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Comment by SmooL | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: are the health risks really that bad? Plastic has been around for decades - surely also then these micro/nano plastics have been around for decades? I can't help but feel like if there were obvious and large health effects that we'd have noticed by now.

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The big problem I guess is to establish correlation between precisely the plastics and whatever effects we should "see". We have plenty of cancer, fodd intolerances, fertility problems, mental and other health issue sthat seemingly never existed to this extend but what they're actually caused by is very hard to determine.

They did exist, and so did various cancers, albeit in lesser concentrations. People mostly died younger and nobody cared nor investigated.

And its not that big mystery - people got properly dumb and do literally everything to destroy themselves, and completely ignore advices coming from every direction about healthy living. Its not 'they evil corps', is us(them) dumb shits who can't act like balanced mature adults and contain those few vices you may gather as life goes along. You can't tackle all of it, but most folks are not even trying and just complain.

A random example - all guys everywhere would massively benefit from consistently wearing loose pants and underwear if they want to increase their fertility, especially in summer. It would skyrocket in stats. Now show me how popular this 'simple trick' is in mass media. There, maybe 30% of couple infertility cases tackled.

I don't want to downplay the topic, the idea that nano-plastic-infested meat is grilled/cooked/even just boiled and eaten by literally everybody... we know what great things high heat does to all plastics, and eating that yummy is probably a bullet train to ruined health decades down the line.

> There, maybe 30% of couple infertility cases tackled.

Any source to back that outrageous number?

Start here: https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2020/p...

The answer is yes, and it is absolutely important. If plastics disrupt our endocrine system, then that touches every facet of our bodies from development, sexual health, mental health, disease, and more. We can’t underestimate the effects plastic exposure has on our health.

That article is talking about plasticizers - small molecules added to plastics - not plastics as the source of risk.

This is the same reason "BPA-free" drink bottles are now a thing.

The plasticizers are in the plastics, and the plastics are in our bodies. When the plasticizers leach out of the plastics, where do you think they can go?

And if, in the case of BPA-free plastic, they're not their in the first place, what, do you imagine they spontaneously come into existence?

The point is that "plastic is toxic" people sure seem to have a lot of trouble being honest about their own sources.

The point is that BPA-free plastics are used specifically in drinking bottles and the like, while micro- and nanoscale particles are liberated into the environment by all plastics - the vast majority of which, certainly all the widely used engineering resins, are not formulated on the assumption that they need to be innocuous.

(I assume that, four years after an airborne virus ran pandemic, no one need explained the inverse relationship between particle size and length of mean free path in air. I hope no one needs that explaining, at least...)

It may be true there is less risk here than some suspect, or it may not. It is certainly foolish to assume either without bothering even to investigate the question.

Keep in mind that a lot of the microplastics come from "macroplastics" (?) that have broken down.

There's few things that destroy them further.

That and many of the effects may not occur until a sufficient amount of microplastics have accumulated which we may only now be approaching.

The biggest issue is that they break down so poorly. Even if we stopped all plastic production today, the total amount of microplastics will only accumulate

If there were subtle and dose-dependent (or dose-rate dependent) and large health effects, though, we could reasonably expect only to have started noticing them around now.

edit: I don't mind that this is getting downvoted, but I would like to know why. What have I overlooked?

Don't say things people don't want to hear.

A quick Google search will make it very clear that we do detect problems already, that it's cumulative and that it's getting worse over time

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