> Various examples of damage caused by microplastics have been reported, such as microplastic accumulation in the bodies of marine and aquatic organisms (leading to malnutrition), inflammation, reduced fertility, and mortality. The threats that microplastics present to the human body have not yet been clearly identified. However, previous reports have shown that ultrafine microplastic absorption resulted in complex toxicity in zebrafish,2 and that microplastics under 100 nm in size can reach almost all organs after entering the human body.3 Therefore, concerns exist regarding the negative effects of continuous microplastic accumulation in the human body.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10151227/
> Microplastics have been found in a variety of organisms and multiple parts of the human body. We emphasize the potential impact of microplastics on the early exposure of infants and the early development of embryos. At present, the toxicity research on microplastics show that the exposure will cause intestinal injury, liver infection, flora imbalance, lipid accumulation, and then lead to metabolic disorder. In addition, the microplastic exposure increases the expression of inflammatory factors, inhibits the activity of acetylcholinesterase, reduces the quality of germ cells, and affects embryo development. At last, we speculate that the exposure of microplastics may be related to the formation of various chronic diseases.
You missed this part, which is the most important one.
I'd wait for more research before freaking out.
The answer being unclear means it makes sense to treat them, from a regulatory standpoint, closer to asbestos. It also makes sense to treat them as an unknowable and not regulate, because any alternative might be worse.
But it does point to there being a dearth in research and answers, and we should solve that as quickly as possible and maybe limit our exposure when viable, known to be non-toxic alternatives exist.
I'm not sure the follows logically, it ignores a bunch of known facts about biology to imagine that there is a pathway for these to cause major issues.
Survival odds in car crashes demonstrate this nicely: count the outcomes and divide. If "the survival odds were unclear, scientifically speaking" then car accidents would have to be orders of magnitude more rare and less lethal than they are.
Was the most important part of all the tobacco research the bits that said “Smoking tobacco is healthy”? Or the studies of lead in gasoline the caveats that said “These are small samples”?
I prefer fact over fear based science.
What is that supposed to mean? Most science is based on theories but you don’t wait for the Theory of Everything to take learnings of science. Fear is a very useful emotion and you shouldn’t fear it.
Now hypothesis is what you were probably mistaking a theory with. A hypothesis is something unproven and may or may not be a real thing.
The amount of exposure has also changed. Some bakelite knobs on your armoir aren't a big deal. Sleeping with a 'fleece' blanket and inhaling polypropylene all night every night may not be fine.
Personally, I don't have confidence in being able to be an informed consumer of plastics, and it's easier to just minimize platic use in general without trying to decide what's dangerous and what's ok.
Actually, it's not even that as most of the modern increase in life expectancy / fall in mortality occurred before the invention of plastics.
The former largely concluded by the 1920s. Plastics were largely invented during the 1930s, and were introduced as products over subsequent decades, at an ever-increasing rate.
Which is to say: whatever lead to the increase in life expectancy was largely not plastics. Rather it was increased general hygiene, sanitation, food quality, refrigeration, waste removal, and sewerage systems.
I'd mentioned this only a few months back, note especially my follow-up comment which similarly points out another frequently-touted factor which also fails the temporal sequencing test:
To wit, life expectancies in North America have been declining the last few years.
Also, plastics have been around for 100+ years. That would be one heck of a lag.
*EDIT* They're not back to pre-COVID levels yet, but getting closer.
I'm sure that has nothing to do with predatory health insurance companies.
To suggest otherwise is clueless and asinine.
[†]: Works as well for high fructose corn syrup or Fentanyl.
Remember the black spatulas a while back, and how it turned out to be a math error?
Seems like a pretty minor change to me. I’m already going out of my way to not put metal in there anyway…
Overcome the effect of antibiotics and vaccines that's just what it shows, and that's really not surprising
> Remember the black spatulas a while back, and how it turned out to be a math error?
The math spatula being an ill-founded crusade from a line researcher doesn't mean you can make nonsensical argument to say it's not harmful…
Humans existed. They had an average life expectency of 'x'. Then we introduced plastic. The life expectency became x+y.
We cannot say that plastic caused the increase, but it is clear that any decrease was small enough to be hidden by other factors.
Am I saying that it's harmless? No. Am I saying that your effort and attention are better spent checking your fire extinguishers arent expired or that your brake pads don't need changed? Yes. Those things have significant and obvious impacts on your survival odds. This does not.
Yes, but those "other factors" being antibiotics and vaccine, it turns out that even the deadliest pollutants we know were hidden by other factors, so it really gives us no idea about how harmful it is, as it could go from "harmless" to "cause millions of death every year" that's why I say the argument makes no sense.
> Am I saying that your effort and attention are better spent checking your fire extinguishers arent expired or that your brake pads don't need changed? Those things have significant and obvious impacts on your survival odds. This does not.
That's the problem, you cannot make this conclusion at all, it could be much worse than those two while still being hidden in longevity statistics, just because antibiotics and vaccine has so strong of an effect on life expectancy! Having no fire extinguisher at home has pretty much no impact on your life expectancy, but at the time plastics were introduced a significant fraction of the newborn didn't reach 10yo because they died of an infection of some sort.
I see what you mean, and I think we're basically coming at the same point from different angles. If you are a medical researcher or involved in crafting legislation this is probably important. You could help save millions of lives in aggregate. However, I'm suggesting that individual people should think of the opportunity cost before they panic. After all, a person can only worry about so many things and almost everyone is at or past their capacity.
To use another half baked example, if plastics take away a year, and antibiotics give you 5 extra you still win. However, if smoking cigarettes, obesity, or driving too fast risk taking away 10 years, start with one of those first.
Optimizing the bits of life that are too small to reliably measure is just not a great way to live, unless you've already handled all of the low hanging fruit in your life. Anxiety kills people too.
I seem to recall a recent study of microplastic levels in a general population, where people with higher microplastic levels seemed to be tea drinkers, which took some by surprise at the time. I think the population under study was from latin america, if I'm not mistaken. Since this study now has flooded the search results, I'm having trouble finding that specific study.
Be that as it may, it's likely that there is a focus on tea because tea-drinkers scored high on microplastics in previous studies.
Over the past few decades there has been a trend for plastic based materials replacing natural materials in everyday things.
Polyester textiles: Found in most clothing, bedding, and furniture upholstery.
Polyurethane coatings: Applied on wooden furniture to give it a glossy, durable finish.
Vinyl flooring and tiles: Replacing traditional wood or ceramic options in many homes.
Nylon carpets and rugs.
Synthetic leather (PU or PVC): Found in everything from sofas to shoes, replacing genuine leather.
It's got to a point where it's now hard to find natural materials in some categories. My wife was looking for a new sweater and most shops only had polyester or acrylic.
This is one thing that confused me about the first article I saw on this. The paper lists three things it detected, one being cellulose, and various articles will list them all together as if they're just three microplastics to be worried about.
The paper seems to encourage this reading with this line: "the third one (from the supermarket) being cellulose (CL, sample 3), a bio-based polymer"[0].
Was sample 3 completely fine? If so, why is say "Nanoplastics were obtained from three teabag brands during a standard preparation"? Are they classing cellulose as nanoplastics?
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004565352...
Steel also contains carbon and if it is stainless steel it also has chromium and probably other metals.
I think something else that doesn't get mentioned is it's not just the risk of microplastics reacting, the physical non-reactive presence of particles can clog and get in the way of natural processes mechanically. So nonreactive shouldn't be taken to imply harmless.
Source?
> In general, mechanical interactions of microparticles and nanoparticles on biological membranes are vaguely studied, despite their importance for biological systems (29, 41). Hereby, we will demonstrate that these microplastics induce a mechanical stress of model cell membrane without the need of indirect assumptions about biological pathways (26, 27).
That would mean fiber in food is harmful since it is not digested. Cellulose is just a common type of natural fiber. Meanwhile:
USDA recommends that people consume the following amounts of fiber per day:
-- Women ages 31–50: 25 grams
-- Men ages 31–50: 38 grams
They are short-chain hydrocarbons, which most definitely exist in nature.
Microplastics are novel hydrocarbons that don't exist in nature. They're similar to cellulose but no organisms exist that eat them. They're believed to be nonreactive and therefore harmless but they might bioaccumulate which could be bad, or they might react with things in our bodies in unknown circumstances. We have limited experience with these molecules so it is hard to say.