Plastic chemical phthalate causes DNA breakage, chromosome defects, study finds
medicalxpress.com
medicalxpress.com
Not just clothing, but also bedding is a huge issue. With pillows, mattresses and towels mostly made of synthetic fibers.
My usual instinct is: try rubbing the synthetic material; if it releases thousands of particles in thin air, stay away from it
All else being equal you're generally safer being exposed to stable things that don't break down than unstable things that happily react with all sorts of things (and tend to meddle with the chemical processes required for life).
If you get to choose between breathing tires and milk jugs pick the milk jugs every time.
Unless the other thing is asbestos or generally any kind of mineral/anorganic material - pneumoconiosis [1] is nasty in all its variants. There is no mechanism at all for your body to break down or expel anorganic contaminants in your lungs.
> If you get to choose between breathing tires and milk jugs pick the milk jugs every time.
Well, plastic, glass or metal, no matter what the jugs are made of, they'll hurt your lungs just like the tire dust will.
Yup. I was thinking of heading off comments like yours by mentioning silicosis or lead poisoning but didn't want to clutter up a simple clarification.
Anyway, still mostly safer than "happy to react with things" compounds which is why people like you get to make comments about it here and now vs it simply being a thing everyone has accepted is not good to breath for hundreds of years (like certain wood dusts)
I think that's somewhat misleading, the lung has a mucus layer and cilia to move particles caught in the mucus up and out. But I'll agree that it's not a completely robust system. Anything that gets past or can't be moved by the mucus layer is going to be a problem, especially particles that can't be broken down by the macrophages.
Natural rubber is poly-cis-isoprene, synthetic rubbers are a mix of petroleum-derived polymers.
Even my mountain bike tyres now contain graphene which doesn't sound like a good idea for the sake of an unnoticeable improvement, and prob only as a racer. Seems a case of new jargon selling more. So they keep adding new compounds.
This premise only exists in a synthetic hypothetical universe.
What is important is to take start with a very real problem that should be resolved in this universe, then project the discussion into a very close but different one and argue there.
Now it doesn't matter if you win or lose in that universe because it doesn't matter. It isn't our reality.
Hypothetically speaking.
The person you originally quoted did mark their post as a nitpick.
There's a similar paradox in nuclear radiation. (Sometimes expressed with a puzzle about differently radioactive cookies and what to do with each.)
Gamma rays are scary because it takes a lot of lead shielding to even slow them down... but that also means that they aren't stopping to interact with things--like yourself--as they travel.
Alpha particles seem relatively safe because they don't travel far and are blocked by your skin... But that means they're doing something to that skin, and luckily for you any damage is being dealt to already-dead cells on the outside.
But if you had to put one of them inside your body, it's quite possible the gamma ray emitter would be the safer option, simply because more of its energy would escape harmlessly.
That's definitely the case with Polonium-210. Even though it emits alpha particles, it's very dangerous to ingest.
What, exactly, do you think is normalized here? That people wear clothing? That people didn't throw out every polyester fiber the moment somebody said plastic can break down into small pieces? That people aren't freaking out over a danger that we know roughly nothing about so far?
People really need to stop finding excuses to freak out over things.
We have been heavily pushed to drive less, recycle more, and use less water, but I have not seen messaging about not buying new clothes you don't need.
They do make purpose-built products to filter microplastic lint from laundry[1][2], but a more hacker approach is to just search for "pool filter."
I wish they made comparable products for the dryer.
Isn't that just the lint filter? Every dryer I've seen has one.
Name of that business sector? Plastics recycling.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
Plastic recycling is just another American "we tried nothing and are out of ideas." Much of the lack of recycling for plastics, when it comes to bottles, isn't some grand conspiracy so much as people just throwing bottles in the trash or on the side of the road, because:
* There aren't omnipresent recycling bins to go alongside trash cans.
* There aren't local programs for recycling pick up.
* Some people can't be bothered and the government isn't punching them in the face, as it should.
Only a half dozen states have a can/bottle deposit, even. Each state should be required to have deposits and municipal recycling pickup in any city of appreciable size, and heavy penalties for littering, or all sorts of federal funding should be withheld.
not sure where this comes from -- this statement is definitely not accurate. Is recycling of plastics "going well" ? no. Please note that USA is composed of States, and then Counties. In the USA law system, counties have the most jurisdiction over most waste laws. Some State laws override those, including toxics handling; then Federal laws including interstate commerce (transportation) and many more toxics regulations.
Counties do vary dramatically. In fact most counties in the whole USA are different in important respects. There is no single USA this way. Overall, recycling is very dependent on economics. It costs money to recycle, and sometimes you get some of it back on materials markets. The costs to the environment are not accurate with respect to markets.
The comment then proceeds to dictate advice to "each state" and that is never going to happen, by definition, for legal matters under the jurisdiction of states, in simple terms.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2020-00137...
It has also begun to subsidize the clothing repair industry:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/13/business/france-shoe-clothing...
Another issue is clothing repair. I think the clothing repair thing is kind of brilliant. But for clothing repair to work you would need to disincentivize buying new clothes. Which subsidizing clothing would work against.
I do think that from an environmental standpoint we should repair and recycle clothes a lot more than we do, but lets not romanticize the past. The small clothes repair businesses disappeared for a reason as living standards improved. Furthermore, today factory production of clothes is incredibly efficient and tends to be done in low-income countries, further making it even harder to restart some kind of clothes repair industry in high-income countries.
Why? I repair clothes. I also like buying new ones. In between I ruin and lose items, or find that I no longer wish to wear them for purely stylistic reasons.
Counting electron delocalization density and reactivity can be a rule of thumb for DNA mutation.
Basically a, "Does your chemical look like this? Maybe consume less of it." infographic.
And in fact, some chemicals that behave very differently may look extremely similar on paper. Especially when it comes to biology.
Natural fibers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_fiber
Green textiles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_textile
There are newer more sustainable production processes for various natural fibers.
TIL that there are special laundry detergents for synthetic fabrics like most activewear like jerseys; and that fabric softener attracts mosquitos and adheres to synthetic fibers causing stank.
Pretty sure I don't need the ones made of microplastics!
It's there if you follow the right people on social media.
Campaigns that center around personal responsibility, however, aren't ever going to work, and there's obvious reasons why people are willing to pay to push this narrative but not the buying fewer clothes one (at least here in the US).
Often regulation forces better alternatives to reach the scale where economy of scale can make it affordable, whereas with the ‘personal responsibility’ model the alternatives will often just stay the far more expensive, premium option.
Surprise surprise, it has actually been studied. One recent review article of the field:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl2746
From figure 2b) we can see that while microplastics from synthetic fibres are certainly an issue, they are far from #1. Dwarfed by tires, paint, and macroplastics (large plastic pieces thrown away slowly grinding down into microplastics e.g. by wave action).
I’m sure those cheap shitty masks were absolutely full of wholesome healthy microplastic.
Over the years I found that of all the dust in my home the vast majority comes from my clothing. I deduced that because the collected dust looks the same as what I find in the dryer, and it feels like cotton too (my by far most warn kind of fiber).
That means rooms are full of tiny particles from your clothes, if I assume that my home is not an anomaly (and why should it be).
Direct sunlight really helps to see how much dust there is all around us, and how with every little movement we create more. That does not even show the particles too small to be seen. The difference is gigantic - without that sunlight you don't see any dust and think the air is clean.
I'm not too concerned, since humanity must have dealt with this for a long time. Particles from fire especially, and there are lots coming from even the tiniest flame. My main worry would be chemicals we add to clothes, but given that by now we ingest plastic pretty much all the time, with every meal, with every breath, we just have to wait and see. I don't see a way to end this long-running experiment.
Preach. I vacuum my bedsheets every day because my cats are insane shedders and I'd otherwise get breaded with cat fur, but the vacuum is full with so much what is clearly not cat fur...
It used to be that they were a little more expensive - now you need to go online to find them.
'Fun' fact - the average brain has about 7 grams of microplastic [0] in it now, up 50% from 2016. At that rate...
SEVEN FUCKING GRAMS. Guys this is beyond stupid.
Even if plastic were totally inert, as I've heard people insist with certainty (where are they getting these ideas!), 7 grams of plastic in your brain is terrifying.
0 - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/23/health/plastics-in-brain-...
Why do you find that terrifying, if it’s inert?
To the downvoters: This is a genuine question.
A huge number of people have implements in their bodies (in their teeth, most often), and much more than seven grams of “foreign stuff” in their stomach and intestines all the time, so that by itself doesn’t seem anything to be terrified of.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/21/...
That doesn't seem very complicated, does it?
It being in my brain is an adverse effect. Inert material in the brain is a problem itself.
Do you want inert rocks in your car engine? Taking up space, interfering with natural processes, etc?
The brain is incredibly complex; far, far, far beyond our current understanding. You don't want anything in there that isn't supposed to be, and plastic isn't fucking supposed to be there.
And, did you miss the part where this is up 50% from only 8 years ago?
... Tbh I'm aghast that anyone needs this explained to them.
When you extrapolate 100,000-fold from uncalibrated micro-scale experiments, you get insane results, but the typical internet reader doesn't get past the abstract of the paper and instantly activates panic mode, instead of questioning the insanity.
The correct amount of brain plastic is 0 grams. Zero. This is a problem and it's very clearly getting worse.
Why would I have to explain that to someone with a PHD in biology? So weird.
You've been secretly living with this horrible condition for long enough for it to happen -- remember, this is happening a nanogram at a time, for years and years! This is not a fast process!
Are you dead? No? Hm.
Perhaps you ought to rethink your priors. I'm not saying you're absolutely wrong -- maybe the right answer really is that "0 is the right number". But maybe the answer is that it doesn't matter that much, and you're exaggerating the impact. More to the point, when you simply leap to the most exaggerated conclusion from a bad paper with sketchy methodology, you're not doing science, or being data-driven -- you're just panicking.
Why assume? There's multiple studies showing microplastics in human brains. Are they all "sketchy" too?
What organ in the body hasn't been shown to be contaminated? Significant and increasing levels have been found in lungs, livers, kidneys, spleens, intestines, hearts, placentas, blood, fat tissue, lymph nodes... All sketchy studies in your view? No? Then why the exception for brains?
Microplastics have been found from the top of Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. They're in 60-80% of all wild species examined. Sketchy? Exaggerated? Bring the data if you have it. It would want to be very strong stuff..
To loudly cast doubt on a study like this, and claim you know the weight of microplastic in people's brains is under 3.5g, you'd want to bring some substance... You haven't brought any; none at all.
> Are you dead? No? Hm.
Do I really need to explain that health is a spectrum - that 'alive' is not equivalent to healthy? That "not immediately sick" isn't the same as thriving? Binary thinking isn't very helpful on issues like this, and it's hard to believe you're arguing in good faith when you say things like this as if you've made a substantive point.
> Perhaps you ought to rethink your priors.
Which priors are those - that I don't want foreign substances accumulating in my brain, much less most brains on the planet?
Why would I? This is a plausibly catastrophic scenario, and you've brought absolutely no evidence that it isn't. None. At all.
> maybe the answer is that it doesn't matter that much, and you're exaggerating the impact.
I don't want to roll the dice on this one, and I think that's the only sensible approach. We have all sorts of alternatives; they're just not quite as 'cheap'.
People have posted elsewhere in the thread about a growing body of scientific links between nasty health outcomes and higher levels of microplastic in people's fleshy bits. You ignored that though... Why? ... Do you have a vested interest? Are you scared that this could actually be an issue, and you don't want to face it? What are your priors - that if you haven't keeled over yet then you're healthy?
> maybe the right answer really is that "0 is the right number"
It is. There's no conceivable advantage from having more than that.
> maybe the answer is that it doesn't matter that much, and you're exaggerating the impact
It's baffling to me that anyone would assume that it's fine and dandy that we're finding increasing amounts of plastic in human brains, or even deny it. To me, that's a ludicrous leap of faith; requiring an utterly unhinged level of naivety or optimism.
> maybe ... you're just panicking.
... You remind me of that old cartoon about climate change - "What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"
In any case, in one study [0], "researchers looked at 12 brain samples from people who had died with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. These brains contained up to 10 times more plastic by weight than healthy samples." Another [1] found "nanoplastics accelerate the aggregation of β-amyloid peptides" and that they exacerbate "the neurotoxicity induced by low-concentration peptides".
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/21/...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
My theory is that it's because of Amazon reviews. For most socks on Amazon, there will be at least one reviewer posting pictures of how their socks got holes after a few days of wearing. These reviewers are ridiculous and seem to have sandpaper for flooring, sweat corrosive acid, or deliberately wear down these socks just to post the review. I've bought many different socks from Amazon and none of them get holes even after years of wearing them.
Anyway, I think that seems to have spooked socks manufacturers.
I don't think phtalates are needed as plasticizers in polyster, so I guess they are coming from the dyes or something else used to treat the fabrics, meaning that the choice of cotton or polyster may not matter for phthalates specifically?
I prefer noncarpets, but hard seating of course not.
All that while most of the shavings accumulate in the lint collector, so it could have been even worse.
Source?
How thin should the air be and how do you measure the particles?
In particular, DNA is not hydrophobic -- it's an extremely polar environment. The known DNA/RNA intercalating chemicals are also very polar (at least, in critical selected locations). For example, Ethidium Bromide:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethidium_bromide
Point being: assuming that the paper in the headline is true (which I do not assume, but I digress), your theory of the mechanism is probably wrong, and therefore misleading.
Edit: having now looked at the paper, they're discussing one specific chemical (bezyl butyl phthalate) which is actually quite polar. It's also an ester, and trivially broken down by common enzymes into a number of different child compounds, any of which could be individually responsible for the claimed effects. Biochemistry is complex.
> Aromatic compounds, aliphatic hydrocarbons, and halogens are the hydrophobic parts of ligand PAEs. Hydrophobic contact is caused by the spatial proximity of the non-polar amino acid side chains and the hydrophobic substituents on the ligand PAE molecules. Water molecules are released from the hydrophobic region upon hydrophobic contact, and the unconstrained water molecules released can participate in the energy-favorable hydrogen bonding interactions, which enhance the overall binding affinity of the ligand [37,38,39]. Therefore, the hydrophobic interactions between ligands and receptors affect the ability of PAEs to bind to hormone proteins and influence the ability of PAEs to bind to DNA response elements.
Your theory is wrong, at least in this case. Also, this paper says the opposite of what you think it says:
> based on the three-dimensional potential energy surface information, it was discovered that the hydrophobic, steric, and electrostatic fields of PAEs significantly influence their endocrine disruption effects on humans.
They're saying that hydrophobic effects matter, but non-hydrophobic effects also matter. So everything matters.
FWIW, the paper is not particularly worth citing. Someone made an ML model that said what any competent chemist could tell you by looking at a phthalate.
If phtalates were highly polar, they wouldn't be soluble in plastic. That means they're going to bind to fat tissue and non-polar receptors.
>the chemical studied in this particular paper [...]
Also, the paper didn't study "a chemical," it covered about 30.
Generally, "pthalates" are not a thing, but rather a whole bunch of different things (some are hydrophobic, some are not), and many of them are metabolized by the human body, so they don't actually accumulate. You have to be more specific.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17604388/
> If phtalates were highly polar, they wouldn't be soluble in plastic.
Setting aside "highly polar", which is not specific, you are wrong. Many/most pthalates are far from what chemists consider "hydrophobic", and are in fact esters, alcolhols and acids.
> Also, the paper didn't study "a chemical," it covered about 30.
The paper in the OP was about one molecule: BBP.
I am being specific enough to be talking about the hydrophobic pthalates that do accumulate in the human body. If I was talking about the other ones that claim would be trivially wrong... when the popular media says cyanide is dangerous, they're talking about the dangerous molecules with R-CN, not the safe ones.
They're all amphiphilic, to some degree. That's how they work. It's also common to the chemical group that they break down quickly, because they tend to be esters and alcohols. Any phthalates that bioaccumulate would be the exception, not the rule.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14384....
I think this does have some ongoing influence on why more detailed analysis of common chemicals is not required.
From what I can tell, it looks like phthalates started with excess coal tar which contained tonnes of a solid waxy aromatic hydrocarbon called naphthalene that nobody probably had much of a way to monetize for quite some time.
Plenty of money was surely being made in other ways so regardless of the accounting methods, the surplus ends up being a no-cost item. When there are tonnes of an unutilized resource like this the full-scale effort would turn every tonne into something useful, and all it has to do is be the least bit useful and the least bit worth money for it look pretty good on paper. Plus the longer it builds up without having a good way to get rid of it can make a difference. Especially if one of the physical properties of the asset has something to do with combustibility and/or toxicity.
This gives extreme financial leverage compared to comparable chemical processes where a major raw material has a nominal cost, or even an attractive cost.
Anyway, naphthalene was an early source of cheap phthalic acids & anhydrides.
Also some oil fields have enough naphthalene content for it to be accumulated in the bigger refineries along with other waxy hydrocarbons which are processed in abundance.
Plus to meet increasing demand phthalic anhydride can also be made from ortho-xylene which many more refineries are commonly processing a stream of. This may not be zero-cost raw material, but it is still a hydrocarbon which is in bulk and easy to add value to if you're going to do something other than burn it for fuel.
In the 1980's the phthalate I would see the most of was "di-octyl phthalate", known as DOP. It was mostly di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate since the "octanol" that formed the diester was usually 2-ethylhexanol, not much n-octanol involved.
The 2-EH itself was some nasty-smelling stuff, one drop on your foot and you would have to leave your shoes outside when you got home. It was a byproduct of butanol & isobutanol manufacture, which themselves are relatively clean solvents. The 2-EH was clarified but it is a low-volatility solvent that doesn't dry up very fast, and stinks so bad it is not an ideal paint ingredient. There was no published laboratory testing procedure but I did do some pioneering chromatography anyway and there was a rich array of minor byproducts which are still most likely not fully identified chemically yet.
So 2-EH is another low-cost item but not much higher viscosity than the butanols.
Esterifying to combine with the phthalic and you get the compound DOP, the syrupy liquid used as a plasticizer that doesn't dry up much faster than the plastic solids themselves, and imparts the increased flexibility desired by the processor.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are some minor impurities in the DOP that trace back to the 2-EH raw material, which could be much more potent endocrine disruptors than the known plasticizer chemical itself. The statistical possibility is based on the number and variety of unidentified minor constituents, the way that very small amounts of hormones have very outsized effects, and the correlations that have been seen which incriminate the plasticizer and seem to show some connection.
Plus, after a few short years being a leading analyst of 2-EH and DOP, one day some highly purified 2-EH became available in "research grade", purchased it to serve as reference material, and it turned out to be relatively odor-free ! It was the 2-ethylhexyl aldehyde content that made it smell so bold. So I have known something was up for a very long time but still don't have all the details I would want.
Now if there is some minor component other than the known plasticizer bulk chemical itself which is causing disruption, and in-vivo work is being done on the highly purified reference material in order to evaluate the target plasticizer itself in the absence of as many unknowns as possible I'm not so sure the findings would apply as much in the real would as I would like.
At the beginning, phthalates were not optimized to serve as plasticizers.
They just happened to not fail at the task.
Got more popular, and non-surplus alternative sources of raw materials for plasticizing will break ground to meet the demand once the more-attractively-priced "chemical waste" has all been spoken for.
Something like a playbook that predates the plastic age.
Like, go drink from a cup of pthalates if youre so ok with it being in your brain, balls, ovaries, etc. No ones arguing we need to ban plastics, but maybe coating the world in single use water bottles without considering the effects is suboptimal. Shouldnt the onus be on proving its safe before spreading it everywhere, rather than proving its dangerous?
https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/06/wor...
Theyll call me extreme/ignorant/naive, but maybe a society where we have to poison ourselves to sustain "growth" isnt worth sustaining.
Not to mention the constant alarm bells about rising GI cancers in younger people. "OH BuT YOU HAVNEnT staTIstiCALLY prOved A cAusAL AssOCiaTION".
They have an incorrect notion of what a phthalate is (usually a slightly greasy ester or an alcohol), how polar/hydrophopic they are (mixed; generally ampiphilic), and whether or not they tend to bioaccumulate (in general, they do not).
Your broader point is well-taken, however, but not in the way you intended: chemistry does not reward a shallow understanding. The details matter a lot.
But sure, you might be more right on the basics of the biochemistry.
I guess I'm just frustrated about the state of the world - im not a degrowth person I just want a better balance.
There seems to be plenty of evidence for, for example, their role in endocrine disruption.
"The question of what this would do in the human body, which is full of polymers with very sensitively evolved mechanical properties, was obvious - yet it was not asked in a funded capacity until we had been letting it accumulate in our kids for decades"
which the article I linked supports, people come out of the woodwork to argue we need "more evidence/an exact biochemical pathway" when we dont have the understanding/technology to actually do that.
There's plenty of evidence we're increasingly fucking with our bodies, again see the rising rates of cancer in youth. Yes, there are likely many causes for that. You'd have to be criminally negligent to argue a class of chemicals like phthalates is in the clear. Yes, the details are complicated. Yes, the dose makes the poison. Yes.
I believe we're smart enough to find a way to have/eat out cake, but smart people are arguing in this classic way about details that miss the main point people should care about, downplaying the issue in a way that laypeople cant understand the nuance of. So we keep following the $$$ and likely poisoning ourselves.
CR showing how much of it is in our food. What’s crazy is how unpredictable it is, some have little, and other very similar products have 100x the amount. As a consumer I have little ability to control this.
"......in worms."
In the south where it’s hotter, the process accelerates proportional to heat.
I'm all for pushing back on chemicals wherever possible, especially in food packaging, but let's be real.
That's obviously not the whole supply chain, and I'm sure many goods still arrive at that kind of store in plastic, but these tend to be run by the types that avoid plastic anyway so whatever they can get in reusable packaging I'm sure they are getting wrapped in something other than plastic. Anyway, if plastic is going to be used, the exposure from a single 100lbs bag of something that you refill into a container is probably vastly lower than from 100 individually wrapped 1lbs bags
1. Some actual bamboo that has been processed to remove starches and sugars
2. Mixed with incredible amounts of chemical glues (some of which include BPA)
Most bamboo products are at least as suspicious to me as plastic.
AFAIU natural latex is an alternative to the ubiquitous polyurethane foam, and lasts longer. Quite pricey though.
The devil is that food that comes pre-packed under vacuum or inert atmosphere in plastics lasts much, much longer than food that gets stored in anything else - including tin cans by the way, they're all lined with plastics because acidic food would otherwise literally eat away the can.
Glass is nominally more expensive and works. Our go-to food storage is mason jars. $12/dozen, probably cheaper by volume than the plastic crap on the shelves at Target or Walmart.
So it's not merely packaging cost but also about convenience of shipping it around.
That said we still manage to ship both of those all over the world despite the unfavorable mass and relative sensitivity of their packaging.
The jar of olives however have plastic liner in the jar lid, so you're not escaping plastics anyway. The solution as I see it is to use the right plastics in the right way and ensure proper disposal of the waste.
There aren't any in polypropylene plastic, polyethylene plastic or polycarbonates.
I'm sympathetic, less plastic is probably good - it does have to be a well thought through change. If the change reduces safety, or if it gets manufacturers to switch to a worse risk profile product, we could be net worse off.
Plastics — including those listed — act as chemical sponges, soaking up and concentrating toxins present in the ambient environment. For example in a household the airborne dust absorbs brominated fire retardants and formaldehydes. The total quantity of toxins in these tiny particles can exceed the gaseous concentration in the air by thousands of times, so microplastics act like a billion tiny Trojan horses for toxins to enter the body.
So when modelling these risks, it could be less about the equilibrium amount of microplastics in the body at any one time (the stock), so much as the constant re-introduction of new microplastics into the body (the flow).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02697...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/plastics-and-ch...
Sounds like a good business idea actually..
Edit: Actually thinking about it, that really is a good business idea. If anyone wants to build that business with me, email me at the address in my bio.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Calvin-Klein-one-Skin-Moisturizer/dp/...
I have taken a very unscientific poll, and a very few number of people would want glass containers. You have to realize that people commenting on HN are not the mass public. The polls I've done were just asking during specific skincare product related conversations. The vast majority were onboard for paraben/phthalate free products made from plant based ingredients, but the no plastic issue was not something people felt strongly about at all.
Now every spillage is a potential mold growth problem, which is also bad to inhale.
plastic was invented 100 years ago. people did just fine in the house without it.
plastic containers for perfume and cosmetics don’t bother me. beauty products tend to last much longer than soap anyway.
PVC is used in water pipes, bottles, packaging films, blister packs, cling wraps, and seals on metal lids.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phthalates [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_chloride#Application...
Home 3D printing fortunately uses mostly PLA, which is biodegradable. Though I'm unsure how degradable it'd be inside your lungs.
This is the most relevant one IMO. You can buy glass cups and jars, it doesn't matter if the water you put into them comes through PVC pipes! Even if you buy BPA-free phthalate-free bottled water, I think it's safe to assume that at one point that water went through several meters of PVC pipes to get to that bottle!
PVC water pipes must be ubiquitous nowadays, and are certainly better than the older copper alternative, which in turn is better than the older lead alternative!
Maybe the next step is special PVC for water piping. Until then I guess we're better than we have ever been, water piping-wise.
The most common water pipe in new construction is cross linked polyethylene. XLPE. It is stable, inert, and contains no plasticizers. PVC is often used for sewage drain pipes. Like the parent said it is the rigid crystalline kind typically containing minimal plasticizers tightly bound within the crystal matrix.
"Product liability is a third-rail in American politics" yes
In other words: Banning certain types of plastics makes sense and we do that all the time. Banning "plastics" is about as sensible as banning dihydrogenmonoxide.
https://www.fda.gov/food/hfp-constituent-updates/fda-respond...
There is already a mountain of research showing that phthalates are endocrine disruptors and cause developmental defects. The FDA knows this and is doing nothing.
So where are all these people with the wrong number of chromosomes? They should be everywhere. Maybe all this damage ends up leading to no human growing from the egg, so they're never born but again where are all the infertile women? It should be nearly everyone! It's either written to deceive or it's obviously wrong.
> Prior material analyses of sex toys like those characterized here revealed phthalate concentrations in most tested products at concentrations ranging from 24–60% by weight [11, 14, 15]. In addition, there is growing concern over human exposure to micro-and nano-plastics. The translocation and biouptake of nano-sized particles is now well established [16]. Human exposure to nanoplastics and the potential for enhanced release of plastic additives are of potential concern.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10034881/#:~:text=P....
HN is supposed to be a forum of educated, rational people capable of critical thought. Here are some basic facts.
1. Plastic is often presented in the media as some kind of monolithic hazardous compound where it is not. There are different kinds of plastic. Alternatives are usually economically and environmentally inferior.
2. The most common types of plastic for consumer applications are polyethylene and polypropylene, followed by polyvinyl chloride and polystyrene. PE and PP are biologically and chemically inert. The same reason why they don't break down is the reason why they are harmless. Polystyrene derived from a naturally occuring compound styrene found in some plants and can and does breakdown under attack of UV light, acids, microorganisms. All three PE, PP, and PS are most commonly manufactured without harmful additives. Only PVC uses significant quantities of plasticizers some of which are harmful. Unless you are chewing on your shower curtain you have little to worry about.
3. At least several hundred billion tons of commodity plastics have been mass produced over the last 70 years with little to no quantified, attributable environmental damage from these plastics. Most microplastic is essentially inert dust that is no different from other organic or inorganic dust such as pollen or clay. Plastics are not allergens because they are non reactive and do not stimulate an immune response. It is very likely that blood of animals contains plastic molecules along with thousands of other molecules in trace quantities doing no more harm than natural silt in a river system.
4.The fact that commodity plastics do not readily rot or degrade is a good thing. Petroleum carbon made into stable plastic and buried in a landfill is kept out of the atmosphere.
5. Plastic items are less energy demanding to recycle and produce in the first place because of lower thermal processing requirements than glass, metal or wood.
6. Lignin in wood is a natural plastic.
7. Most of the macro plastics in the ocean comes from Asia and the fishing industry. In the west it is buried in a landfill where it helpfully sequesters carbon.
8. Plastic items are often lighter to ship also consuming less energy that way versus alternatives.
9. Most microplastics in the ocean are from synthetic fibers and tire abrasion. I have yet to see a non handwaving study that these actually result in significant environmental harm. Maybe we should research more durable tire materials. Perversely electric vehicles wear tires quicker than ICE vehicles due to a more aggressive torque curve. Cotton has to be planted (diesel tractor), sprayed with fertilizers and pesticides, picked (diesel), spun, woven, etc. just because it's natural doesn't mean it's better for the environment at mass scale. This true of other things too like glass, metal, paper, etc.
10. People should stop irresponsibly hating on plastics when the alternatives are worse.
This neo Luddite Puritanism is just dumb and unscientific.
I challenge anyone to rebut my assertions with hard facts that quantify to supposed damage plastic does versus what alternatives would do.
It's not enough to assert, loudly, that you are right and we are all wrong and everything is fine let's all go back inside and let the chemists keep doing what they're doing. You have to explain also why PE and PP never under any circumstances ever contain any plasticizers.
Regarding plastics and microplastics in the oceans, I've seen tons of pictures of dead birds that after autopsy have filled their crops with broken plastic pieces instead of food. This is not good, and having all of our sea birds die is not an insignificant environmental harm.
So hand-waiving that away doesn't change the fact that introducing plastics have caused new and exciting forms of harm in our biosphere.
2. I believe you should consider logical fallacies and questions of scale and trade offs.
Specifically people arguing against "plastics" in general seem to depend on hearsay, strawmen, all or nothing fallacy, appeal to authority, etc. it is black and white thinking against the nuance of the real world. In recent times on many issues it seems that black and white thinking is presented as something that is a rational way to approach things. It is not. The real world is complicated and full of nuance anf tradeoffs. Just because you can show some plastics may have some harmful effects does not mean that the miracle of plastic materials is a net bad for humanity or the environment unless you can show the harm EXCEEDS that of scalable alternatives. The burden of proof is on those who are against plastics to show that the net harm caused by specific compounds is worse than the net benefit of using them. We will never be able to prove that all plastics are harmless in every possible context. Nor should we. In life we have to make decisions based on the best available information we have. So it makes more sense to ask after 70 years what significant harms have been caused by plastics that would be made less than alternatives. Even a thousand pictures of dead birds does not make a compelling case unless it is weighed against the costs of harvesting forests for paper and burning fossil fuels to make glass and metal to make inferior packaging that costs more and takes more fuel to transport.
All else held equal light weight non biodegrade materials made from cheap highly productive chemical feed stocks are better for the environment than alternatives.
A series of anecdotes and one sided analyses does not make a compelling case.
EVs are also heavy and might wear tires quicker in braking situations though.
You clearly know this, and much more.
Why not go one step beyond “hey anti all plastic people, not all plastics are bad” and help them get educated on, avoid and solve the harms that do exist?
Lack of nuance, on either side of the debate, mostly comes across as propaganda (to me)
You're missing a couple points yourself. For example, the article is talking about phthalates. These are additives added to plastics. These leech from microplastics. So your rant about how plastics are inert shows you didnt even understand the article yourself tbh.
There is plenty of evidence that these compounds are harmful and affect the biology. See the section on wikipedia on phthalates. What there isnt is much evidence and experimentation showing theyre NOT harmful.