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Comment by saberience | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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...

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

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-

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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 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".

> 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

> 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

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

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...

Metastasized melanoma will still kill you just as dead.

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.

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.

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