Microplastics have always fascinated me, because I keep seeing article after article about how much microplastic exists around us, but far less strong evidence about its actual effects. That is not to say there are no effects, of course. Maybe we just have not found them yet.
A friend of mine worked on her bachelor’s thesis about the effects of microplastics on the immune system, specifically T cells. Her result was that the microplastic particles she studied were too large to interact with T cells.
She probably will not publish this result because she thinks it is not interesting enough. Classic file-drawer problem in academic science.
While I encourage her to do it anyways as a negative results is also interesting but she wanted results that are worthing of headlines in magazines.
> She probably will not publish this result because she thinks it is not interesting enough. Classic file-drawer problem in academic science.
It's truly insane that everyone in the academic class understands the fundamental problems of herding and sampling bias and yet every incentive is in place to do this.
Having lived this reality, people respond to incentives. Your have to very fundamentally re-architect the incentives and career progression in academia to make publication of null results more common. The other side of this is reducing the time and hassle of publication. Right now I’m unlikely to battle for 1.5-3 years to get something through peer review for a result that nobody will find interesting.
> but far less strong evidence about its actual effects.
Yeah, but we shouldn't take absence of evidence as evidence of absence. The fact is that it's just really really hard to establish a causal relationship, even if it's there, because of all the cofounders. Heck even if you constructed a study with a known poison, like lead, and you might not see the results in a single study. You could give 50 participants water with flint levels of lead in it for a month, and you might not get scientifically significant result just due to the wide variance in a population.
Or another example is just thinking how hard it would be construct a study with a control, when every single construction material has plastics in it and they are floating in the air around us all the time (as mentioned in the article). Could it affect mental or reproductive wellbeing? Certainly. Can we construct a study to establish either way? Not easily.
And one of the plasticizers they talk about, pthalates, are known to be endocrine disruptors (i.e. mess with hormones).
> Her result was that the microplastic particles she studied were too large to interact with T cells.
Her "result" of what? Was there an actual experiment and what was its scope or was this by surveying literature?
Microplastics are of a pretty large range of size, and then there are nanoplastics below that.
I'm also not an expert, but a quick search shows a number of results of microplastics affecting T cells, some directly and some in terms of immune signaling, so this negative result doesn't seem that definitive.
(as usual, the difficulty is in teasing out in vivo effects)
I expect many researchers are using fresh lab-made microplastics, which are indeed mostly harmless. However part of the problem is that real-world plastics are chemical sponges that absorb toxins (heavy metals, PCBs, etc) from the environment and deliver them in a concentrated dose into the body.
>However part of the problem is that real-world plastics are chemical sponges that absorb toxins (heavy metals, PCBs, etc) from the environment and deliver them in a concentrated dose into the body.
Once microplastics fall apart futher, to nano-plastic, it will start to get absorbed by T cells because they want to destroy any invaders. Once absorbed, T-Cell start to produce H2O2 to destroy anything they absorbed. Unfortunately, plastics are mostly chemically neutral and so, it cannot be destroyed like that.
T-Cells produce more H2O2, eventually it leaks outside and start inflamation of surrunding tissue. There is research about it.
AKA nanoplastic-induced oxidative stress, but it's actually macrophages (and neutrophils), not T-cells.
The reason this is problem is because cells can never destroy nano-plastic so they keep self destroying forever (chronic inflammation).
I still have my doubts about actual scale of this, especially how we still haven't solved pm2.5 pollution or even asbestos. You are most likely to inhale it due to plastic abundance in environment, just like thousands of other things. It doesn't even have ICD yet.
There’s a transition point where things stop being micro plastics and become chemicals. Those molecules may be toxic but the interactions are distinct from microplastics.
Unknown to me, but something useful to know is that there is something smaller than microplastics called nanoplastics. The distinguishing factor is that nanoplastics are particles smaller than 1 micron, while microplastics are particles between 1 micron and around 5 millimeters. As your other respondent notes, at some point you're talking about single molecules. As plastics is an entire category and not a single thing, there's no one size where that happens, but some polymers have chains that are as little as 0.01 (1/100th of a) micron in size.
As far as I am aware, we have yet to have effective, replicable research on what if any biointeractions exist with nanoplastic particles, including single polymer chains.
> We assessed how reliable current measures are for trying to find microplastics in blood. And what we found is that lipids and fats will give you a false positive for polyethylene.
> We worked with an architect, and we built the lab pretty much from scratch. [...] So we ended up going with stainless steel. It was the only way to not have any plastics.
> I don’t think we’ve got really good evidence at all for what effects [microplastics particles on their own] might be having on human bodies. If we’re eating plastics, what size and what type of plastic can actually get into the bloodstream?
This is a great interview, though I'd caution against reading it like a literature review. It's just the views and opinions of a single (relevant and qualified) expert
We don’t fully understand even some of the most obvious pathologies. If a disease isn’t glaringly obvious and coupled with profit incentive, God help you. The question of what microplastics do to us is simply beyond the capabilities of both modern medicine and academic research institutions.
Exactly. If you fart in a cup and then move it to your pelvis without letting any air leak out and then release it, that doesn’t count as a queef regardless of whether or not you had a vagina.
fwiw kimchi-derived probiotic bacterium (Leuconostoc mesenteroides CBA3656) was shown to bind nanoplastics and help mice excrete more of them. But it’s not yet proven that eating kimchi removes microplastics from humans
" We tested about 30 different construction materials trying to find some that didn’t contain plastics, but also didn’t contain plastic [additives] such as phthalates, but we couldn’t find any. Everything had either plastics or phthalates in them."
Very nice to see someone actually looking at the issue objectively instead of the unholy blend of clickbait, shoddy "science" and either fear mongering or blind denialism we usually see.
Getting to the point where we're actually able to measure something real is good progress.
did read,
>e360: Do we really eat a credit card’s worth of plastic each week?
>Rauert: That has absolutely been debunked
and
>...we found is that lipids and fats will give you a false positive for polyethylene. Lipids are made up of the same building blocks as polyethylene, so when we analyze them, they look identical in our analysis instrument.
>I know it is easy to say we don’t have enough information yet, but we do know about [the health risks from] these chemicals that are in all the plastics that your food is wrapped in.
Not just because we can't measure it but because its hard to say what's due to the plastic and what's due to additives in the plastics
> And while we know a lot about the impact of chemicals added to plastic — such as phthalates, which have been shown to impact fertility, or bisphenols, which have been linked to Type 2 diabetes — we know very little about what effect the plastic particles themselves might be having.
I think hate of plastics is an emergent form of elitism.
Upwardly mobile middle/upper class people who've sort of "maxed out" the amount of personal identity they can buy with regular plastic things can unlock a new level of identity by deciding that plastics are bad for them and eliminating plastics from their life, a process which conveniently requires buying a whole new set of things that distinguish them from their peers.
This is the only way I can explain how irrational and inconsistent plastic-haters behavior is. There is so much invisible plastic in their life that they don't seem to care about.
> requires buying a whole new set of things that distinguish them from their peers
No, it requires buying a whole new set of things to fit in with and be accepted by their peers, to distinguish themselves from the outgroup, the plastic users.
I don’t necessarily believe this is some emergent elitism; I see it more as a modern religion with many many rules about eating and consumption (using plastic is now a sin).
Like any religion, sinners (for example plastic users) are mostly pitied because they are ignorant, but those who know and choose to use plastic anyway, well, it’s OK to hate them.
I don't get this whole attitude. Moving away from plastics in our kitchen was basically zero extra cost. Something busted, and we replaced it with non-plastic. Even bamboo scrubbers don't cost more than plastic (maybe even a little less) and I can't see any particular longevity difference.
I think the fact that I volunteer to clean up trash on public lands and know that weathered plastic is the period worst period to remove makes me move away from plastic in general.
Plus, a solid $3 wooden spoon is just a joy to cook with. They outlast the plastic ones, too.
Microplastic ingestion? Well, I'm not sure the effects or the relative quantity compared to tire shed and other industrial factors. But if I were forced by some diety to bet my life on if plastics in the kitchen or on clothing had a negative health effect, I'd make that bet.
But the main thing I don't get about the attitude stems from the fact that I don't really care what other people use in their kitchens. I recommend it.
Things like glass food storage containers are really expensive compared to plastic. And they still have plastic lids; like, I don't know what you'd even do without at least the seal-part being some kind of plastic, I guess you'd need to use natural-sourced wax to make it seal, or something?
And on the topic of cost, I'm certain my kids have broken between 50 and 100 glass and ceramic drinking cups, storage containers, plates, and bowls in a little over a decade. They destroy plastic items at a way, way lower rate. Consider the use case of packing a kid's lunchbox. Plastic is... very tempting, for practical reasons. And cheaper.
Last I checked, plastic vs. wood on an otherwise identical stamped metal Victoronix knife costs you an extra $15-$20, which is a notable percentage of the total cost of the item. I sprung for the wood on my latest replacement just for the aesthetics, but it cost enough more that I did give it a good think first.
> Even bamboo scrubbers don't cost more than plastic (maybe even a little less) and I can't see any particular longevity difference.
Are those actually just bamboo? Maybe they are, I dunno, I can't recall seeing one. Lots of the "bamboo" materials I've encountered have turned out to contain (at least some) plastic.
> Plus, a solid $3 wooden spoon is just a joy to cook with. They outlast the plastic ones, too.
That's just true. Plastic spoons for cooking suck, wood and (where it makes sense and won't damage other things) metal are way better. Wooden ones aren't even expensive. The popularity of plastic ones is baffling.
One thing that's surprised me is the cost and/or total lack of availability of glass blender jars, even on fairly high-end brands (both the fake-high-end ones that are just expensive, and the actually-good ones). I remember my parents' assuredly cheapest-thing-in-the-store blender that they probably bought in the 70s or 80s had a glass jar, because that was just... standard. Meanwhile my as-awesome-as-I'd-hoped-thank-god expensive-ass Vitamix came with a plastic jar, and they do not make glass replacements. (I'm just checking and it looks like they might finally make one in stainless, though? Still, I'd prefer glass because being able to see what's going on in there is very nice, but I'm gonna have to look into that...)
I've addressed this idea in a sibling comment. I think at least some superstition is inevitable in any subculture. Consider how many tech 'holy wars' might involve baseless beliefs about how a text editor or programming language or whatever being not only superior because of personal preference but because it's inherently more optimized. Treating anti-micro-plastics as a "religion" rather than a subculture based on a meme deserves a bit more nuance.
1. Is it based on inherently irrational, unfactual beliefs, e.g. like anti-vaccination or anti-5G myths?
2. If we consider religion as a way to explain complex phenomena using just-so stories (the pop anthropology / layman idea of primitive man inventing Zeus to explain lightning), then what intellectual or emotional need does anti-microplastics belief validate?
Health in general has always worked like this, from supplements, to organic food, to avoiding ultra-processed foods, to gluten-free diets, pretty much every popular health fad has no provable causative effect on health.
Most of human behavior is irrational. If we were all perfectly rational, we would have healthy diet and exercise habits from the get go, and we'd have plenty of time to prepare food and exercise, because we wouldn't waste any time on entertainment.
You could just liken it to any pop health, dietary, or environmental fad instead of trying to portray a banal "people turn consumer choices into personal identity/lifestyle" trend as a whole new class of phenomenon. Crunchy hippies shop organic and audiophiles buy gold-plated premium wires; every subculture has at least a little bit of superstition.
Even more so: plastics are not a specific chemical and they are not a specific material. Plastic is a category of materials that is very broad and very wide. You can make plastics out of almost anything. Therefore, to hate on plastics is to basically hate on an entire category of engineering and material design but not to actually know what a plastic is... sheer ignorance.
Yes, it's a category of materials that is overwhelmingly populated by a much more specific, ultra-cheap and therefore ultra-pervasive, set of chemicals which are shown in study after study to have worrying characteristics.
Anything that shows evidence of omnipresence, endocrine disruption, bioaccumulation, and inter-generational transmission should be extremely, extremely closely scrutinized.
To think otherwise is absolute braindead contrarianism, full-stop.
Personally, I think that the Microplastics Moral Panic is a textbook study of F.U.D.
There is practically nothing that ordinary people can do for prevention, mitigation, diagnosis or treatment of microplastics in our bodies, so I therefore conclude that it is futile and wasteful to worry or argue about it, unless you have abundant free time and resources to get paranoid strangers all in a frenzy, for no good reason.
I half-assed try to avoid plastic in contact with (especially very) hot food or drink, and avoid it in long-term food containers, in no small part because I've seen things like plastic cooking spoons losing non-microscopic parts of themselves in food, and I find the stains plastic storage containers acquire after a little use kinda worrisome (I'd rather my reusable storage containers not be that permeable, thank you very much), but otherwise agree that any real amount of effort to avoid microplastics would probably do more good if it took the form of a 20-minute jog per week, i.e. "don't even consider worrying about it unless you've really, really got all your other health stuff sorted out"
Like I'm pretty sure the bigger health risk with a plastic soda straw is the soda, not the straw, you know?
Are you sure it's all irrational? I, for one, prefer other materials for many things because they are more durable, hygenic or simply feels nicer. Seems perfectly rational to me. An irrational choice would be something like carrying a heavy canvas tent with wooden poles just because you hate plastic. Do you know anyone who does that?
>Even when you put a glass panel in the window, you have silicon holding the glass in. We tested all these different brands of silicon to try to find ones that had low levels of phthalates. It was a crazy amount of detail that we went to, but it was really worth it.
Silicone holds the glass panel. Silicon is the glass itself. Yale editors, do your job.
Microplastics have always fascinated me, because I keep seeing article after article about how much microplastic exists around us, but far less strong evidence about its actual effects. That is not to say there are no effects, of course. Maybe we just have not found them yet.
A friend of mine worked on her bachelor’s thesis about the effects of microplastics on the immune system, specifically T cells. Her result was that the microplastic particles she studied were too large to interact with T cells.
She probably will not publish this result because she thinks it is not interesting enough. Classic file-drawer problem in academic science.
While I encourage her to do it anyways as a negative results is also interesting but she wanted results that are worthing of headlines in magazines.
> She probably will not publish this result because she thinks it is not interesting enough. Classic file-drawer problem in academic science.
It's truly insane that everyone in the academic class understands the fundamental problems of herding and sampling bias and yet every incentive is in place to do this.
Having lived this reality, people respond to incentives. Your have to very fundamentally re-architect the incentives and career progression in academia to make publication of null results more common. The other side of this is reducing the time and hassle of publication. Right now I’m unlikely to battle for 1.5-3 years to get something through peer review for a result that nobody will find interesting.
> but far less strong evidence about its actual effects.
Yeah, but we shouldn't take absence of evidence as evidence of absence. The fact is that it's just really really hard to establish a causal relationship, even if it's there, because of all the cofounders. Heck even if you constructed a study with a known poison, like lead, and you might not see the results in a single study. You could give 50 participants water with flint levels of lead in it for a month, and you might not get scientifically significant result just due to the wide variance in a population.
Or another example is just thinking how hard it would be construct a study with a control, when every single construction material has plastics in it and they are floating in the air around us all the time (as mentioned in the article). Could it affect mental or reproductive wellbeing? Certainly. Can we construct a study to establish either way? Not easily.
And one of the plasticizers they talk about, pthalates, are known to be endocrine disruptors (i.e. mess with hormones).
I participated in research from 2017-2022 that found similar results regarding bio-interactions, generally.
Learned a lot about making microfludic flow cells at least
> Her result was that the microplastic particles she studied were too large to interact with T cells.
Her "result" of what? Was there an actual experiment and what was its scope or was this by surveying literature?
Microplastics are of a pretty large range of size, and then there are nanoplastics below that.
I'm also not an expert, but a quick search shows a number of results of microplastics affecting T cells, some directly and some in terms of immune signaling, so this negative result doesn't seem that definitive.
(as usual, the difficulty is in teasing out in vivo effects)
I'm not an expert but I'm going to condescend about an expert's "results" anyway.
Very informative, thank you for your comment. You have truly contributed to the conversation. Good job.
> ... too large to interact with T cells.
Also, unfortunately, a result that industry and the anti-regulation crowd will use to say microplastics are harmless.
also, asbestos is too small to interact with T-cells, so it must be safe.
I expect many researchers are using fresh lab-made microplastics, which are indeed mostly harmless. However part of the problem is that real-world plastics are chemical sponges that absorb toxins (heavy metals, PCBs, etc) from the environment and deliver them in a concentrated dose into the body.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/923529
>However part of the problem is that real-world plastics are chemical sponges that absorb toxins (heavy metals, PCBs, etc) from the environment and deliver them in a concentrated dose into the body.
>https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/923529
But your linked study only talks about biofilms and E.coli?
Can microplastics never get small enough to interact with T cells?
Once microplastics fall apart futher, to nano-plastic, it will start to get absorbed by T cells because they want to destroy any invaders. Once absorbed, T-Cell start to produce H2O2 to destroy anything they absorbed. Unfortunately, plastics are mostly chemically neutral and so, it cannot be destroyed like that. T-Cells produce more H2O2, eventually it leaks outside and start inflamation of surrunding tissue. There is research about it.
AKA nanoplastic-induced oxidative stress, but it's actually macrophages (and neutrophils), not T-cells.
The reason this is problem is because cells can never destroy nano-plastic so they keep self destroying forever (chronic inflammation).
I still have my doubts about actual scale of this, especially how we still haven't solved pm2.5 pollution or even asbestos. You are most likely to inhale it due to plastic abundance in environment, just like thousands of other things. It doesn't even have ICD yet.
[delayed]
Link to that research, please. It would add meaningfully to this discussion.
There’s a transition point where things stop being micro plastics and become chemicals. Those molecules may be toxic but the interactions are distinct from microplastics.
Unknown to me, but something useful to know is that there is something smaller than microplastics called nanoplastics. The distinguishing factor is that nanoplastics are particles smaller than 1 micron, while microplastics are particles between 1 micron and around 5 millimeters. As your other respondent notes, at some point you're talking about single molecules. As plastics is an entire category and not a single thing, there's no one size where that happens, but some polymers have chains that are as little as 0.01 (1/100th of a) micron in size.
As far as I am aware, we have yet to have effective, replicable research on what if any biointeractions exist with nanoplastic particles, including single polymer chains.
Some stand out takeaways:
> We assessed how reliable current measures are for trying to find microplastics in blood. And what we found is that lipids and fats will give you a false positive for polyethylene.
> We worked with an architect, and we built the lab pretty much from scratch. [...] So we ended up going with stainless steel. It was the only way to not have any plastics.
> I don’t think we’ve got really good evidence at all for what effects [microplastics particles on their own] might be having on human bodies. If we’re eating plastics, what size and what type of plastic can actually get into the bloodstream?
This is a great interview, though I'd caution against reading it like a literature review. It's just the views and opinions of a single (relevant and qualified) expert
We don’t fully understand even some of the most obvious pathologies. If a disease isn’t glaringly obvious and coupled with profit incentive, God help you. The question of what microplastics do to us is simply beyond the capabilities of both modern medicine and academic research institutions.
Would have loved to see the effects broken down by plastic, as the term "plastics" is as non-specific as "metals" and "organic"
Exactly. If you fart in a cup and then move it to your pelvis without letting any air leak out and then release it, that doesn’t count as a queef regardless of whether or not you had a vagina.
Words have meaning.
Did she debunk that article that was around microplastics in human testicles?
fwiw kimchi-derived probiotic bacterium (Leuconostoc mesenteroides CBA3656) was shown to bind nanoplastics and help mice excrete more of them. But it’s not yet proven that eating kimchi removes microplastics from humans
It is proven that it tastes hella good though
" We tested about 30 different construction materials trying to find some that didn’t contain plastics, but also didn’t contain plastic [additives] such as phthalates, but we couldn’t find any. Everything had either plastics or phthalates in them."
We’re going to find out at an autopsy.
I have grown to accept it. It is part of me now
one word: microplastics
deep cut
we have recently transitioned to only using glass bottles in our family.
Very nice to see someone actually looking at the issue objectively instead of the unholy blend of clickbait, shoddy "science" and either fear mongering or blind denialism we usually see.
Getting to the point where we're actually able to measure something real is good progress.
tldr, not much because we can't measure it to begin with
did read, >e360: Do we really eat a credit card’s worth of plastic each week? >Rauert: That has absolutely been debunked
and >...we found is that lipids and fats will give you a false positive for polyethylene. Lipids are made up of the same building blocks as polyethylene, so when we analyze them, they look identical in our analysis instrument. >I know it is easy to say we don’t have enough information yet, but we do know about [the health risks from] these chemicals that are in all the plastics that your food is wrapped in.
Not just because we can't measure it but because its hard to say what's due to the plastic and what's due to additives in the plastics
> And while we know a lot about the impact of chemicals added to plastic — such as phthalates, which have been shown to impact fertility, or bisphenols, which have been linked to Type 2 diabetes — we know very little about what effect the plastic particles themselves might be having.
I think hate of plastics is an emergent form of elitism.
Upwardly mobile middle/upper class people who've sort of "maxed out" the amount of personal identity they can buy with regular plastic things can unlock a new level of identity by deciding that plastics are bad for them and eliminating plastics from their life, a process which conveniently requires buying a whole new set of things that distinguish them from their peers.
This is the only way I can explain how irrational and inconsistent plastic-haters behavior is. There is so much invisible plastic in their life that they don't seem to care about.
> requires buying a whole new set of things that distinguish them from their peers
No, it requires buying a whole new set of things to fit in with and be accepted by their peers, to distinguish themselves from the outgroup, the plastic users.
I don’t necessarily believe this is some emergent elitism; I see it more as a modern religion with many many rules about eating and consumption (using plastic is now a sin).
Like any religion, sinners (for example plastic users) are mostly pitied because they are ignorant, but those who know and choose to use plastic anyway, well, it’s OK to hate them.
I don't get this whole attitude. Moving away from plastics in our kitchen was basically zero extra cost. Something busted, and we replaced it with non-plastic. Even bamboo scrubbers don't cost more than plastic (maybe even a little less) and I can't see any particular longevity difference.
I think the fact that I volunteer to clean up trash on public lands and know that weathered plastic is the period worst period to remove makes me move away from plastic in general.
Plus, a solid $3 wooden spoon is just a joy to cook with. They outlast the plastic ones, too.
Microplastic ingestion? Well, I'm not sure the effects or the relative quantity compared to tire shed and other industrial factors. But if I were forced by some diety to bet my life on if plastics in the kitchen or on clothing had a negative health effect, I'd make that bet.
But the main thing I don't get about the attitude stems from the fact that I don't really care what other people use in their kitchens. I recommend it.
Just please don't litter. :)
Things like glass food storage containers are really expensive compared to plastic. And they still have plastic lids; like, I don't know what you'd even do without at least the seal-part being some kind of plastic, I guess you'd need to use natural-sourced wax to make it seal, or something?
And on the topic of cost, I'm certain my kids have broken between 50 and 100 glass and ceramic drinking cups, storage containers, plates, and bowls in a little over a decade. They destroy plastic items at a way, way lower rate. Consider the use case of packing a kid's lunchbox. Plastic is... very tempting, for practical reasons. And cheaper.
Last I checked, plastic vs. wood on an otherwise identical stamped metal Victoronix knife costs you an extra $15-$20, which is a notable percentage of the total cost of the item. I sprung for the wood on my latest replacement just for the aesthetics, but it cost enough more that I did give it a good think first.
> Even bamboo scrubbers don't cost more than plastic (maybe even a little less) and I can't see any particular longevity difference.
Are those actually just bamboo? Maybe they are, I dunno, I can't recall seeing one. Lots of the "bamboo" materials I've encountered have turned out to contain (at least some) plastic.
> Plus, a solid $3 wooden spoon is just a joy to cook with. They outlast the plastic ones, too.
That's just true. Plastic spoons for cooking suck, wood and (where it makes sense and won't damage other things) metal are way better. Wooden ones aren't even expensive. The popularity of plastic ones is baffling.
One thing that's surprised me is the cost and/or total lack of availability of glass blender jars, even on fairly high-end brands (both the fake-high-end ones that are just expensive, and the actually-good ones). I remember my parents' assuredly cheapest-thing-in-the-store blender that they probably bought in the 70s or 80s had a glass jar, because that was just... standard. Meanwhile my as-awesome-as-I'd-hoped-thank-god expensive-ass Vitamix came with a plastic jar, and they do not make glass replacements. (I'm just checking and it looks like they might finally make one in stainless, though? Still, I'd prefer glass because being able to see what's going on in there is very nice, but I'm gonna have to look into that...)
I've addressed this idea in a sibling comment. I think at least some superstition is inevitable in any subculture. Consider how many tech 'holy wars' might involve baseless beliefs about how a text editor or programming language or whatever being not only superior because of personal preference but because it's inherently more optimized. Treating anti-micro-plastics as a "religion" rather than a subculture based on a meme deserves a bit more nuance.
1. Is it based on inherently irrational, unfactual beliefs, e.g. like anti-vaccination or anti-5G myths?
2. If we consider religion as a way to explain complex phenomena using just-so stories (the pop anthropology / layman idea of primitive man inventing Zeus to explain lightning), then what intellectual or emotional need does anti-microplastics belief validate?
Health in general has always worked like this, from supplements, to organic food, to avoiding ultra-processed foods, to gluten-free diets, pretty much every popular health fad has no provable causative effect on health.
Most of human behavior is irrational. If we were all perfectly rational, we would have healthy diet and exercise habits from the get go, and we'd have plenty of time to prepare food and exercise, because we wouldn't waste any time on entertainment.
You could just liken it to any pop health, dietary, or environmental fad instead of trying to portray a banal "people turn consumer choices into personal identity/lifestyle" trend as a whole new class of phenomenon. Crunchy hippies shop organic and audiophiles buy gold-plated premium wires; every subculture has at least a little bit of superstition.
Every plastic object replaced with a metal, or similarly strong/more solid material is an upgrade.
Even more so: plastics are not a specific chemical and they are not a specific material. Plastic is a category of materials that is very broad and very wide. You can make plastics out of almost anything. Therefore, to hate on plastics is to basically hate on an entire category of engineering and material design but not to actually know what a plastic is... sheer ignorance.
Yes, it's a category of materials that is overwhelmingly populated by a much more specific, ultra-cheap and therefore ultra-pervasive, set of chemicals which are shown in study after study to have worrying characteristics.
Anything that shows evidence of omnipresence, endocrine disruption, bioaccumulation, and inter-generational transmission should be extremely, extremely closely scrutinized.
To think otherwise is absolute braindead contrarianism, full-stop.
Personally, I think that the Microplastics Moral Panic is a textbook study of F.U.D.
There is practically nothing that ordinary people can do for prevention, mitigation, diagnosis or treatment of microplastics in our bodies, so I therefore conclude that it is futile and wasteful to worry or argue about it, unless you have abundant free time and resources to get paranoid strangers all in a frenzy, for no good reason.
I half-assed try to avoid plastic in contact with (especially very) hot food or drink, and avoid it in long-term food containers, in no small part because I've seen things like plastic cooking spoons losing non-microscopic parts of themselves in food, and I find the stains plastic storage containers acquire after a little use kinda worrisome (I'd rather my reusable storage containers not be that permeable, thank you very much), but otherwise agree that any real amount of effort to avoid microplastics would probably do more good if it took the form of a 20-minute jog per week, i.e. "don't even consider worrying about it unless you've really, really got all your other health stuff sorted out"
Like I'm pretty sure the bigger health risk with a plastic soda straw is the soda, not the straw, you know?
Did this apply to people freaking out about lead a couple decades ago?
What about those advocating for smoking bans in shared spaces?
Cholera outbreaks near the city water wells?
Or are microplastics special in some way?
Are you sure it's all irrational? I, for one, prefer other materials for many things because they are more durable, hygenic or simply feels nicer. Seems perfectly rational to me. An irrational choice would be something like carrying a heavy canvas tent with wooden poles just because you hate plastic. Do you know anyone who does that?
> There is so much invisible plastic in their life that they don't seem to care about.
Huh? You think it's hypocritical for people not to "seem to care about" things that, by your own definition, they are ignorant of?
Are the microplastics in the room with us now?
yes
Please show us on the doll where the microplastics hurt you, for the jury please.
The doll is missing that part!
>Even when you put a glass panel in the window, you have silicon holding the glass in. We tested all these different brands of silicon to try to find ones that had low levels of phthalates. It was a crazy amount of detail that we went to, but it was really worth it.
Silicone holds the glass panel. Silicon is the glass itself. Yale editors, do your job.