Chemicals in Plastic Waste Are Killing Us | Hacker News Reader

Chemicals in Plastic Waste Are Killing Us

smosa.com

68 pointsbuddhacobbler18 comments

Low effort article, possibly even just blogspam. Says plastic waste contains a diverse list of endocrine disrupting chemicals. Doesn't say how much of each or which ones have been found to be medically significant. No evidence presented that the chemicals are actually making their way into our bodies in clinically significant quantities.

They should have included links to the study and to the conference that they referred to.

> Doesn't say how much of each or which ones have been found to be medically significant.

Plastic waste is probably not uniform enough to make those measurements and have them be correct for other collections of platsic waste.

> No evidence presented that the chemicals are actually making their way into our bodies in clinically significant quantities.

Its probably not wise to wait until the water supply is contaminated with medically significant amounts of endocrine disruptors to tell people there’s a problem.

To be clear. Blogspam can reference true facts and events and still be blogspam. I think something should be done about plastic waste and contamination. But I don't want to reward the entity that created this article with clicks.

It's kinda ironic how a serious topic like environmental pollution is itself beset by information pollution.

Search engines [positively] judge content by how poorly it links to other materials. The rest is obvious.

It's funny back in 2000 PageRank was all the rage and it worked by figuring out some kind of eigenvalue based on how well pages linked to each other...

Maybe that's still true so long as other people link to you but you don't link to anyone else...

It tries to be one of my favorite topics but its rather sad. There are to many entities with a vested interest in preserving their tenured position.

I could write a fantastic article about this topic but why bother exactly?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics

If you go here and examine the article extremely carefully (unrealistically carefully) you would find in the section "Persistent organic pollutants" a link to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor

Which links to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenoestrogen

And this is where the gay frogs came from. Our humble water filter salesman was actually right.

Does you filter allow to filter that stuff out, tested and all? What is this filter made of - food grade steel, aluminum, or have some plastic parts/tubing too?

Moreover, it's hard to take articles like this at face value when a lot of other statistics regarding quality of life, such as infant mortality and life expectancy, have been constantly improving for at least a century.

By that mode of thinking, there can’t be any problems in the world, because things are improving by most metrics.

No, but it does suggest a step back could be acceptable if it is needed for five steps forward. Progress on the net.

Why can't all 5 steps be forward or even just 4 steps only forward instead.

this doesn't make sense logically. If there were 5000 problems, and 4000 of them got solved in the last decade, that would mean everything is demonstrably getting better, yet still leave 1000 problems to be solved.

Just because everything isn't perfect, doesn't mean it's not better than it was, and improving.

We are in agreement; I was saying that the fact 4000 of them got solved does not mean that the remaining 1000 don't matter or aren't worth thinking or talking about, or aren't serious problems.

Some information from the original source:

https://www.endocrine.org/topics/edc

their research is here: https://academic.oup.com/edrv/article/36/6/E1/2354691

I just want to point out that there are no sources in this article.

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