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Comment by Justsignedup | Hacker News Reader

The problem is plastic particles getting into food. And that comes from things like heating up in plastic, storing things in plastic. Non single use plastics are a major problem.

That's the thing. Plastic is modern lead. It's easily moldable, but causes subtle health problems.

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Citation needed.

These comments read like Reddit/TikTok. Lots of frantic fearful hand waving, not a lot of evidence presented.

I don't understand this perspective, the need to wait for mountains of published evidence that something is "bad", or "bad enough" to do something about it. Plastic is toxic, we all know this. It's everywhere, it's in the food and in the water. In reality it's the "Citation needed" reflex that's the reddit-tier reaction to stuff like this, because it pretends that humans can't or shouldn't make decisions unless we all sit around in a peer-review committee to review the "data". Perhaps in some contexts that perspective makes sense, but again, in this one, we all know plastic is bad (for us and the environment).

> Plastic is toxic, we all know this.

There are thousands of plastics, and a blanket statement like this is simply false. We should be working to figure out which plastics are toxic, and why. You're essentially looking at lead and coming to the conclusion that "Metal is toxic, we all know this."

That’s not a great comparison.

If it was comparable to lead in terms of identifying toxicity, we wouldn’t be having this debate.

So actually plastic is worse than lead in that it’s more insidious, some want to slowly kill things but it’s nearly impossible to tell which. If only it were like lead and upfront about it.

So no, they are not saying “metal is toxic”. That is extending the analogy to another topic: identification

I don't understand the perspective of criticizing a request for a citation? This is exactly how misinformation spreads.

The parent hand-waved away the substantial differences between various plastics and made bold blanket statements on plastics as a whole that may or may not be true.

There's plenty of material out there to cite with and providing a cite that supported your understanding would help the discussion. Here's a random one:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c01103

Heating up plastics is thought to release microplastics but I've not seen much solid research on it either.

According to the European Parliament, ~63% of microplastics come from laundering synthetic clothes and car tires [1].

1. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/201...

A recent study found that microwaving food in plastic packaging releases a lot of microplastic into the food:

https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/nebraska-study-...

> Non single use plastics are a major problem.

And they're everywhere. I bought a sweater a couple of years ago. It's made from recycled PET bottles. It felt like a nice thing a couple of years ago. Now I realize that every time I wash it I'm releasing micro plastics into the sewer that might not get filtered out.

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