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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

>do practitioners not distinguish between naturally-occurring polymers and synthetic plastics in this kind of microplastic/nanoplastic research?

They don't care. This is a junk paper that cites a bunch of other junk papers. It's published in the same junk journal that gave us the junk paper on black plastic kitchen utensils. I can't really say more without risking a defamation suit, but what you're looking at has nothing to do with science.

https://retractionwatch.com/2024/12/18/journal-that-publishe...

https://retractionwatch.com/2024/05/13/publisher-slaps-60-pa...

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Related thread,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42494733 ("Journal that published faulty black plastic study removed from science index (arstechnica.com)", 63 comments)

Microplastics really are the new shit magnet of science papers.

You get nice news headlines with no tangible issues to health are found and it's easy to just prove a bunch of microplastics in all the things.

If I wanted an easy PhD I'd likely do the same due to how shitty academic hustle is in today's world...

Not only of science papers, I recently bought new shampoo and it has a "0% microplastics" label, on its plastic bottle.. it's milking people's emotions for money, like usual

“No tangible issues to health” … not too long ago members of the tobacco industry were claiming about the same thing.

The White House, taking microplastics seriously: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Mobili...

Do they do that because it's popular or because there is scientific consensus?

We live in a democracy, so ideally both.

The White House pdf suggests a scientific consensus of some form, stating: “Researchers are sounding alarm bells over the growing presence of microplastics in the human body, and are concerned that the ingestion of microplastics and exposure to plastic-related pollution are posing a growing risk to public health.”

Hopefully because it has predictive power. Scientific consensus is a proxy for that, but lets not mistake the proxy for the actual thing.

>I can't really say more without risking a defamation suit

Not even the part about how you know it's junk? Is that based on your own critical analysis of the content, or just on what Retraction Watch has to say about Chemosphere?

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