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Comment by stef25 | Hacker News Reader

There's microplastics which are now absolutely everywhere. Apparently we consume a credit card's worth of plastic per month. Nobody should feel ok about consuming a drink that's got a ground up credit card in it, yet that's what we're doing.

In Asia especially it's crazy how plastic is often used - you go to a 7/11 to buy a cold drink, they put it in TWO flimsy plastic bags which you throw in the first trash can you come across. So the thing has a useful lifetime of under a minute. They also give you a plastic straw, wrapped in plastic which goes in the trash a few minutes later.

All that stuff is produced in a dirty process and will linger in the environment for way too long.

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> There's microplastics which are now absolutely everywhere. Apparently we consume a credit card's worth of plastic per month. Nobody should feel ok about consuming a drink that's got a ground up credit card in it, yet that's what we're doing.

And what's the effect? We've been doing this for decades?

I think you severely underestimate not only how long effects can take to show, but how long and complicated it can be to fund good long term scientific studies.

There's this belief that if something has an effect, it'll just show up magically on the news after the minimum amount of time, without taking into account all the hurdles people have to go through to research. Even if you didn't have powerful companies with interests against the research being published, it would be complicated.

I think the point is that we don’t see the major spikes that the ubiquitousness of plastics combined with the alarm levels raised by headlines like this would theoretically produce.

If plastics are indeed poisoning us, the hazard ratio seems to be small enough that it would require significant research to quantify.

Compare to, say, the lung cancer skyrocket that happened in the 70s-90s from the 30-year smoking habits developed in the 40s-60s.

With plastics, either the lag time for effects is really long, the effects themselves are so spread out that any meaningful bump for a single one is hard to identify, or we are reducing other causes of the same issues in lock step.

There could be observable effects that haven't been widely attributed to microplastics yet. Eg. the decrease in male testosterone over the last few decades.

If it takes that long we'll all be dead before the effects show up.

Microdosing can also result in slow development of symptoms. Is everyone fat because of sedentary lifestyles? Endocrine disruption? Maybe plastic ingestion makes people lazy. We don’t know because almost no one has asked. And now you can’t even create a control group to study it.

Replace plastic with lead and reread. Lead was used for centuries before the risks were fully understood.

And mercury.

Lead was used for millenia. Romans drank from lead goblets. It sweetened the wine.

And we didn’t know the full story of lead until 20 years after it was banned from gasoline, and the violent crime rates started to drop.

But we haven't used plastic for millennia, and sure while it gets everywhere, some environments are far higher in microplastics than others, so doing comparisons should be easy

When I was in Tokyo, 25 years ago, I got to the point where I’d trick the convenience store cashiers into not putting a single can of soda into a plastic bag. Which they would do, every single time. So I’d hand them my money, then pick up the beverage while they were busy with the till.

It was a public debate issue at the time, trying to solve trash problems. I don’t know where they are at with the problem now.

We're not just ingesting it, we're also breathing it in, in form of dust.

Correction: it's actually a credit card per week, not per month

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