Coal power definitely saved a lot of lives, and probably more than it killed, but it introduced new problems, not worse one, highly probably less-bad problems, but problems nevertheless, shouldn't mean that we ban coal tomorrow, but that we should (as we somewhat are) work toward fixing the new problems.
The same goes for all technologies, they generally save a lot of people from A but then causes B which is a new, less efficient source of death. This is one of the situations where we should strive to have our cake and eat it too. Hell, asbestos probably helped save more lives than it took, we just found something less terrible to replace it with.
It does not mean that its use was a mistake, but it's continued use would be, as we have an intrinsic responsibility to always seek safer alternatives when we discover the negative effects-
So will we see the 1% swing back to wooden crockery? Of course, not that McTimber stuff laced with glue, but real wood. But what's in the varnish? Do we stick with unvarnished wood?
> After all, lead poisoning was suggested as one of the possible reasons for the decline of the Roman empire.
What are you trying to imply here? Microplastic -> Low Testorone -> Socialist government -> Decline of civilisation?
Now, there's obviously many benefits that may also be seen with a less aggressive or even less competitive population, but the basic principle doesn't seem insane here, it seems a bit of a stretch and requires some serious leaps that I'm not sure are remotely proven though...
The studies involved have a number of confounding factors, and notably the use of clinical manipulation of testosterone levels fails to find consistent effect.
I'm not sure how this accurate description of the entire history of human society is supposed to refute their hypothesis?
These things are very hard to quantify, but all studies so far points to microplastic being bad. Not poisonous like lead, or deadly like uranium in ceramics. Instead they are a bit more sneaky. While plastic in itself is not so bad, all the other stuff in plastic is. Take BPA [1], a known endocrine disruptor. It is especially bad for humans in the early stages of development and has life long effects. Boys will have less testosterone (leading to multiple knock off effects) and girls will have earlier puberty, more breast and other types of cancer. Because the doses are so low the effect are not typically seen in individuals. Instead we detect them on population scale. An example is the testosterone levels of men is dwindling each year [2]. Of course correlation does not equal causation, but more and more studies are pointing to chemical disruption.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21605673/ [2] https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/92/1/196/2598434?login...