Comment by Knufen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Knufen | Hacker News Reader

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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...

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.

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