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Comment by vngzs | Hacker News Reader

Experiments with human cells and mice have shown oxidative stress, neurotoxicity, reproductive toxicity, carcinogencity, and altered metabolism.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10151227/

If you ask me, plastic is the new lead.

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To be fair, if you poke a cell with sugars, amino acids, vitamin C, and all sorts of other essential nutrients you'll also see signs of oxidative stress, neurotoxicity, reproductive toxicity, carcinogenicity, and altered metabolism. In some ways it's the counterpart of "bullets cure cancer in a petri dish."

Plastics are still probably bad (with a prior that most synthetic chemicals we're exposed to are known to be toxic and not "proven" to be so and actually banned for 20-100 years), but a cellular study showing that plastics damage those cells isn't very convincing on its own.

Your linked study is a little broader, but it mostly summarizes studies with grandiose ideas or those summarizing those sorts of "poke a cell and find it doesn't like being poked" experiments I initially derided.

Do you think the people who performed the studies didn't think of that?

Do you think that everyone who ever released a "bullets cure cancer in a petri dish" study didn't think of that?

Whether or not they did, it's still a necessary part of the discussion.

They probably did think of that, and they did it too: Science as it is practiced in the real world. This sort of stuff is related to our whining about replication crises, careerism, etc.

But it can have its utility too, it's just more "defense from morons" instead "advancing the field". Or more neutrally filling in very predictable gaps in knowledge, like if you got something really unexpected but this stuff is all bog standard unhappy cells

It's worse than lead. Our planet has irreversiblely been polluted at so many levels of the food chain that it will be a wonder how future humans will figure out how to clean it all up. I'm convinced that at this point we have signed every lifeform up for an evolutionary pressure, and future generations will likely be selected for their resistance to whatever collection of illnesses are ultimately linked to microplastics.

All my food interacts with plastic. I can go to Rainbow Grocery, and they are just doing me the favor of disposing of the plastic packaging somewhere else in the supply chain.

Much plastic dust in my environment is from car tires.

Both my neighbors solve problems with their roofs with disintegrating, $50 plastic tarps from Home Depot, filling my back yard with plastic. Multi million dollar homes in San Francisco!

What am I really supposed to do? Speaking of lead, it's not like the city has forced anyone to replace the exterior lead paint or lead pipes.

You are right, but if it's lead, it's bad news. The problem isn't that pollution is unknown, the problem is that the middle-aged members of my community, maybe every community, fucking suck as soon as something costs them a fucking dime.

the middle-aged members of my community

There's no need for prejudice, be it skin colour or age. Cheap and corner cutting exists across the entire spectrum of humanity.

Cheap and cutting corners might be better described as externalizing costs. As we know increasing shareholer value trumps all. That being said our civilization would have to roll back to something like the 1800s level of technology. I'm not advocating for this, medicine and transportation can not exist without plastic, but our clothing furniture and rugs and other items don't have to be. And plastic recycling doesn't have to be a joke. But we can't expect shareholders to interalize those costs and not get as rich as fast as possible, can we? After all it will be someone else who will be affected by the wanton distraction of the environment.

Have you talked to your neighbors and offered to cover the cost of replacing their roofs, so they no longer need to use those tarps that are causing you problems? It shouldn't be that much of a financial burden on you if it'd only cost a "dime" or two to fix the problem properly.

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