I won't speak for the whole world, but the amount of plastic things around me increased by a couple orders of magnitude in the last 15-20 years. What used to be made of stainless steel, wood or paper is now often made of plastic: tea kettles, dishes, water pipes, food bags, etc. etc. We'll see what effects it has in another 15-20 years when it will be too late to do anything.

'Plastic' is a loaded term. It includes lots of different types of platic, as well as intentional (plasticizers) and unintentional (residue in recycled plastic) additives to it. Some of the formulations are fairly new, some have been in use for a long time.

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.

Post hoc ergo prompter hoc fallacy.

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:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41020120>

I wasn't attributing the increase to plastic, I was noting the lack of sudden decrease.

That's overly simplistic. The negative health effects might be lagging, because when plastic was invented there were zero micro plastics in the environment and now there are lots.

To wit, life expectancies in North America have been declining the last few years.

The CDC announced yesterday or this morning that they're back to pre COVID levels. It seems they're done dropping for now.

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.

Having just killed off over a million of the least healthy Americans makes things appear better than they actually are.

I see your point, but I suspect it's at least equally valid to assert that our average lifespans also fell due to COVID. Mortality isn't the only impact it had, and long term effects linger.

> life expectancies in North America have been declining the last few years.

I'm sure that has nothing to do with predatory health insurance companies.

Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't but the fact remains it's overly simplistic to assume that plastic production doesn't temporally lead changes in health effects by some amount.

To suggest otherwise is clueless and asinine.

does the US consume a lot more plastic than elsewhere?

Probably. But frankly I don't care, because that's irrelevant. Plastic pollution is global.

in which case it doesn't explain why America specifically has a lowered life expectancy.

It's almost like life expectancies cannot be explained by a single variable, and the original claim that life expectancies went up thus plastics aren't bad is overly simplistic. Imagine that.

Or not bad enough to overcome other benefits that came out around the same time.

Just because smoking and exercise made you visibly fitter, doesn’t mean you should disregard the consequences of smoking.

“Accumulation” is a keyword you might want to examine.

This argument makes no sense, life expectancy increased a lot after the invention of leaded gasoline†, yet nobody would say it's harmless.

[†]: Works as well for high fructose corn syrup or Fentanyl.

I'm not saying it's harmless, I'm saying that even if it is harmful it's not by enough to justify the panic and sudden lifestyle changes these articles sometimes lead to.

Remember the black spatulas a while back, and how it turned out to be a math error?

Is scooping out your food out of the crappy plastic takeout container into a bowl before microwaving an example of “panic and sudden lifestyle changes”?

Seems like a pretty minor change to me. I’m already going out of my way to not put metal in there anyway…

> I'm not saying it's harmless, I'm saying that even if it is harmful it's not by enough to

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…

Again, I did not say it is harmless.

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.

> but it is clear that any decrease was small enough to be hidden by other factors.

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.

> it could be much worse than those two while still being hidden in longevity statistics

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.

But fertility dropped. May be a contributing factor.