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Comment by myth_drannon | Hacker News Reader

We threw away all our glass containers because they constantly chip. I'm more afraid of ingesting piece of sharp glass than nanoplastics. I don't know why that keeps happenning, I guess dishwasher's high heat damages the glass or they keep bumping into each other.

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That's weird, I pretty much exclusively use glass food storage and it's never chipped. And I just got some random ones off Amazon, not like they're some super high quality or anything

It may be how you load, I don't think that's a common issue. Microscopic bits of glass are basically sand though so I wouldn't worry unless there's a lot or it's getting airborne.

I've given up on teaching my partner how to load a dishwasher. She insists you can fit more into a load. We also have a bunch of chipped plates and mugs. Not on my watch of course.

You would poop the glass though

Yeah, generally speaking unless it's a very large shard and cuts your esophagus, once it reaches your stomach, acids will knock the edges off and it'll pass without issue.

Gastric acid is basically hydrochloric acid, and rather less concentrated than the standard laboratory bench HCl, which stands peaceably for years in glass flasks. I would be wary of assuming that chemical attack will quickly blunt glass shards.

I really doubt stomach acid would do anything to glass. Strong acids are regularly stored in glass.

HCl will do nothing to glass. It's strong bases that will dissolve glass (a little), and your digestive system doesn't have any.

well the pieces are about 5mm. For sure it will cut mouth, throat or something else.

In some cases, probably rare ones, it can lead to perforation of the intestine

No, I think eating glass leads to internal bleeding and could be very bad for you.

I remember being really scared about it and then I vaguely remember some doctor saying most stuff will go through stomach just fine, and that included glass.

Memory is fuzzy and I'm definitely not a doctor, so please double check.

I'm assuming if you are eating glass, it's a small enough piece that you won't notice, it can be big, you'll notice in your mouth.

Get the expensive pyrex glass.

Pyrex is the one that chips.

weird. I never had a problem with pyrex. Must be something to do with the environment the glass in your specific case is exposed to.

Pyrex is just tempered glass now. You have to trawl yard sales and antique shops to find the borosylicate version.

There's actually two variants, confusingly differentiated via capitalization.

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

> The pyrex (all lowercase) trademark is now used for kitchenware sold in the United States, South America, and Asia. In Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, a variation of the PYREX (all uppercase) trademark is licensed by International Cookware for bakeware that has been made of numerous materials including borosilicate and soda-lime glass, stoneware, metal, plus vitroceramic cookware.

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