this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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Nobody has been able, to my knowledge, to explain how microplastics are bad. That said, they certainly aren't beneficial. They are everywhere, and if they're bad for plants and animals, yes it's going to be the next big thing. We could stop making and using plastics today (obviously impossible) and the amount already in the environment would still be devastating if we learn they have serious consequences.
Fun fact- in the US, 1.8 million tons of microplastics are estimated to come from vehicle tire wear each year. Perhaps as much as 10% of the total. Yeah so tires aren't made from rubber anymore, and haven't been for a long time. It surprised me too.
We stopped making lead paint, lead water pipes, and putting lead in gasoline. That's child's play compared to trying to phase out petrochemical derived plastics.
Our only hope is that the effects of microplastics aren't too serious.
The book A Poison Like No Other convincingly explains why microplastics are bad, and acknowledges that we should be doing more to understand the problem. I'd recommend reading it, if you haven't already: https://islandpress.org/books/poison-no-other
I’ve only seen that if a fish eats massive amounts of plastic chunks, it’s going to end badly. I’ve also seen lots of evidence, that tiny plastic particles can be found literally everywhere. You could name any place, look at it under a microscope, and find microplastics in there.
The long term effect of microplastics is still very unclear to me. If it were as deadly as mercury or lead, we should have noticed something already, but we haven’t, so I guess we can rule that out. All the other kinds of effects are still on the table though.
The problem is that you can't rule anything out. Microplastics are always accumulating in your body and each generation has more than the previous. We pass our plastic onto the newborns. Newborns whose parents had less microplastics in them when they were born. No one can really tell you the effect of this because we are living in it. There is no control sample for comparison. We can make wild guesses and have conspiracy theories that might end up true.
People are having more trouble conceiving children and look to IVF. Could microplastics somehow hinder the reproductive process?
More people are being diagnosed with mental health problems. Are microplastics causing problems with our mental development?
Modern humans absorb less nutrients from their diet. Is it just because our food has less nutrients than it used to, or because we can't absorb as efficiently with microplastics?
I mean no one can point to a source and no one will be able to because plastics are everywhere and we can't compare humans with to humans without. Clearly microplastics do something. At the very least they are taking up space that could be used by a more healthy chemical, nutrient, or other bodily process. The microplastics would be the roadblocks slowing signals and making traffic worse.
I guess you could run lab experiments to see if mice in a plastic free environment live longer and happier than ones chewing plastic things all day long. At least, that should reveal any acute symptoms. Who knows what happens after decades of exposure. Studying those types of questions is very difficult, but in recent years there have been more and more studies indicating potential carcinogenic effects in various chemicals.
As far as I now, humans have been exposed to wood particles for thousands of years, and they could have similar effects as far as the physical particles are concerned. Obviously they leach off very different compounds, so that part of the net effect won’t be comparable at all. If the presence of tiny particles in the bloodsream or elsewhere in the body is harmful, we would probably already know about it. What if the effect could also be so subtle, that you won’t notice anything out of the ordinary in a society where people rarely live past their 40s.