Microplastics found in the placentas of human fetuses | Hacker News Reader

Microplastics found in the placentas of human fetuses

theguardian.com

207 pointssamizdis126 comments

Ok, we get it, microplastics are everywhere and have been for most of our lifetimes.

Can someone explain why this is a bad thing or even IF it is a bad thing?

As far as I can tell, humans have been dying from the same illnesses for the past 100-200-300 years, except we're living longer than ever and dying more from lifestyle illnesses now.

Are we just assuming that eating microplastics is bad? Why not assume it's good? I mean, I haven't seen any evidence for either outcome and the stress and worry about eating them is probably worse for our health than the microplastics themselves.

Edit: I'm not sure why downvoting this comment helps. I'm not saying microplastics are good or bad for human health, just that we get scary articles all the time telling us how they are everywhere, but no one saying anything yet about their harm (or harmlessness).

As a medicinal chemist working on human reproduction I can give a little perspective (though not as much as a bio chemist with knowledge of human reproduction).

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...

I think what's missing is a risk/benefit approach. No doubt concerning evidence it's harmful, but does the harm outway the benefits we've seen from plastics? And there have been benefits. Not just convenience, but the ability to scale packaging as well as better hygiene as a prevention from infectious diseases.

I don't think one is needed. Plastics helped us to get here, now we're ready to look for the next step, or solutions to the current problem. Most of the technologies have had a more positive effect than negative, but that's no reason to ignore the new negative effects.

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.

Ofcourse. Any new technology or product will have negative repercussions. Just a question of the extent. But don't assume newer is necessarily is better. There's also a perverse incentive among litigation enthusiasts just to find harm a product does and then amplify it out of proportion. It's kind of a cottage industry. Asbestos was an incredibly efficient insulation. I don't think anything has matched it. Just not when its mishandled.

Yes, that's the thing, a lot of people died of asbestos, but more people would likely have frozen or burned to death without it.. It's good that we're getting rid of it, because we now have the technology to replace almost all of its uses with sufficiently effective and less dangerous alternatives.

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-

all studies so far points to microplastic being bad. Not poisonous like lead, or deadly like uranium in ceramics.

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?

What do you mean uranium in ceramics? I have a decorative piece of uranium glass behind me - Light it up with a UV light and it glows. Is that considered dangerous now?

If you use it for drinking/eating, especially for acidic (or basic) food, or ingest/inhale its fragments/dust, then quite probably yes.

All potassium-containing foods are radioactive - think bananas and potatoes. All mushrooms, Brazil nuts, and many others are as well. Every time you get on a transcontinental flight, you get irradiated, too.

unfortunately, none of this is convincing enough for a scientific skeptic to say that there is actually a true human health impact from microplastics.

Downvoting never helps.

Anyway you should read the article before you comment. Its described in the article itself that microplastic attracts/collects toxins (heavy metals etc.). We already know that plenty of animals are dying because of plastic as well.

Also general speaking, while we live longer everyday, it still can mean that we live longer but worse due to microplastic and its affects on us. Sleep issues perhaps? Alzheimer perhaps? Depression?

For me personally speaking, this feels very unnatural (and i don't like this word at all normally) and its sickening to know that we produce a product and it is now floating in our bloodstreams and it doesn't need to be there.

We have had millions of years of an selfs sustainable ecosystem and we arrive, produce an enormous amount of plastic and taint our own environment in such an idiotic way. It is now everywhere. We found it in rainwater, on mountain tops etc.

1950 0 tones of plastic production per year vs. 2015 350 Million tons.

It also weirds me out a little bit to see that other people actually don't care or don't see any issues with it.

The article does NOT mention heavy metals anywhere. Maybe implied. But instead it focuses on fear mongering like this gem:

> “It is like having a cyborg baby: no longer composed only of human cells, but a mixture of biological and inorganic entities,” said Antonio Ragusa, director of obstetrics and gynaecology at the San Giovanni Calibita Fatebenefratelli hospital in Rome, and who led the study. “The mothers were shocked.”

It doesn't. Thats what i added as additional information.

From the text, 'toxins' are mentioned: "Further studies need to be performed to assess if the presence of microplastics may trigger immune responses or may lead to the release of toxic contaminants, resulting in harm."

Not sure if this is missleading if i add information i'm aware of.

It's misleading because you're stating something false. You adamantly say the article says one thing when it ain't there.

You: 'Its described in the article itself that microplastic attracts/collects toxins (heavy metals etc.)' Article: 'Further studies need to be performed to assess if the presence of microplastics may trigger immune responses or may lead to the release of toxic contaminants'

Maybe and does is one difference. The absence of the mention of heavy metals which you state is from the article itself is another difference. I like the other stuff you said though.

> For me personally speaking, this feels very unnatural (and i don't like this word at all normally) and its sickening to know that we produce a product and it is now floating in our bloodstreams and it doesn't need to be there.

At this point we're so inundated in plastic trash that it has now entered our bodies. Just let that sink in. There's so much garbage its overflowing into your body. Grotesque.

It is grotesque. But it is the way of things on Earth; it is a massive recycling system that's been churning over the same molecules since the Earth was formed. It's actually extraordinarily rare for an organism to develop that produces any long-lasting waste, as eventually Earth gets around to burning it up, grinding it up, tilling it under, ripping its molecules apart, and otherwise reusing it.

The biosphere has always taken care of our bio waste. No we are experiencing what happens when you dump non recyclables into the recyling!

So it's not at all "the way of things on earth" then.

Oh, Earth will eventually recycle all of the molecules in the plastic, at least that which is exposed to erosive forces and not sedimented down to be preserved for millenia. The question is how much disruption, poisoning, death, and destruction it will cause as it contaminates everything, is sucked up in the massive recycling systems, and filtered through the food web over and over. We're going to find out the hard way and there won't be much we can do but watch. My guess is that it is at least partially responsible for the insect apocalypse and severely disrupts the microbiota of most ecosystems. It's also probably pretty bad for human health.

I have read that a concern with bodily purity is a sign of low openness, and of authoritarian tendencies. Likewise with a tendency to find things "grotesque". It is all connected to a tendency to police the boundary between the self and the other.

It's not that I don't care. However, I object to the huge amount of media/news stories driven by fear which leads to a generalized anxiety and depression about basically everything.

If you read the modern news and take it at all seriously, you will live in a constant fear of doing just about anything. Drinking water? You're drinking scary microplastics. Walking outside? Don't do that, the air pollution is going to give you cancer or other nasty lung diseases. Stay in and have a meal? Don't eat bread/carbs/sugar/red meat/tuna/legumes/anything processed, that will give you heart disease or cancer too, inflammation. etc etc etc.

Basically everything you can put into your body or do with your time has been associated with death or otherwise making you sick and what can the average person do about it? Basically fucking nothing.

The average person can do nothing about microplastics except be afraid of them. Also the average person cannot afford to have a healthy diet or avoid plastic and in addition, their diets are usually so bad that even if microplastics have any deleterious health effect, it's liable to be several orders of magnitude less bad than the effects of junk food or alcohol.

All the above goes to say why I think microplastics are something for scientists to worry about now because I believe the psychological impacts of all this fear are far worse than the thing itself.

Anxiety and depression, undoubtedly made worse by all the fear driven media kill more people every year or otherwise reduce quality of life far more than I believe microplastics do.

I would object to it if i had the feeling we are taking it serious.

We don't.

What the avg person could do? They could actually buy less plastic products; Can write to politician, to companies, as employees talk to collegues and bosses, as a boss make the right decision.

Everyone of us can do so much.

And honestly, if this is the first time its scientific proven that there is microplastic already in a fetus, thats news worthy to me.

I will also not get into your strawman argument; Other toxins, air pollution etc. is bad but doesn't make the microplastic situation any better or worse.

Based on what you write 'its not that i dont' care' why do you take so much effort to take the issue down? Its not that the issue will suddenly have theonly priority of our society just because you also think its wrong.

> huge amount of media/news stories driven by fear which leads to a generalized anxiety and depression about basically everything.

Are we so fragile that we can't handle the general anxiety and fear that stems from such articles. I think we humans have been having these emotions since the beginning of time. They ensured our survival in past and today we have far better techniques to manage these emotions.

The thing is fear and anxiety have been turned into hallmark of negative emotions by our society. As far as I understand those emotions are necessary for our survival. They are the pointers that something isn't working in individuals life and change is needed. Fear and anxiety throws a man into action. I think we should stop putting good/bad labels to human emotions. If they exist, they are serving some purpose. Embracing and facing them will improve the life of individuals and society as whole.

> It's not that I don't care. However, I object to the huge amount of media/news stories driven by fear which leads to a generalized anxiety and depression about basically everything.

So, in summary, you think ignorance is bliss.

> The average person can do nothing about microplastics except be afraid of them. Also the average person cannot afford to have a healthy diet or avoid plastic and in addition, their diets are usually so bad that even if microplastics have any deleterious health effect, it's liable to be several orders of magnitude less bad than the effects of junk food or alcohol.

That's not actually true, or is only true if you inappropriately restrict yourself to uncoordinated individual action, and deny the possibility of collective action. Many people live in democracies, and a pretty well trodden path to change in them is:

1. popular awareness of an issue,

2. pressure put on political bodies to do something,

3. legislation or other political action addressing the issue.

This is not a clockwork process, and often nothing comes of it, but your idealized state of ignorance would prevent it completely.

> Why not assume it's good?

Yes, like lead in gas/paint, radium in lipstick, freon, asbestos... why not assume it's good, it never backfired...

Feel free to read the thousands of studies on the subject (spoiler alert: none are concluding micro-plastics are good for us nor the environment in general)

https://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=microplastic+effect+huma...

> As far as I can tell, humans have been dying from the same illnesses for the past 100-200-300 years

We're talking long term effects of a very recent thing that potentially affects every single one of us. unless you have a crystal ball or studies backing up your skepticism this line of thought isn't very logical. It's like a 22 years old telling you smoking cigarettes is fine because he doesn't have a lung cancer or reduced lung capacity _yet_

I was asking whether it might be good as a provocative question asked in the more philosophical sense. I don't assume they are good, but I do object to simple fear-mongering over yet another new thing to be afraid of in our world, especially when most other things appear to be orders of magnitude more dangerous to us than microplastics, e.g. drinking alcohol, traffic fumes/air pollution.

> I do object to simple fear-mongering over yet another new thing to be afraid of in our world

The world is full of dangers, large and small, and it's normal for adults to discuss and evaluate them. For example, if I've left a cupboard open, I might say "oh hey, watch your head" as you walk into the kitchen -- even though it's less dangerous than a falling anvil. Microplastics are a relatively novel phenomenon, and therefore an active area of scientific research.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the risks in the world, and the consequences of living in a society, maybe that's a sign that you should step away from the news for a while. Read a book, paint a picture, play an instrument, go fishing, or something that will get you and your attention away from computers and phones for an extended period.

> I don't assume they are good, but I do object to simple fear-mongering over yet another new thing to be afraid of in our world

Why are you so hung up on fear-mongering? The title of the article is plain neutral. The article just reports the results of a medical research and quotes some medical professionals. I don't see any fear-mongering here. Isn't it just your interpretation?

The article does have neutral statements on findings "Their effect in the body is unknown but scientists say there is an urgent need to assess the issue, particularly for infants." And the quoted statements from journals are also stating the facts and the general concern because the placenta is crucial for foetal development.

But prior to that in the article are statements like “It is like having a cyborg baby: no longer composed only of human cells, but a mixture of biological and inorganic entities,” and "the scientists said they could carry chemicals that could cause long-term damage or upset the foetus’s developing immune system"

The article presents these attention grabbing statements prior to some of the medical journal entries which is why they are likely accusing the article of "fear-mongering".

Freon is bad for humans? Or did you mean it destroys the ozone?

Freon is toxic.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322165

In the anthropocene era, sometimes we should err on the side of caution. If our human activities can reshape the Earth significantly and such changes can last for very long periods of time, we likely shouldn't proceed gung-ho on those fronts but do so slowly gathering as much knowledge as we can.

We used to pump lead into all sorts of things and throw CFCs into the environment but we realized later these are bad for most us Earth dewllers. At the time, we didn't have abundant evidence of the negative effects and that got us into trouble.

Maybe microplastics are harmless but it may be a wise assumption to assume they are and proceed slowly and cautiously. Turning these things backwards may be incredibly difficult to nearly impossible (e.g. Chernobyl).

Scale is very important for experimenting if something is harmful or not. Its better to experiment with these things at small scale before rolling processes out globally. Some effects are only clear at full scale though, unfortunately.

Ironically, plastics and other hydrocarbons now substitute for many of the uses of lead: pipes, paint, gasoline additives, etc. So to say we should have moved slowly to plastics would probably mean lead would have been around for a lot longer.

I'd happily take the wager that removing lead from the environment around us was the right move. I might lose the bet, but I think it's a reasonable position.

How have plastics substituted for lead in paint and gasoline additives (genuinely curious)?

Pipes I'm quite familiar with (lead/PVC). It's my understanding gas tends to use ethanol as a substitute, not plastics? No clue about paint. It's also my understanding the vast majority of microplastics found are for plastics designed to be small (e.g. micro beads in soaps) and clothing (e.g. polyester material strands) and not from fragments of larger plastic components (e.g. PVC pipes).

Gasoline is not substituted with ethanol. It's a combination of improved engine design and non-lead additives to provide the necessary anti-detonation properties.

I meant ethanol as one of the substitutes for lead (previously a common additive) in gasoline which was often used before to better control compression and combustion. Are microplastics or plastics used to better control combusion engines now?

I meant ethanol was not substituted for lead AFAIK - the lead was replaced with MTBE in practice, and then the story of ethanol blending has more to do with CO2 emissions reduction (or in the case of Australia, a conservative prime minister somehow getting away with a levy on milk to bail out his mate's ethanol plant and mandating 10% blending in fuel at the pumps).

Ethanol was the original anti knock agent, but afaik was actually replaced by tetraethyl lead originally.

Interesting, thanks.

That's kind of a false dichotomy though, isn't it?

Huh? i assumed we went from lead to copper and not straight to plastic

Copper is toxic, too. Don't overeat liver!

Then we'd just complain about an overabundance of minerals in our body.

Seeing that humans have a far higher tolerance for copper compared to other animals we can assume that this was indeed at some point in our history a major problem.

In germany we have a ton of copper pipes and there are no copper minerals going into the water as soon as the oxidatinlayer is there.

Its still standard having copper pipes here; we use plastic after the water arrives at the room.

> Why not assume it's good?

Yeah, let's just assume that everything is good by default.

"Before It Was Dangerous, Lead Was The Miracle Metal That We Loved" https://www.npr.org/2016/04/06/473268312/before-it-was-dange...

We even x-rayed feet to see if shoes fit. The shoe industry of course rejected health concerns:

"Representatives of the shoe retail industry denied claims of potential harm in newspaper articles and opinion pieces. They argued that the devices' use prevented harm to customers' feet that otherwise would have resulted from poorly-fitted shoes.", from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope

TBH if the rays only hit the feet (which wasn't the case with this machine, it was far from "tight" and radiation escaped in all directions), total health concern would be smaller.

Hands and feet can tolerate bigger radiation doses than our internal organs. Muscle and bone is not that sensitive, most damage will be on skin.

https://www.env.go.jp/en/chemi/rhm/basic-info/1st/03-02-07.h...

Yeah worst case just cut them off.

In any case shoe salesmen are actually in the business of telling customers their shoe fits even when it doesn't.

A relative who was a shoe salesman in the forties told me if the shoe was too small, tell them it'll fit in the morning because feet swell in the afternoon. If the shoe was too big say it had to have a distance between the toe and the end of the shoe of about one finger width.

In reality you should actually try on shoes until one actually fits comfortably.

I highly doubt this machine was actually used for finding better-fitting shoes as opposed to being a magical contraption used to give authority to the shoe salesman so he could sell more, more expensive shoes faster and with less work.

Metastasized melanoma will still kill you just as dead.

Man, that's a brilliant idea! So sad it's dangerous...!

I think you raise a fair point here regarding the unproven harm/benefit. The same default to "it must be bad" happened with mobile phone radiation. If people are going to be in business of unsubstantiated claims then that one always struck me as rich: you could just as easily imagine a scenario where the extra heat improves blood flow thus enhancing cognitive ability! (to be clear I'm not seriously suggesting this) It's reasonable to discuss this with an open mind even if the vast majority of human environmental impact have been negative for life (eg pesticides, lead, CFCs etc)

There's a difference between no known mechanism (and the effect being completely swamped by the environment) versus actually having a contaminant persist in the body, which historically is usually the precursor of larger effects.

I.e. asbestos is harmless, and would be harmless if didn't remain in the lungs, and we just breathed it back out.

Hell, you can handle most radioactive isotopes quite safely provided they don't enter the body in a persistent way.

Thank you for saying this, I have had the same concerns and been afraid to voice them. It surely depends on the plastic type for sure. The reason we used polypropylene beakers in our lab is because it is one of the most benign and unreactive substances on earth. Other plastics may not be as benign as that but on the whole that is one of the great things about plastic and why it builds up in oceans etc. Nothing can degrade it so the bacteria in your gut are probably just meh about it. I can’t think of a way it could cause a problem to have little bits of it in your digestive system along with all the other substances we eat.

Plasticizers that leach out from the micro plastics maybe, but I have to think that there are so many things we should be more concerned about in our food. The dose of plasticizer from the macro plastics we store and transport all our food in seems like it would be a much bigger issue. BPA and other xenoestrogens should have leached out of micro plastics long before they get micro right?

For the same reason we spent a year testing COVID vaccines. You don't want to put something of unknown effect into your body. You especially don't want to put something unknown into everyone's body all at once. It's not "good vs. bad" it's "safe vs. not safe". It's also about emergent properties that aren't apparent until you've hit a certain scale.

Fish with plastic heavy diets have more tumors and liver problems. It would be pretty shocking if there wasn't an inflection point at which we see some heavy consequences for humans as well in terms of plastic concentration. Maybe we won't reach that level practically for a long time, maybe we will. I lean towards thinking we won't see too drastic of a consequence in the next 200 years (not backed up by anything) but I'd still say it's definitively a problem.

Sperm count. It has been dropping precipitously over the handful of decades. Many men are already infertile and if the sperm count continues to fall at the rate it has been, most will be infertile before this century is done.

There is reason to believe that plastics may be a contributor to this phenomenon: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/24/toxic-americ.... https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero

Our bodies did not evolve around microplastics, so we're allowed to be biased against microplastics. So, waiting for some studies that microplastics are harmless (p-values < 1e10-5 only, please).

Obviously if on average everything gets better you still don't ignore potentially long term harmful effects. It's clear that microplastics have been infiltrating our systems dormantly since microplastics have been around and so its probably a good idea to find out why so that we dont construct a world in which we are entirely dependent on them if they do turn out to have a significantly bad long term effect. Oh wait, that's already the world we live in.

I gave you an upvote because you’re asking a reasonable question. One answer is that snippets of organic compounds are often carcinogenic and/or bioactive, so they’re scarier than (say) metal filings that just dissolve in short order (try a magnet on “iron fortified” cereal! Turns out iron’s fairly bioavailabile when combined with vitamin C.)

It’s bad because it will only increase from here. Let me know if you want to volunteer to be on a microplastic heavy diet so we can be sure it’s not bad.

In a nutshell it’s endocrine description and certain plastics acting as estrogen mimics. You’re getting downvoted because this comment is eerily similar is length, structure and content to the top comment on other HN stories about micro plastics.

Most things are bad by default.

The US in particular has taken the pursuit of convenience to extremes and the abuse of plastics is one of the clearest examples of that. Most packaging should be glass, paper, or metal. Fewer things should be so disposable.

One thing I wish we could find a solution to is our oil subsidy problem. I get that the US gov wants to subsidize oil for the sake of national security but those subsidies have all sorts of crazy unintended consequences. One of those consequences was that oil found a way to make itself the primary component of packaging.

Studies have shown that high levels of micro plastics can cause neurotoxicity in fish [1] which I'm surprised no one else is mentioning. It seems that nano plastics might even be more concerning seeing that they can pass the blood brain barrier [2].

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166445X1.... [2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170925104730.h...

The amount of plastic in use today, I feel, is unreasonable. It's so carelessly and thoughtlessly used in everything. The grocery store -- what happened to bringing your own containers, baskets, and bags? Every entertainment, convenience, appliance, and device we use: plastic. Want to buy a birthday card? Chances are it will come wrapped in plastic. We even wrap the plastic in plastic.

I can't imagine a world where we don't depend on oil and plastics because we've come to a point where nobody can imagine living in a world where things aren't build to be disposable, convenient, and last practically forever.

This article just continues the trend. The plastics don't simply disappear. Eventually we'll just be drowning in the stuff. It already inhibits plant growth in soils and plastic is in almost all the soil around the world. I won't be surprised if it also inhibits human growth.

Nanoplastics alter intestinal microbiome and threaten human health

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/uadb-nai1221...

Should just outright ban use of plastics, and have the companies producing these toxic products cleanup the oceans and drinkable water tables. The O&G industry has literally made billions of dollars for destroying the planet we share.

I think you'd find that medical technology (as an example) would be severely hindered by banning all plastics.

We should absolutely seek to reduce the impacts plastics have on the planet and our bodies, but outright bans are not the solution unless we want to regress technologically.

These issues require nuance, not pronouncements.

Tough luck for grandpa's pacemaker, I guess.

trillions

How do you even reduce it without completely removing plastic from everyday use. Even a long term reusable thing will shade plastic from what it seems like. What happens with other materials that we use like metal, wood, glass, concrete do they shave off particles too or not?

Everything shaves off particles in varying amounts. The question is whether those particles decay on their own, make their way into our food supplies, and how toxic are they.

I don't know the quantitative answers to any of these. But I would hazard that wood decays fast; and glass and concrete particles are inert, very similar to soil and not very harmful in the amounts they make into our food supplies.

Plastics on the other hand, don't decay, float in water (so easier to spread) and empirically make it into our food supplies. The fear is that they are carcinogenic and cause unwanted hormonal changes.

Let's start by banning single-use plastics.

I know it sounds crazy, but tupperware is a thing. We had ways to distribute, dairy, meat, and all types of food before plastic. But even if we do make use of plastic in the future, we need to rethink how distribution happens instead of just slapping everything in its own plastic bag/box for its entire lifetime. It is entirely thinkable that you bring your own tupperware to the grocery store and fill it up, then bring it home. I've been doing this for years with takeout. People are just lazy and can't plan ahead.

I agree on single use plastic, but I think paper/cellulose could be used to a much larger extent. People will never adapt to bringing their own containers for everything, but replacing single use plastic with single use (lightly treated) paper would go a long way and seems reasonable.

It's all about the waste processing stream, I think. The problem is, nobody treats plastic waste as hazardous.

It's all about dust to dust product design. What is made of what is not clearly marked, not able to be collected as the necessary waste streams to enable proper disposal and recycling.

The results from California's prop 65 cancer labels should be kept in mind when trying to label broad classes of objects as hazardous. That is to say, it will be ignored.

Well said, although labeling it as 'hazardous' can be tricky since we don't really understand some of the long-term effects yet.

Just remove it completely. We somehow survived without it 60 years ago.

Even this oversimplification is wrong. Back then we had a bit over a third of the current world population and a much worse standard of living across the globe.

Progress is about making good tradeoffs, not about picking perfect solutions. Otherwise your logic could get rid of any innovation by ignoring its benefits and saying "it has some problems so let's get rid of it altogether, we somehow survived without it in the past".

Yes, the human species has survived with far fewer luxuries than we now enjoy. The species also survived before computers and the internet, and before air travel and before automobiles.

These things (including plastic) all have widespread costs and widespread benefits. Let's try to find ways to reduce the costs without entirely ignoring and losing the benefits?

Why not this: try to find ways to reduce the costs without losing any of the benefits. If a different (better) technology does not provide all the benefits, few people might be interested in using it. Forcing technologies like these by law is not good. I now have a few hundred plastic straws because I don’t like the paper straws and their deterioration while drinking forced by the eu.

>We somehow survived without it 60 years ago.

60 years ago we were putting way dumber contaminants in our bodies.

Yeah and 60 years ago we didn't have the robust food supply chain we have now. Plastic is a cheap way to package, transport, and store foods. Without it your options are... glass, metal, wood, ceramic, etc. So "get rid of all plastic" means "jack up the price of all food". This would put us in another situation where the cure is worse than the ill. X people die every year due to microplastics, but abolishing all plastic will probably push hundreds of millions into poverty.

The device you posted this on has a plastic shell, plastic coated silicon chips, a plastic PCB, uses wiring covered in plastic.

The paint on your walls is plastic, as are your sewer pipes, probably water pipes, the insulation in your walls, the glue such makes up structural members of your house...

I imagine there’s sand/dust in most tissues to some degree.

This community has resources to learn about environmentally friendly alternatives to everyday products. e.g.: less packaging/no packaging.

http://reddit.com/r/zerowaste

Make sure to check out their wiki too.

It's now tough to buy affordable cotton underwear and t-shirts. Acrylic fibers are literally everywhere in our house dust, and end up in our lungs. They also end up in oceans from the washers. So, I think one easy step is to remove plastics from our clothing! Always check the fibers of your clothing and go for the real thing. Wool, linen, and cotton - I try not to buy any garment made of something else. I'm not really sure about bamboo fibers and how they are made, so I pick the traditional fabrics, which can wrong you!

I had a crazy thought while reading the comments here.

The strength of plastic is also its weakness. They are one and the same. People talk a lot about replacing/removing plastic use. What if instead of trying to get rid of its weakness, thus removing its benefit, we make it even stronger. More durable, less shed, more like metal. Thus less micropastics.

Short term, this seems like a win without apparent downside. Long term, technology plus policy will eventually solve the recycling problem.

Although I don't have anything technical to back it up. Just pointing out the direction of thinking.

This is actually not a bad idea at all. Plastic at macroscopic scales is easier to clean out of water ways (since you can see it) and if we could design materials with a lower bound on granulation they'd just settle out as sediment rather then being able to enter organisms.

It's not really clear how you'd do that though.

Unfortunately policy tends to be corrupted by lobbyists. One thing I can assure you is that profiteers are gonna keep profiteering. If your plan in any way shape or form relies on people volunteering reducing their income, profits, or revenues, fat chance.

Sure, agreed. But we need to do something. I'm arguing what that something should be. How we achieve that, or can it even be done is a different story.

I read the article but it's unclear if the type of stuff that invades the body, especially the placenta are nano-plastics? I mean what type of products would we need to stop using if we wanted to actually take this issue, I find it hard to believe that "all" plastic" use would be bad by default, I'm sure some uses must be much worse than others.

It does mention in the article that this plastic is likely from cosmetics, which I cannot believe there are plastic in cosmetics, wow.

Thinking thing from things like tyre dust, cosmetics etc.

I mean if you manage to recycle or burn the plastic I'm assuming you don't get many nanoparticles into the environment. But if plastic ends up in rivers and oceans it's going to slowly fall apart and release particles. Tires always release particles when used.

The problem is how do you replace these? And how many that could be recycled or burned aren't? A lot of packaging plastic doesn't end up in the right place, so the only way to get a significant reduction here is to get rid of any non-essential use. And we should start where there is the most plastic used. Both of these together point to single use plastics in food packaging.

You don't need to package vegetables and fruit in plastic. Recycled paper bags do just fine.

It's an easy reduction.

We should be packaging as much as we can in reusable glass container.

Why is this headline different from the original, and with ~a mis~ an American spelling of a word The Guardian (UK) wouldn't, and indeed didn't in the subheading?

I'd like to know why the title was changed too...

This title is wonky, shouldn't it be "the placentas of pregnant women"? Fetuses by definition cannot have placentas but are in placentas.

You might be confusing the placenta with the amniotic sac. The placenta is ultimately the part of the embryo that embeds itself in the uterus and triggers the mother's pregnancy. It connects to the fetus via the umbilical cord.

In practice people don't think of them belonging to the fetus though, and the title "Microplastics found in human placentas" would have been clearer.

Shouldn't we have found microplastics in large land animals (e.g. meat) long before, and shouldn't that have raised the necessary questions?

Or is this microplastics from cosmetics?

The method to find microplastics has only been commonly known for the last ~2 years.

Before that these plastics went unnoticed.

We do.

We raised the necessary questions.

This is not the first news, this is just an additional water droplet on the full barrel.

There were articles about microplastic in the rain, on mountains, dessert and on fields; Water supply and in waste water.

> All the particles analysed were plastics that had been dyed blue, red, orange or pink and may have originally come from packaging, paints or cosmetics and personal care products.

Lots of things had plastic micro-beads until recently, I believe (laundry detergents, exfoliating soaps/shampoos). It’s more that we’ve just started thinking of this as a bad thing and started looking for it, and now we’re finding it.

Plastics have been in common use for well over a century. So where are the people made ill from microplastics, and what are they suffering from?

You want particles in the human body? I can find you particles. The question of disease significance requires much more than finding particles. Telling mothers they have given birth to god damn cyborg babies because you found particles of plastic in the placenta is either hopelessly naive, or ruthlessly exploitative of people’s fundamental fears on the basis of no evidence.

I wonder, how much of that I get everytime I brush my teeth.

In my first house, I inherited a push broom the previous owner left in the shed.

I was well on a road to organic gardening by that point, and one day while sweeping, I had picked up the broom and noticed that the bristles were abraded. The plastic bristles. Well fuck. There's only one place all that plastic is going and that's into my yard. So I popped off the head and dumped it in the trash (the handle had not committed any crimes, and they are reusable, which can save a bunch of space). There are several natural fibers that are about as tough as plastic, but they're exotic so I couldn't tell you how long the carbon footprint is, but at least I have less plastic in my yard.

The dryer vent, however, is an unsolved problem.

We are the fish now.

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