that jet exhaust pollution does not include appreciable amounts of lead.
- neves 1y ago
- nikbackm 1y agoClean, beautiful lead.
- mlinhares 1y agoI can hear him saying it, shit.
- tylerflick 1y agoI’ve been joking he’s going to try and bring back leaded gas.
- Lerc 1y agoDo we laugh at Romans for using lead and mercury? I'd say they did things that were harmful that they did not know they were harmful. Unless they did it in the face of clear evidence of the harm, what is there to mock? I expect the people in 100 years from now will laugh at us for doing all of the things that we absolutely know are harming the environment right now. Perhaps they will even laugh at us for hand wringing about plastics on the possibility that they might be harmful while doing next to nothing about the things we do actually have evidence for,
- vladms 1y agoIt is optimistic to think they will "laugh" about the environments harm. That would mean they would not suffer a lot of the consequences of said harm. Let's hope it will not be that bad to become fanatical about it.
- reactordev 1y agoWhere there’s an engineer, there’s a way - it just may not be the solution you seek.
- realo 1y agoThe environment? In 100 years? Laughing? Come on ...
- FugeDaws 1y agoI mean laugh out of context I dont think anyones specifically laughing at something they didnt know but in the context of smuggness of what we know now We wont do a damn thing about the dangers of micro plastic now until it gets incredibly bad that we cant ignore it. Id say they would actually laugh at us for that though in the future
- Lerc 1y agoWhat are the confirmed dangers of micro plastics? I'll concede that they are everywhere, and they are detectable. What is the established consensus on the harm that they cause?
- aa_is_op 1y agoLike asbestos? Oh nevermind... that's legal again
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoI would like to thank the activists at r/asbestosremovalmemes for normalizing eating it, first step in normalizing it and making sure everyone will be entitled to compensation.
- swayvil 1y agoThey'll laugh at us for trusting any information we get from social media, too. It's the epistemological equivalent of licking the floor of a public restroom.
- DanielHB 1y agoI don't think so, plastic wrapping is a massive boost for keeping food hygienic in transport and both to avoid waste and reduce pathogen contamination. Probably a much bigger benefit than the microplastic contamination. It might be they will be like "shame they didn't have this awesome new material that has 0 environmental/health impact that we have today" though. There are no clear substitutes for plastic in a lot of applications even when you disregard price.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoI think most people would be okay if "only" the 80% of food that could manage paper packaging switched.
- bell-cot 1y agoIf asked their opinions, probably true. If you watched their actual choices, when confronted with shiny transparent-and-or-colorful familiar plastic vs. paper replacements...yeah. (And as soon as you have paper packaging, the big companies want to "improve" it with 57 varieties of chemicals & coatings & treatments & crap. Not to say that manufacturing paper is anything resembling clean & green, either.)
- taeric 1y agoI'm curious what paper packaging you have in mind, that isn't also lined with plastics. Maybe we could use more wax lined items? I don't know. But it is down right comical how people will avoid some macro plastic things only to be using something that has micro plastic by design.
- BobaFloutist 1y agoFor that matter, what's wax? I bet at least some waxes are basically plastic these days.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoWaxes are pretty similar to plastics and can be produced by similar processes from the things. The main difference is that they're a lot more biodegradable.
- tokai 1y agoYes, but its going to be like the romans where their use of lead was nowhere as problematic as people like to think.
- p3rls 1y agoAre... you under the impression that people who actually study history mock the Romans for their... use of lead? You need to read more actual sources than the hindustanitimes.com listicles if you're coming to this impression.
- kylebenzle 1y agoYes! As an agriculturist I've been TRYING TO sound the alarm that every single food supply chain is contaminated with plastics. EVERY SINGLE soil sample we've been testing has some amount of plastics. Farmers are feeding plastic to our pigs, then spreading the waste as fertilizer. Imagine our farm fields being covered with a thin layer of partially digested micro plastics, neurotoxins and Roundup-like herbicides. There is no longer any industrial food stream not heavily contaminated with plastics, the weird thing is no one seems to care at all!
- graemep 1y agoLearned helplessness. What can we actually do about it?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- vladms 1y agoTalk about it (worked for the ozone layer and some pesticides), use less (not that hard), support any alternative. And I think this works for any topic. The helplessness is a feeling, hard to assess the impact of individual actions, so why bother? You do what you can/think of and continue living - with a critical mass things will move in the right direction.
- graemep 1y ago> Talk about it (worked for the ozone layer and some pesticides) Partly, if not largely, because we were lucky enough to have an influential politician who had been a chemist: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22069768 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22069768 It was also a much simpler and cheaper to fix issue than micro-plastics because it involved replacing a few substances, used for particular things, that had alternatives.
- hnthrow90348765 1y agoWait for the science to deal with it, or become a scientist yourself. With how ubiquitous it is, it's going to be hard to filter it out of the entire planet, so chances are you'd want to find something to deal with it in humans. Plus any planet-wide solution risks having its own side effects which may be worse.
- roenxi 1y agoThis article seems a bit breathless. I wonder if the author realises that plants grow in the dirt and risk having insects crawling all over them. And the sheer number of lifestyle diseases people have. It'll take more than plastic having negative health outcomes for it to be a problem; it'd need to be some pretty substantial problems to outweigh the use people get from plastics. > One of the studies included in the new review found 1 liter of water — the equivalent of two standard-size bottled waters bought at the store — contained an average of 240,000 plastic particles from seven types of plastics How many non-plastic particles? I've heard it said there's enough uranium in seawater that we can theoretically use it to generate power.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- floundy 1y ago>plants grow in the dirt and risk having insects crawling all over them Non-sequitor. >And the sheer number of lifestyle diseases people have. Red herring. Other peoples' diabetes or obesity doesn't really impact me. Plastic has contaminated water and soil, it's not possible to opt out of the consequences of others using it even if you do not use it yourself. >I've heard it said Must be true!
- roenxi 1y agohttps://www.acs.org/pressroom/presspacs/2023/december/extracting-uranium-from-seawater-as-another-source-of-nuclear-fuel.html https://www.acs.org/pressroom/presspacs/2023/december/extrac... if you want to read up on it. It's quite a fascinating area.
- MonkeyIsNull 1y ago> Non-sequitor. > Red herring. > Must be true! Someone took a class (or two) on Arguments!
- thunfischtoast 1y ago> plants grow in the dirt and water is wet. What is your point?
- ourmandave 1y agoIf you want a good explanation of PFAs, Veritasium did a video on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY The safe allowable ppm counts are insanely low for this shit.
- graemep 1y agoI saw that a while back. Probably the most terrifying video I have ever seen. Also how willing people were to go along with covering up the danger. Not just businesses and politicians, but ordinary people in a company town.
- deadbabe 1y agoBefore food was packaged in plastic, what did people put it in? Metal?
- petre 1y agoWaxed paper, glass jars and bottles, metal cans.
- Gigachad 1y agoAlso I imagine just less processed crap and takeaway containers in general. They didn’t have plastic wrapped baked goods shipped from another country. It was just baked in the store you bought it and served on a plate.
- yetihehe 1y agoSome glass bottles can contain more microplastics than plastic bottles... [0] https://anses.hal.science/anses-05066642/file/Chaib_JFCA_2025.pdf https://anses.hal.science/anses-05066642/file/Chaib_JFCA_202... [1] https://www.sciencealert.com/glass-bottles-actually-contain-more-microplastics-scientists-find https://www.sciencealert.com/glass-bottles-actually-contain-...
- Timshel 1y agoSince it appears to be from the outer paint on the cap, it's relatively straightforward to select bottles with unpainted caps.
- yetihehe 1y agoIn the article, scientists developed a procedure to decrease amount of microplastic in such situations: a blast of air on caps. But "just use glass" doesn't mean "microplastic free".
- denkmoon 1y agoI'm reasonably sure however that the glass bottles themselves are not contributing to the pervasive abundance of microplastics in the environment. The article also cites that it comes from the paint on the caps. I'm sure that can be fixed.
- b0a04gl 1y agowe probably just need to train soil bugs to treat plastic like dead leaves. researchers like rillig(germany) and Ting Xu(berkeley) already did something there in this direction. next move maybe just making sure these bugs don’t mess with roots and stay alive in real farm dirt. if that clicks, soil fixes itself while we sleep literally
- nonelog 1y agoWhile such things are actually already possible as of now, there are always forces opposed to overall progress in health. You can probably guess who will not like it. So people need to become more clever/savvy in terms of how to implement such strategies without getting shot down in the process.
- account42 1y agoThat's how you could break down macroplastics into microplastics but how would those bugs digest the microplastics? And how do you achieve that without breaking down plastics you don't want to be broken down - after all, durability is the main reason plastics are used everywhere.
- EasyMark 1y agothere are some bacteria that can process it but they are rare and not very quick at doing it. I don't think that's a solution.
- superkuh 1y agoAlso: plastics protect food from contamination and infection with biological agents that would cause sickness and death. The benefits far, far, far outweighs the slight downside that might exist.
- EasyMark 1y agoThat's a big maybe, we simply don't know yet. Clearly it's better than botulism or salmonella which can kill you in a day or two, but you can't just rule out their prevalence.
- KboPAacDA3 1y agoThe current zeitgeist is clearly anti-plastic. Only time will change their minds. Fortunately, the healthcare industry (hospitals) will always use plastic for preventing contamination in a very economical way.
- notTooFarGone 1y agoyeah but there don't seem to be conclusive studies that show that "microplastics" are a detriment at all. You'd assume that there is a study that tested 200 people with more and less microplastic intake over a year to show that it actually has an effect, but I guess you'd have to do 20 studies to get a p<0.05...
- gcanyon 1y agoThis has to be judged against the alternative, which is… I’m not sure in many cases. As just one example, think about how much more of a pain it is to package/ store/ transport/ consume milk in bottles compared to plastic. Of course there’s also paperboard — I think (I Am Not A Packaging Expert) milk is actually easier to handle with noon-plastic than many other foods. Consider what it would mean to avoid plastic for selling meat I think that means going back to individually prepared paper packages, which would be much more expensive. This is not to say it might not be worth it in some cases, just that it is a trade-off, and plastic is remarkably good at what it does.
- westurner 1y agoThere are many sustainable alternatives to plastics for perishables. Which are most cost effective? Who pays for The Ocean Cleanup, for example? That's an external cost.
- giraffe_lady 1y agoI think about this a lot actually. I grew up with glass milk bottles and paper meat packaging. Even being able to estimate this is incredibly far outside of my expertise or knowledge, but I suspect for most products plastic is only cheaper because the externalities are not factored into the price. It seems totally possible to me that for a lot of things glass packaging would be cheaper than plastic if plastic were priced appropriately. Other things I'm not sure. We could probably approach it differently, using different plastics and requiring re-use. It would be interesting to hear a genuine packaging expert's opinion on the balance point here, I doubt it's truly zero plastic for food. But maybe. FWIW I think any non-glass non-plastic food packaging is also actually plastic. Paperboard and aluminum & steel cans all have plastic linings at least. I think almost exactly everything does these days. Glass being the one exception still.
- akgoel 1y agoI grew up in a world where there was broken glass bottles everywhere - in parking lots, in playgrounds, on the street. I've never seen that externality of broken glass calculated.
- jongjong 1y agoOf course, in a world where we support corrupt legal concepts such as 'limited liability', this kind of thing was bound to happen and guaranteed to get worse. I propose a new model; 'total liability'. Every time something bad happens, you identify every person who contributed to the harm, calculate each person's liability and they have to pay. If some of the culprits cannot be identified, then the remaining culprits who can be identified have to absorb the unallocated liability... Not allocating full liability to people who do harm is akin to allocating it to everyone, including those who played no part in the harm. This is immoral and creates perverse incentives for continued harm. For example, someone discards an empty plastic Coca Cola bottle on the ground in a public park, the person is fined maybe 95% but 5% of the fine is directed to the Coca Cola company for having made the decision to make the bottle out of plastic instead of tin or glass; thus being complicit in the harm. The money for any harm done, by any entity should go directly towards UBI and be paid out equally to all citizens. The government could also use statistics to fine companies based on reasonable estimates of current harmful practices. For example, how much damage is microplastics causing in terms of medical costs globally? Make a list of all companies responsible, fine each one proportionally to their contribution to the harm. People should be paid for identifying, reporting and successfully proving harmful practices (they deserve a commission, like a lawyer). Identifying and reporting problems adds value to society and should be rewarded. The majority of the proceeds should go to UBI. Why UBI? Because diffuse harms require diffuse remedies. It's not possible to award damages for widespread harm in a fair, non-corrupt way, so distributing to all citizens equally is the best approach. It's not perfect, but people know how to count and it's easier to identify and prove fraud if the rule is simple like 'each person gets the same amount of UBI'.
- wyager 1y agoThis is a great strategy for ensuring that you don't have any kind of technological economy
- freeone3000 1y agoMaybe the technological economy is the problem
- zdenulo 1y agoIt looks like the URL to the study is not valid https://doi.org/10.1038/s41538-025-00470-3 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41538-025-00470-3, or maybe they did some change
- honeybadger1 1y agoI have adopted for the last 5 years glassware and stainless kitchen items to avoid plastic as much as I possibly can. But then I read something in the last week or so that said recently made glassware has more plastic leeching than some plastic containers...FFS....
- strict9 1y agoAn interesting exercise is to view https://www.plasticlist.org/ https://www.plasticlist.org/ and sort the items from highest to lowest. Whatever your gut tells you about what has the most or least plastic in the food you're eating is probably incorrect. War rations from the 1950s had the most, along with fast food cheeseburgers and Whole Foods grass fed steak. Kraft Mac and cheese was low, especially after microwaving.
- neves 1y agoHow microwaving can decrease the amount of microplastics? Any link for an explanation?
- doph 1y agoMicrowaving causes individual particles to join into a delicious plastic-cheese emulsion, making them undetectable.
- hollerith 1y agoI figure it made the plastic less detectable by whatever measurement method was used.
- strict9 1y agoNat Friedman, who I believe commissioned this site, said he was surprised at this finding: https://x.com/natfriedman/status/1872836471398539379 https://x.com/natfriedman/status/1872836471398539379 Direct link to a paper in replies if you don't use X: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286203208_Effect_of_the_microwave_heating_on_the_stability_of_phthalate_plasticizers_which_are_used_in_plastic_packing_industry_in_aqueous_food_simulants https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286203208_Effect_of...
- kenjackson 1y agoThis is interesting -- it does put into context some of what was hyped up recently in the news, for example, the Fairlife Core Power microplastics. While it is higher in Core Plastics, it's not off by an order of magnitudes compared with other milk products. The other question I have -- what does someone who consumes very little microplastics look like? Increased lifespan, decreased risk of cancer (by how much), does it have lead-like outcomes, etc... Avoiding microplastics seems like a lot of inconvenience (at least for an individual) -- I'd want to make sure the payoff at the end is worth it.
- taeric 1y agoI hate to doubt studies, but with advice like: "Invest in a zippered fabric bag and ask the dry cleaner to return your clothes in that instead of those thin sheets of plastic." I am doubtful. I assert that the number one source of microplastics in a house will be clothing. Your "lint trap" in a dryer? Largely microplastics. Dust in your house? Again, largely made up of fabric fibers. Which are increasingly plastics. Especially so if you have a carpeted house. I'm not fully against some of these ideas and studies. And I am all for reducing our exposure to microplastics, where we can. But folks largely ignore the microplastic lining in cans, thinking they are avoiding that plastic bottle. We seem to have done a great job of avoiding large plastics in the fear of microplastics. Meanwhile, folks have very little intuition on where the microplastics come from.
- baxtr 1y agoThanks, good insight. Reminds me of people wanting to save CO2 and then do the silliest thing but ignore the big chunks. Can you share a good source with some details on where the bulk of microplastic exposure comes from?
- taeric 1y agoSadly, I make that largely as an assertion that I don't know how to disprove. I do remember seeing a study on it at one point, but did not save it. I think this and tires were much higher than people contend with. At a personal level, it is just kind of eye opening to see how much lint I generate in the dryer on a regular basis. Granted, cat hair also makes up an amusingly sizeable portion of that source. If you do find a good read that is counter to this, please share. It would not be the first thing I was personally wrong about. Probably wouldn't be the last, either. :D
- Melatonic 1y agoTextiles do make a huge amount of microplastics. This has been known for awhile. As for dust in the home - I have not heard these are microplastics. And given how it reacts I do not think it is. The tire thing was a more recent discovery but makes a lot of sense - tire dust cannot be good for us to inhale or be getting into our bodies via other methods.
- jakub_g 1y agoJust from a few days ago: > Microplastics ... in glass bottles contain more microplastic particles than those in plastic bottles, cartons or cans. This was the surprising finding of a study conducted by the Boulogne-sur-Mer unit of the ANSES Laboratory for Food Safety. The scientists hypothesised that these plastic particles could come from the paint used on bottle caps. Water and wine are less affected than other beverages. [1] [1] https://www.anses.fr/en/content/caps-glass-bottles-contaminate-beverages-microplastics https://www.anses.fr/en/content/caps-glass-bottles-contamina...
- whatsakandr 1y agoBest idea of a solution I can think of is modifying bacteria to consume microplastics and releasing them into the wild. Make them a permanent part of the ecosystem.
- bobbylarrybobby 1y agoProblem is they'd probably also start consuming macroplastics, and every plastic thing we use would degrade.
- ge96 1y agoThen it evolves starts eating everything ahhh horror movie plot
- ChaoPrayaWave 1y agoI started trying to reduce my exposure to plastic packaging a few years ago, but it’s hard to avoid it completely. Even when you buy “organic” or “sustainable” food, it’s often packaged in plastic.
- swayvil 1y agoIf we were using lead pipes and I spoke discouragingly about that, I'd be flagged and censored. Now it's the vaccine.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]