Study Finds Microplastics in Nearly 90% of Proteins Sampled
oceanconservancy.org
oceanconservancy.org
There are no established health effects of microplastics. There are magnitudes worse health problems in e.g. both under and overnutrition that cause a lot less panic and fuss.
https://www.undp.org/kosovo/blog/microplastics-human-health-...
It'd be more true to say, "There are no established significant health effects of microplastics on humans." FWIW, the article you linked to doesn't say "no effects", but "limited evidence for significant adverse health impacts".
This seems concerning: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9885170/
You might call it panic to minimize it, and you'd be right to do so if we here were in charge of nutrition for a population; but I'm guessing most of us are in charge of our own nutrition and maybe a family's, so the information to deal with that is pretty valuable.
Micro plastics is like CO2. Spread out everywhere, can't be sequestered or reversed.
Rather than saying it's not a problem now — it's worth saying what's the threshold beyond which health complications begin (that number can't be infinity), and based on current growth levels how far we're off from it. If that's like at current rate of growth we still have 5000 years, then yeah I would agree with you and ignore the news. But just saying retrogressively that there is no conclusive evidence based on what we're eating so far – unfortunately sounds only politically correct, without considering the spirit of doing science (exploring the horizons / where the limits are).
An equally true statement is that there is no established safe concentration of microplastics in tissue.
(* the article seems to be using the term "protein" in the culinary sense, not the molecular sense).
[1] https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/08/30/microplastics-could...
[2] https://www.uri.edu/news/2023/08/microplastics-infiltrate-al...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38917410
(edit: yes, yes, no surprise it's in the bottled water, maybe we shouldn't be selling bottled water if it's full of microplastics? Less bottled water, more water dispensers everywhere)
The bottled water that comes in plastic bottles? Not that surprising?
https://www.tvo.org/article/think-bagged-milk-is-weird-think...
When I was a kid, many had their lunch sandwiches in a re-used milk bag too. And you can use the empty bags to store other stuff in the fridge.
Are you going to take a big milk jug, or a cardboard milk container, and use it like a sandwich bag? It's so useful.
It's the perfect way to get milk. PERFECT.
And now.. this.
Notably, across all samples, nearly half (44%) of the identified microplastics were fibers, which is consistent with other studies suggesting that fibers are the most prevalent form of microplastic in the environment.
Are 4 fibers of 50 micron length 4 times more dangerous than one 200 micron long fiber? There's no discussion of it in the article, but reporting microplastics by number of countable particles carries that implication.
Is there any way to remove microplastics from a person/animal once already ingested?
What technology if any is being worked on to help alleviate this?
> The study found evidence that food processing is a likely source of microplastic contamination, as highly processed protein products (like fish sticks, chicken nuggets, tofu, and plant-based burgers, among others) contained significantly more microplastics per gram than minimally processed products (items like packaged wild Alaska pollock, raw chicken breast, and others).
Note the tofu and plant-based burgers.
The press release does a disservice to the study by referring to the highly processed group as a whole and not excluding tofu. For reference, the breaded shrimp and fish sticks were measured to have 1.2 and 0.26 particles per gram.
Table 3.7 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026974912...
Regardless if a processed food like tofu has minimal plastic concentration, I would assume minimally processed whole plant food like beans and nuts would also have low microplastic exposure. The study found little total plastic from packaging, their evidence pointed towards the processing.
I would guess plants have more microplastics as they just pull things out of the soil and store them (why many plants have a ton of heavy metals). Animals at least have some systems for filtering and processing unwanted items.
I've been trying to make small moves away from car infrastructure in my town and the response is, well, less than positive.
We already tacitly accept that cars are one of the biggest causes of death. Reducing car infrastructure to reduce microplastics, where we don't even really know the harm, seems far far more challenging.
However there's also a regressive aspect that refuses to make any accommodations for anything except cars, and these people have veto power over non-car infrastructure. There is no built-in veto power for new car infrastructure, and in fact existing law requires car infrastructure as a base for any sort of building, for example parking minimums.
Most of the city was built 1960-1980, so based on car designs. But it's small enough that small amounts of change would eliminate car dependence.
[1] https://www.ustires.org/whats-tire-0
Tires generate more particles of pollution than exhaust.[2] EVs are good. But eliminating car exhaust apparently isn't the big car pollution problem.
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...
Looks like most of the rubber used these days is synthetic[1], usually made of styrene and butadiene which could easily degrade into base monomers or at least shorter chains.
Not a realistic solution. The vast majority of people will take the microplastics over not driving.
If we were to even legalize non-car options, we might discover what the market actually wants. And the necessity of those laws kind of shows that the non-car option must be legally suppressed to prevent its true market preference from being revealed.
To everyone who thinks that the "vast majority" of people prefer driving, I say: show the confidence of your convictions and make it legal to build other options.
What do you mean by that? Which non-car options are outlawed?
Water pollution from brake and tire dust, (and oil drippings,) is well proven. If you build infrastructure to handle runoff from roads, you need to mitigate pollution in that runoff too.
> Most microplastic in water comes from washing machines. Synthetic fibers from clothes.
I know less about that but from what I've skimmed it appears to be true too.
> Seventy-eight percent of ocean microplastics are synthetic tire rubber, according to one estimate.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/tire-pollution-toxic-chemical...
> About 34% of the emitted coarse TWPs (tire wear particles) and 30% of the emitted coarse BWPs (brake wear particles) (100 kt yr−1 and 40 kt yr−1 respectively) were deposited in the World Ocean. These amounts are of similar magnitude as the total estimated direct and riverine transport of TWPs and fibres to the ocean (64 kt yr−1).
And also synthetic clothes. According to the study they found more plastic fibres than plastic particles in many samples.
These get released when you launder your clothes, ending up in the drain water and ultimately the ocean.
Solution? Buy clothes with natural fibres (cotton, wool, etc) instead of plastics. And wash your clothes in a modern washing machine with a microfibre filter on its drain outlet.
That doesn't solve the whole problem because the microfibres eventually need disposal.
Depending on your location, they’ll either get destroyed by incineration or put in landfill where they’ll do less harm and hopefully break down after a few centuries.
Of course, if you clean the filter by flushing the sludge down the sink then you didn’t solve anything.
Obviously these are geography-relative concerns. But they aren't rare.
- You eat a credit card sized amount of plastic every week: https://nautil.us/you-eat-a-credits-card-worth-of-plastic-ev... - 93% of bottled water has plastic in it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16793888 - Plastic containers, even "safe" ones, release plastic into food: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36532812 - Car tires are depositing plastic everywhere, including oceans: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37726539
It goes on and on. There are studies showing it gets into the placenta, harms animals, affects behavior, stays in your system forever, bioaccumulates all the way up the food chain and makes its way into every organ, and so on. This is all within the last few years. It seems like bottled water is a vector for this stuff very similar to lead pipes, and tires are a vector similar to leaded gasoline, and that the evidence is basically all there and all that is needed is a big epidemiological "smoking gun" study to put it all together.
Of course not every single thing one could possibly call "plastic" need be equally unsafe. Probably some better plastic will be devised which is safer for use in tires and etc. Still, I think there will be a society-wide push against so-called "plastic", in general. People will probably push to replace everything made of plastic with something else: replacing saran wrap with parchment paper, Tupperware with glass, etc.
I'm not super interested in defending this rigorously as it's really just a hunch, but I'm curious if this is what happens.
I don't.
The effects of lead or mercury poisoning are fast-acting and obvious. All the links you provided talk about the release of plastics into the world, but the details on how that affects things are sketchier than say , mercury poisoning , because the symptoms are slowly accruing and ambiguous compared to lots of other environmental contaminants.
I agree we should do something about it.
Seems like one could live on a vegan diet and still be consuming a lot of plastic fiber. My favorite blankets, rugs, and t-shirts are all 100% polyester.
Even if I managed to use avoid plastics at home, plastic lint is everywhere in public too.
For some reason they have started putting stretchy stuff into cotton jeans - maybe style, or maybe (my pet theory) that good quality cotton is no longer economic for jean production, and so they have to use rougher cotton, which needs the stretchy stuff to be comfortable enough to wear.
I know PFAS are hormonal disrupters in research but it seems like most people are doing... just fine?
So maybe a good % of the population could be doing more fine without the micro plastics?
There's very strong evidence that both sperm counts and testosterone levels are going down (wikipedia it) worldwide over the last 60 years.
The mechanism here would be that many plastics are or contain endocrine disruptors. Or just an unknown mechanism (there's just so much about biology we don't know).
I believe there's also evidence that younger generations are having less sex. There's also a claim that people have much less "mature" (i.e. sexually-developed) facial features.
Of course this could all be tested by a proper study.
Now back to your point, your first reaction might be "All my friends aren't having kids because they don't want to, none are trying and can't." But if sex-drive is down across the board that may explain it. America doesn't even self-replace (unless you count new immigrants).
We are burning huge amounts of fossil fuels to run the economy. This economic boon leads to longer lifetimes, at a huge but externalized and delayed cost.
> it seems like most people are doing... just fine?
Where do you live?
Outside of affluent areas, I think most people these days would laugh at such an absurd claim. We are not fine, physically or mentally.
Our soil isn't fine. Our air isn't fine. Our water isn't fine - not our wells, our rivers, our lakes, our oceans, or even our icecaps. Our species are being made extinct at 1000x the background rate of extinction. Anyone fine with this is on the ignorant side of blissful.
But certain biomarkers in average are oddly doing ok. It's weird.
Not suggesting to have humans consume concentrated concoctions of plastics, but however ethically science allows.
What if there's some kind of plastic cliff that most species in the universe don't survive?
We worry about virus epidemics, global warming, asteroids, etc.
Some bacteria will survive.
I'm very curious how we will protect against this, otherwise bacteria will eat away at our car dashboards and such.
Policy-by-platitude is a bad strategy.
http://onemoregeneration.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Life...
Plastics also break down to simpler hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide with prolonged exposure to sunlight. Unfortunately, these gaseous small molecules are greenhouse gases, but they don't persist for as long.
"Production of methane and ethylene from plastic in the environment"
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Again, probably wrong, not at all an opinion to be taken as fact, just a gut feeling. History tells us that there will at least be SOMETHING perceived as normal today that is later discovered to be not okay, anyway. Plastic, social media, hell, maybe even EV after 50 years of batteries rotting in landfills.
Always a great way to start a sentence. (Intended in jest.)
And if the exposure is as universal as it sounds, then we can place some upper bounds on the amount of harm. With asbestos, the exposure was somewhat limited, but had greater consewuences. With plastics, we are all getting it.
So as far as I can tell, the “upper bound” of harm is reproductive collapse of our species?
Another pretty decent hypothesis of plastic contamination's effects is obesity (it's been seen both in vitro and in non-human animals). People absolutely are dropping dead en masse of obesity and related complications, and while obesity is proximally explainable (calories), the explanation of why people are consuming so many more calories is contested, at best.
So I don't think we know enough to say confidently that people aren't just dropping dead inexplicably.
>So I don't think we know enough to say confidently that people aren't just dropping dead inexplicably.
Well proving a negative is impossible. Further research into the potential health effects is needed. But at this stage I think worrying over every report that we found plastic in more and more places isn't cause for alarm until we actually know its dangerous.
1) In-vitro and animal model data showing metabolic and reproductive harm from plastic contamination
2) Plastics continuing to be found contaminating more and more things that humans interact with or ingest
3) Strong evidence that this contamination bioaccumulates within individuals
4) Strong evidence that this contamination accumulates across generations
5) Strong evidence that this contamination is approximately impossible to remove from water and soil
6) Strong evidence of very similar metabolic and reproductive harms that have been found in-vitro and in animal models showing up across extremely broad swaths of the human species.
I would buy into the, "no alarm until we know it's dangerous" approach if there were a way to undo the harm after the fact, or if there were a way to quickly "know it's dangerous," or if this contamination wasn't covering pretty much the entire globe, but none of those things is true.
We have no method to ascertain population-scale danger prior to that danger being pretty much irreversibly realized.
I've identified what would change my position from alarmed to not-alarmed. What, concretely, would change your position from not-alarmed to alarmed? There is no way to do a randomized controlled trial of plastic poisoning. So what would constitute "knowing" it's bad for us?
My guess is that it is never replaced, and instead, we will pour time and money into treating whatever (if any) issues microplastic consumption cause instead. Theorizing for fun, it’s pretty bleak though hah