Plasticlist Report – Data on plastic chemicals in Bay Area foods | Hacker News Reader

Plasticlist Report – Data on plastic chemicals in Bay Area foods

plasticlist.org

635 pointsjeff18193 comments

I am, in a different life, a consumer of compost and I have started looking very carefully at the compost products for sale in the bay area.

On the urban consumer side of things I see compost collection bins which cannot possibly be decontaminated of all manner of plastic pieces which will, inevitably, be ground up into the compost product.

On the rural side of things I see miles of plastic baling twine and weedeater string - and other plastic meshes and grid - used throughout pastures year after year and then collected back up again with loads of hay and manure which also end up in the compost stream.

These truckloads of soil/compost/fill have to be significantly contaminated and the rural end users are pouring them right back on their fields.

It's funny how the same people that dump whatever trash they feel like into the compost bins because it's convenient turn around and say "Wow, free compost! Let me spread that all over my garden!" Like, didn't I just see you yesterday putting a compostable takeout container into the bin with ketchup packets still inside? You think the municipal composting fairy just magics that stuff away?

Microplastics impact endocrine hormones and potentially are carcinogenic.

Lifespan growth has stagnated although technology has improved. Quality of life has declined as number of temperate days with good air quality declines with climate change.

I’m usually less worried about microplastics than many (human lifespan is at the longest it’s ever been, and people are healthy at older ages than ever - things can’t be that bad overall), but weed eater string is a pet peeve of mine. We’re just spewing nylon microplastics everywhere, and I can’t understand how it’s not at all controversial!

I've spent some time thinking about this and it's a difficult problem for two reasons:

First, while we use metal blades on our ranch it's not easy - you need to educate workers on the extra safety issues involved with the blade and you need to be very careful about fire safety due to sparking. There are only a few months where we use the trimmers at all due to fire risk.[1]

Second, operators of trimmers don't like the performance of the blades and how they cut. With a bit of practice it is fine and as an employer I can dictate the tools I choose ... but convincing homeowners or small property owners to switch to blades is going to be hard. Further, there are some techniques (like trimming up to landscaping features or house siding without destroying them) that are impossible with the blade.

But yes ... if you see a row of workers mowing a big field with string ... somebody isn't putting two and two together and it's a shame to see pristine fields being plasticized.

[1] I have looked into a short metal cable made of non-sparking metal as a replacement for the blade ... not an easy thing to put together ...

Hang on. You're the rsync guy and you're also running a ranch? DAYUM. I'm gobsmacked. Do you have an RSync Ranch blog somewhere?

What is your reason for using them over plastic? Just pollution or do you have a lot of woody shrubs?

Google confirms they are available here in New Zealand but I have only ever seen them in American YouTube videos.

Over here, you can’t just dictate tools. Health & Safety regulations and agencies use highly punitive measures to ensure employers do everything possible to avoid employee injury.

Even if you hurt yourself at home you are required to disclose who your employer is if you are claiming universal accident insurance.

I am sure they keep an eye on if employees of a particular organisation are having the same type of accident “at home”.

I think this is probably why they are uncommon.

Yes - The choice is dictated solely by the pollution.

I Can’t comment on the laws in New Zealand, but I live in California, which is, relatively, Progressive with worker protections.

The dangers associated with the Trimmer blades are a subset of the dangers associated with the chainsaws we (safely) use.

Plastics were really only introduced ~1950 and usage/production has been increasing since, which means that we'll only know the lifetime effects of current exposure levels 80 some years from now. Human lifespan statistics are currently based on people born before 1950.

Mid 1800s is when synthetic plastics started appearing.

In Columbus we have, "The Compost Exchange" and as a small farmer I get their compost delivered.

It is now so full of plastic contamination it's just not worth it anymore. Its disgusting what I find in there, countless grocery bags, Keurig cups, people don't care and I don't save enough money to be worth picking out plastic.

Because they tell you to do this like this. Food container? green waste. Dogpoop bag? green waste. Its less about giving you good compost and more about getting the local landfill to emit a little bit less methane by not having as much organic matter rotting in there.

I know that some wastewater treatment plants will sell biosolid sludge (the filtered and partially treated solid output of the treatment process). Do you know what, if anything, that does to the plastics?

I think it's mostly mechanical settling and then sitting in piles on the ground. Not sure if that UV exposure from the sun is enough to meaningfully degrade the plastic into something else.

Crazy excerpt from the report:

> "On BPA in particular, just 10 years ago, the US EPA and the EU EFSA had the same limit. Then the EFSA lowered their limit several times, resulting in a 250,000x difference in the limits. But the EPA Iris site to this day says that, no, the limit they last revised in 1988 is still correct. This is an important difference if you want to interpret PlasticList results. Remember the Boba Guys tea that contains 1.2 years of safe BPA consumption according to the EFSA? According to the EPA, it’s well under the limit."

How the heck can the limits established by the EPA and EFSA vary up to 250,000x ??? That's several orders of magnitudes...

Really hoping this study blow up so more research gets funded. The testing is supposedly cheap and there's definitely enough public interest at this point.

Limits are often set for political reasons (in both directions).

There can also be very different appetites for risk.

It's hilarious how McDonalds ends up being the safest premade meals you can get (outside a big tech company cafeteria) at least from a scary plastic chemical standpoint. They actually have the resources and a big enough PR problem to spend the money to send their stuff to labs and get it tested. Everyone else solves the PR problem by just labeling their food organic and healthy instead. https://justine.lol/tmp/healthy.jpg This is all of course assuming no one discovers anything horrible about DEHT in the future, which is the new chemical they're leaning into. I get maybe 10% as many Google Scholar hits on DEHT compared to its terrifying well-studied cousin DEHP.

McD tested high for phthalates, phthalate substitutes, and even sometimes for bisphenols.

It is ironic. Amazing how if you don't go looking for it, there is no bad news!

I see the same in people who visit developing countries and talk about how "fresh and organic" the food is. They comment "you don't read about the food safety issues like you do in developed countries".

Yeah, of course you don't, the developing countries don't test!

Having lived in a developing country for a decade: they don't speak the local language and don't read local news that's why they don't hear about it. The local news and gossip is always full of it.

Varies by country.

But my comment was more about government inspections and news about violations, not news about food poisoning outbreaks.

In the developing country I was in, plenty of food products are never tested, but once you've visited a factory it's clear it would be shutdown in any developed country.

Yeah I know a guy who’s daughter almost died after eating an ice cream cone bought at a roadside stall in Thailand. Had to go to hospital and get her stomach pumped and everything…

Roadside icecream in Asia is quite hazardous. I would in general eat only very hot cooked food (165F or 74C, inside and outside) while in Asia, thereby ensuring the germs are dead. Stick to boiled or sealed bottled water. Despite the food being hot, it can still sometimes contain bacterial toxins or mycotoxins. Avoid salads while outdoors almost anywhere. Also be careful with the choice of fish to avoid any potentially toxic fish, e.g. reef fish.

Not gonna lie, the meat I had in some European countries without preservatives and processing went through me so cleanly and easy I’m convinced we are the ones dropping the ball in this whole discussion somehow.

Not knowing where in Europe you went eating meat, there is a good chance it was a developed country.

Regarding the EU vs. US food debate I would generally expect to find higher quality produce in the EU countries, and that is not because things a pushed under the rug. That is just more regulation.

Morocco and Spain

That's partly true, but on the other hand less intensive, less industrialized food production will end up with safer food. The apple or tomato from your grandma's backyard in Eastern Europe will have less chemicals than the one grown in the Dutch monoculture farm.

My personal experience is the opposite. There is no control on the produce on grandma's backyard and therefore we have no idea how much chemicals she is using. Probably she doesn't know either. But I'm sure of one thing: she definitely uses chemicals if she wants to eat (or sell) those apples. Chemical-free agriculture is more demanding and the grandma doesn't have an incentive to invest in it. After all, using chemicals is what she learned growing up and therefore is the "traditional" way.

I dont think grandmas are out there using genetically modified crops so they can douse the whole thing in Roundup

Grandmas can be growing it in heavily contaminated soils (old motor oil, lead, arsenic, etc.), or using ‘random weed spray’ at 10x its recommended dosage, or not washing their hands after using the toilet and then handling veggies, etc.

The idea that Roundup is the worst pesticide being used is optimistic.

It’s like the GP indicates - I think the concern is more for yield than safety.

My experience as a tourist was that some fruit reeked so strongly of chemicals that I just kept away from it.

Your scenario provides far fewer applications of pesticides than the alternatives, especially those in "organic farming", with a pesticide that is much less bad than the common alternatives.

Looking forward to more testing like this. I've been trying to consciously avoid anything combining "hot" with "plastic" though there's only so much you can do.

Fish are aggregators of this stuff so that's not surprising. Spam and other processed meats and prepared foods also not too surprising (though what's with the Annie's organic mac and cheese being so full of it? Maybe it's the sauce?)... I think the tap water was the scariest one to me. Sure, you expect some but ... wildly unsafe levels?!

Are you looking at the results in the table on the main page? That is tap water treated with some purifying tablet, not straight tap water. There is plain tap water in the full database but it doesn't seem to have levels of anything in excess of established limits.

My mistake, I didn't see that part. I thought the tablet treatment was just something they did to prepare it for testing. Maybe the tablets kill the microfauna via microplastic overdose.

Manufacturers are putting more and more plastic into things to cut costs it seems.

My favorite pour over coffee maker almost entirely had water in contact with metal and glass during brewing. Glass reservoir, glass decanter, metal grounds basket - only rubber tubes going from reservoir to heating element.

When it died (your average coffee maker only lasts 5 years) all of their newer more expensive models had mostly plastic everything except for the decanter.

Hmmm...I'm now worried about my Aeropress, which I love. Perhaps it's time to switch to a french press.

They have an Aeropress in glass now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pw0hc7CB64

Also, is there an aggregate plastic danger metric? It would be great to develop an aggregate metric that combines the different types of plastics and multiplies them by their known potential dangers to the human body. I realize the multiples will change over time as more research comes in, but right now, there's no way to quantify BPA vs DEHP dangers.

This would make the main giant aggregate list: https://www.plasticlist.org a lot more useful.

The PlasticList site explores safety levels, including a discussion of aggregate levels across products and chemicals. It’s an interesting but frustrating read.

Have "unsafe levels" been established, or are we just assuming that any is bad?

Edit: I see they appear to be using the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) intake limits for most of their tests.

Initial data says they're at least bad for sea life. Doubtful it's good to have such durable micro materials bouncing around our lungs and digestive tracts. Stopping pollution is also much easier than cleaning up after the fact.

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

> Doubtful it's good to have such durable micro materials bouncing around our lungs and digestive tracts.

Having odd things in your lungs is bad. Having things bouncing around in your digestive tract means nothing. The whole point of the digestive tract is that you put untrusted materials into it.

As long as it actually makes it out the other end. Bits of undigestable matter the size of smoke particles is a relatively new phenomenon.

Uh, smoke particles and mineral dusts are generally non digestible - and we’ve been eating smoked/cooked meats and slightly dirty things for at least as long as recorded history?

isnt smoked/charred food associated with colon cancer?

Yes.

And the last decades we’ve had a new unknown cause of colon cancer increase in young adults.

My money is on plastics, but will be hard to prove.

There's growing evidence, especially in the past few years with better studies, that suggests HPV is a significant driver, if not the most significant driver, of the increase in colorectal cancer among younger adults. I suspect it's been a disfavored explanation because of certain implications--implications which should be irrelevant and not even necessarily true, but I digress. The HPV vaccine should in theory be protective[1] so in the next decade or so it might become more clear even in the absence of additional direct investigation. Likewise, we should expect the incidence of oropharyngeal cancers to decrease, which probably not coincidentally has also risen among younger--20-50yo--adults. Notably, the HPV link is more clearly established.

[1] HPV16 and HPV18 being the variants most often identified in HPV-associated colorectal cancers[2], and which are targeted by HPV vaccines as they're the variants primarily responsible for cervical and anal cancers.

[2] See, e.g., https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1479314/ and https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9610003/

Very interesting!

Perhaps inappropriate to ask, but are you thinking the implication is anal sex, or the ‘eating ass’ cultural element, or something else?

Many of the chemicals in smoke particles cause cancer with extended contact.

But not new. At all.

> Fish are aggregators of this stuff so that's not surprising.

I doubt the BPA in fish originates from the fish themselves. It's more likely from the can linings used to package the fish.

It's interesting that everyone is talking about boba tea instead of things they regularly consume like milk and beef, also featured in dedication sections of TFA.

Either because they didn't scroll past the first chart or it's more convenient to focus on a food item they don't eat daily.

Edit: I was randomly on NewRepublic's website and saw this relevant article about how farmers using 'biosolids' (sewage) on their land multiplied the PFAS in their livestock/dairy/water: https://newrepublic.com/article/187106/pfas-milk-maine-texas... ("One State’s War on Forever Chemicals in Milk")

Great read and amazing initiative. Relevance of findings seems to 90% depend on whether you believe the EFSA BPA intake thresholds over the FDA. Love how transparent they’re about it instead of doing what most do. The world needs more of this.

This research by these non academic background folks is simply astounding and exceptional. How did they get the funding to run $500k of independent lab testing? Can we donate to the cause?

This stuff is on my mind all the time eating out or from plastic-impregnated cardboard food packaging lining, etc. I’m worried about reproductive impact on future generations and overall personal health, etc.

Nat Friedman leads the project. He was GitHub's CEO, among many other things. He funds many interesting ambitious projects, such as the Vesuvius Challenge (https://scrollprize.org/)

Really cool thanks for pointing me in the right direction

The boba tea result alone makes me want to never drink that again. Was a fun little treat while it lasted…

It seems noteworthy, but not commented that I can see (in the article), that the different samples of "Boba Guys Black Tea Pearls" have 20x variation in measured amount.

So what's up with that? (I have uninformed ideas...)

Further down, they explain the measurement errors involved:

" If you buy the same product twice, how much will chemical levels vary?

When we bought two samples of the same product, plastic chemical levels differed on average by 59%, calculated as Relative Percent Difference (RPD).

To test whether completely identical samples would show different levels of chemicals, we sent about 10% of our products in triplicate. This means we sent three copies of the product from the same batch – with matching lot number and expiration date – bought at the same store on the same day. We found that the triplicate samples differed less – on average by 33%.

Our lab’s quality control methodology lists 20% RPD as an acceptable margin of measurement error for duplicate samples, meaning if you tested the exact same sample twice, you could see up to a 20% difference purely due to measurement noise. Taking that into account, the RPD for two samples of the same product (not necessarily from the same lot) ranges from 39-59%. For samples with the same lot number and expiration date, the RPD narrows to 13-33%.

Within-product variability appears high, possibly because we are dealing with very small chemical concentrations measured in nanograms."

Yep, I saw that section. To my interpretation, these average percents are so much smaller than the variation seen, that it's basically /not/ addressing the outlier variations.

Perhaps plots would be better/less alarming than easy-to-cherry-pick tables, but I'm not expert on conveying this sort of data either...

This seems to be the happening with other items and chemicals tested as well. Look at the results for DNP in Clover organic milk for example.

In Taiwan, there was a huge scandal decade ago about this exact same issue — people discovered vendors were using plasticiser to make the boba jelly like.

Im sure most of the boba shops in the US import ingredients from Taiwan, so its not surprising here

It's really annoying that they only test one brand (Boba Guys), it's unclear wether other producers have better quality products.

Why did you ever drink it in the first place? A boba is 500g of diabetes packaged in 100g of trash. It's the worst idea ever.

Some people are capable of consuming nutrition in moderation.

my fam loves boba w zero sugar added... all the places we go to here in san diego let you adjust (e.g. omomo [0]). basically a fresh milky fruit or avocado smoothie with chewy tapioca pearls. it's a fun treat that seemed a lot healthier than an ice cream or something. these findings make me sad :-|

[0]: https://www.omomoteashoppe.com

It's funny that you hold up ice cream as a paradigmatically unhealthy food, when most of the studies point in the opposite direction: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cre...

The state of nutrition science is so bad that I wouldn't believe most any study, though.

Ice cream strikes me as a lot healthier than boiled play-doh.

You seem to have a weirdly strong hatred for boba.

It’s okay if something isn’t for you!

Is this based off the tapioca balls? I haven’t considered the health of the balls, but I could see it as being the same as swallowing a bunch of gum.

They are not “gum”. They are mainly starch. They have no nutritional benefit but a do convert a big load of sugars in your blood.

> They have no nutritional benefit but a do convert a big load of sugars in your blood.

That is, like, the definition of nutritional benefit.

It is a very low grade nutrition that produces a lot of unhealthy results. Not really a benefit.

Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough has ~25g sugar per 100g.

Boba has ~14g per 100g, depending on the type.

Coca Cola has ~11g sugar per 100g.

In other words, ice cream has 1.8x more sugar content than boba and 2.3x more sugar content of Coca Cola.

If you’re concerned about the tapioca, that’s literally just starch. You know what else contains starch? Potatoes and rice.

> In other words, ice cream has 1.8x more sugar content than boba and 2.3x more sugar content of Coca Cola.

Most Boba Tea cups I’ve seen are far bigger than the typical ice cream.

You can’t use per-100gm doses this way. You have to look at sugar in the product as ordered.

People don’t order and eat their food in neat 100gm increments.

How much people happen to eat in one sitting is nice bonus info, but it doesn't make sense to complain that the data has been normalized into density figures.

Either way, a little 16oz carton of Ben and Jerry's that people smash in one sitting is 1200 calories. So it's still more sugar- and calorie-dense than boba tea.

I don't really see the point in bickering over calorie-dense junk foods though. Both of them are displacing healthier foods in your diet that you could've eaten instead. Neither should account for more than a small fraction of your calorie intake.

Companies vastly differ in serving amounts and some have multiple serve sizes.

What did you expect me to do, bash out a 5x10 multi-company matrix so you can compare perfectly across servings?

> Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough has ~25g sugar per 100g. Boba has ~14g per 100g, depending on the type.

Nothing at Boba Guys weighs 100g. That's the difference! 100g really is a typical cup of gelato or ice cream.

Boba can be part of a healthy diet and lifestyle.

Jesus HN, it's a sweet drink. Y'all act like nobody eats cookies, candy, ice cream. Happy Birthday here's your kale salad.

The "ate like shit your whole life and are now overcorrecting in your 40s because you got consequences for the first time" energy is big in this thread.

So can smoking

No it can't. Type 2 diabetes is mostly genetic. I can eat as much Boba as I want and not get diabetes.

Source on type 2 being mostly genetic? All I've found is there is some link but not conclusive.

Also T2 is on the rise in young people. Have their genetics changed dramatically in the past few decades? Or has food?

https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/data-research/research/young-pe...

So interestingly it could be the two working together [1] [2]. T2 may be on the rise partially to epigenetic changes.

[1] https://www.thediabetescouncil.com/link-epigenetics-type-2-d...

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10258626/

This is a simplification. Type 2 diabetes is heavily polygenic, but the genetic connection could be... you are genetically predisposed to like sweet food! In which case, the diet intervention would work, most people just aren't willing to do it.

Many genetic predispositions are behavioral, it's not all pure metabolic effects.

lol no

It's true. My mother has been obese for most of her life but isn't even pre-diabetic. Her diet would scare people on HN.

Yeah, your proclivity to overeat is highly genetic, and your predisposition to get T2 diabetes in an energy surplus is highly genetic.

We like to think that our (positive) behavior comes from our own self-made character traits rather behavior that is genetically determined.

I like the texture of the tapioca balls and like milk tea. I’d only get the milk tea plus tapioca (and choose the lowest sweetness possible, “no sugar” if offered)

I mean I get not liking it. I like it. I’d have it maybe once every three months as a little treat

I wish similar testing were available in Australia, I'd pay for a subscription to have access to high-quality independent testing of the common foods that are available in the shops.

I wonder if enough people care for this to be a viable business model.

I'd also like this.

I just want a ballpark on the orders of magnitude between alternatives so I can make simple swaps.

The most popular three brands of each food category (canned black beans, soy milk, hummus, etc.) would be a nice start.

On the other hand, it also seems like the wrong fixation for most people. Most people should probably be making swaps away from things like junk food and saturated fat before they invest energy in minmaxing the nanograms of pfas in their butter. It would suck if it introduced more chaos and confusion into health/food discourse.

+1 for US & India.

I put in a quote request with the lab OP used, the economics might work out but we'd run into the problem of people sharing the insights/outliers on social media?

Also side note, this test seems exorbitantly expensive in India. $1100 for 1 kit! https://www.amazon.in/Phthalates-Test-Bus-Days-Schneider/dp/...

Would be nice to put through all the terrible plastic-wrapped produce you find at Coles and Woolies.

Paint is a huge source of microplastics that many are unaware of [1].

But also consider how you are wearing clothing made with plastic and the fact that it’s not hard to find 100% cotton shirts. Start figuring out how to have less plastic in your life. It’s not hard if you can be content to do it gradually.

[1] https://www.e-a.earth/plastic-paints-the-environment/

True. Also, no one is talking about tyres. They shed lot of micro plastics in their life time

I don’t even know, but it would not surprise me if whatever they spray on cotton clothing to make it feel new, which washes out with the first wash, is also some endocrine disrupter. It is insane to me that we have allowed our psychotic cooperations and the psychotic narcissistic people who run and are part of them to totally poison our whole world and lives. This is not even a new thing. I know for a fact that Nestle experimented with including these types of liquid plastics into baby food, testing the maximum amount of liquid plastic that could be added to baby jar food because it would result in babies not being able to take up nourishment, which would in turn cause parents to have to feed more and buy more. I don’t know to what level that was implemented, but I know of a scientist that was involved and asked to do thinks he could not reconcile with goods conscience, so he resigned. I’m sure they found someone else somewhere with less reservations of morals. Most likely most industrial baby food has immense amounts of liquid plastics in it.

No one that goes through the trouble of cooking their own baby food feeds their babies as much as when they feed jar food, that foes right through them.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercerisation], plus various lubricants most likely.

I wish they would have been more concentrated with their approach versus this spray and pray route (ie test chick-fil-a from different parts of the country and done it 1000 times so customers could actually impact a change to the biggest offenders). Would happily pay to crowdsource a much bigger project here.

The Boba Guys result is a real kick in the nuts. Using a shitty paperish straw for the environment but the core product being so high in these tests.

The "paper" straw, that's still coated in plastic and becomes unusably soggy long before the product is consumed.

i mean you're lucky if it's just coated in plastic, most are PFAS.

20x variation in their measurements of "Black Tea Pearls" (and 8x or so in the tea juice). Would have liked to see more reflection on that.

(I feel like I'm still seeing plastic straws for boba everywhere in San Jose; but I'm far from a frequent consumer)

Think of the turtle.

Plastic straws are natural predators. Removing them from the food chain will simply cause overpopulation in turtles.

> At least one of the 18 chemicals was found in every baby food, prenatal supplement, human breast milk, yogurt, and ice cream product that we tested, to name only a few categories.

Wow

My wife is a doctor dealing with (part of) the endocrine system and for years she has had us avoiding heating anything up in a plastic container and avoiding food/liquids+plastic where we can. She believes that these endocrine disruptors are very likely much worse for us than we currently realize, and that the research is eventually going to show that.

I think when people act like this they get a little irrational even if they have credentials and education. For example, the concern is limiting plastic intake. the solution is to limit it at home apparently, because this is within our realm of control. It's a fallacy though.

However, if this was approached scientifically, we might ask ourselves to identify where these plastics are most likely to come from when we get in contact from them. Are these few levers in our control really having any effect compared to the levers we have no control over that probably also contribute significant plastic in our lives? That is the first question to be asked before any action IMO. It is humbling I am sure to know of a problem but also subconsciously at least know there isn't anything you can do about it. Like most other pollution I guess; you have to breathe that air at the end of the day. And your only salve is the scientific community gathering evidence of these effects so that regulation might be written to target them specifically. Individually, we are powerless.

Why does she believe this? What data is it based on?

(I also avoid these things but only because I feel paranoid about it.)

From my understanding she feels that the mechanisms for these endocrine disrupters are there, that they act similarly to BPA, which is better understood, and that over time as research is done we will find more ways that they interact. The research is hard to do and takes a very long time, and quite a lot of it is not definitive because it is difficult with so many confounding factors, but there is a lot of it and more over time.

Specifically on heating plastics:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c01942

My wife is a researcher that has looked in to human breast milk, and blood metabolites. She has colleagues who have looked in to similar things. They all avoid plastics as much as possible.

Microwaving the food in the food containers reduced the plastic chemicals on average, it didn't cause any leakage according to the results. Weird.

> Additionally, acid in foods may break down the phthalate diesters we measured into monoesters, which our testing didn't detect. This means actual phthalate levels could be higher than reported.

Just curious, is it possible for the acid to break them down completely? Like, poof, no more harmful plastic monoester, it's now just plastic-adjacent goop?

More likely it didn't break down the phthalate itself but interfered with the monomer their test method created and measured

It's such a sad realization when you notice that most of the cost decreases for common products have happened through plasticizing everything.

It's basically impossible to find cheap natural products for cleaning consumables, for example, and it's really hard to find trustworthy global brands.

Plastic is entering absolutely every aspect of our lives and I really fear it's a "lead in gasoline" and "asbestos" moment for our generation :-( and it's going to be much harder to undo that either of those.

The sugar content of boba tea is much more relevant than trace levels of BPA. You will have disastrous health effects from sugar, versus potential effects from BPA.

This is so informative, thank you. I always got my kids baby food in glass, thinking it would reduce their microplastics exposure as well as reducing plastic waste. Turns out only one of those was true :(

It may still be true. Handling plastic over time (e.g. lots of squeezing and dropping) could plausibly cause an increase of plastic leakage over time.

You might try getting a cloth diaper service as well. All those plastics, plasticizers, and VOCs can leach into skin.

Great work, very interesting list!

Ideally the "% Limit" column would: 1. Be right-aligned 2. Have consistent formatting (i.e. same number of digits after the dot) 3. A little bar underneath each number showing relative scale (i.e. top entry is full width, last entry is 216.7 / 32571.4 = 0.00665307601, though maybe on a log scale for confusion? ;)

Being lazy here, but would love to know more about how testing for all of these plastics chemicals that are omnipresent is done in a way that ensures the measurement process or tools themselves do not contribute trace chemicals (e.g. lab tech wears latex gloves while handling the sample, whoops, etc).

They go into significant detail about their sample handling as well as documenting potential sources of contamination here: https://www.plasticlist.org/methodology

Nice and thank you! Will now go head my head in shame for not having bothered to click the “menu” icon on the main report :facepalm:

So, how about a startup for baby food / prenatals that shows transparent, third party testing for plastic compounds and heavy metals? I'm serious, would love to do this.

I love this idea. I hope to see this type of testing for everyday food as well. Here are some hurtles you might run across

* Can you source low plastic baby food, or low plastic food to process into baby food? Seems like large quantities of the food supply are contaminated.

* How can you comparatively advertise your low test results compared to the competition without being the victim of lawsuits? Lawsuits from established companies feels inevitable, but being involved in a lawsuit can harm funding rounds for startups, even if it’s baseless.

* Would brick & motor stores want to deal with you if you are essentially calling the rest of their products poison?

* Will you need special tools for processing the food that introduces minimal plastics?

For your third question -- there are already lots of products on the market in certain stores (Costco, Whole Foods, co-ops) that have third party testing or claims about purity.

Am I interpreting this correctly that Brita actually works as a limiter for plasticizers in tap water? Specially since tap water plasticizer content can vary by a lot?

If you are interested in water filters that filter out microplastics, look in to filters that have NSF ratings for it. Afaik only the berkefeld filters (NOT berkey) do. Also a lot of water filter companies are sketchy, and market their filters with terms like made from NSF rated components but do not have the actual full filter assemblies tested (red red red flag).

The study makes clear the water findings are inconclusive.

Did they test Wheat. I'm convinced something is up with the Wheat here. I've not seen Europeans gain anywhere near as much weight from eating bread as people do here. From my experience visiting Paris, croissants, butter and pastries pretty common on the menu. But still people are still pretty skinny in comparison. And like Pasta in Italy is a staple. Yet still, lower BMI there.

Nothing special about the wheat, it's the amount Americans are eating that is the problem.

When I lived in Asia I was amazed how skinny everyone was! Most people ate street vendor food which was mostly carbs and very little vegetables or protein.

The answer was...portion sizes! Even manual labor workers ate a lunch that was maybe 500 kcal. Total daily caloric intake rarely went over 2,000. While Americans average 3,600.

I think EU (at least some countries) bans glyphosate and tightly regulate other pesticide and herbicide usage on their wheat.

It probably has as much to do with their portion sizes as it does the actual wheat. Not to mention wildly different activity levels(people actually walk places far more often in the EU than they do in the US)

American bakers use more sugar.

Don't miss the DIY...

https://www.plasticlist.org/diy

Are there prospective studies on effects? Afaik it's just in vitro, and I wonder if our bodies have a natural mitigation mechanism that would allow up to a certain amount without harm. I'm just afraid of what I see as a trend to attribute small factors to big things that are caused by societal problems, etc.

Indeed. It reminds me of NNT's anti-GMO advocacy.

Well fuck.

How can I test for effects from endocrine-disrupting chemicals on my children? Are there blood tests that check for this?

You could get this plastic test: https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.com/products/microplastics-te.... I haven't tried it, but it's the only one I know of.

I don’t know what that’s measuring but TFA is about plastic chemicals like BPA, not microplastics

Of course my favorite blueberry RXBAR is full of bad things.

So basically the headline is that Europe and US have a very different limit for BPA, most US food is also under the European limit, but there are a handful of items that are only under the US limit but not under the much lower European limit?

I guess at some point will know how dangerous to people it is, and how risky it is compared to things that we really know are really bad, but that we are still eating. (for one reason or another).

If it turns out that it is a serious health threat, then pretty much anyone alive today is f*ked. and given the build up of it, will be for quite a while.

But we also have climate change, AI apocalypse, global thermonuclear war, mcDonalds, and all other things at the same time.

And we wont know if whatever it is replaced with, if will be replaced will turn out any better for humanity in the long term.

I've been using a reverse osmosis water filter at home to reduce microplastics and other contaminants from my drinking and cooking water for the past few years. I am using the #1 recommended product on Buyer's Guide[1] for others who are interested.

[1] https://buyersguide.org/countertop-reverse-osmosis-system/t/...

> I am using the #1 recommended product on Buyer's Guide[1] for others who are interested.

I’m reading their “review” but I don’t see anything other than common ChatGPT affiliate link blog spam. The “review” is just generic filler content about water filtration, not even about this product. These websites just collect products with profitable affiliate links, run the description of the product through an LLM to get it into a standard format, and then drive traffic to their list to collect affiliate revenue.

This website hasn’t reviewed anything. They’re just tricking people into clicking links to buy expensive products that will give them affiliate ad revenue.

Please don’t encourage the proliferation of these website by linking to them or endorsing their rankings.

Reverse osmosis leaches microplastics (because of the membrane):

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/scientists-find-about-a...

I guess it’s possible to distill the water and add clean minerals back in. (Not sure if “clean minerals” are something that you can obtain though.)

After the RO layer should exist another activated charcoal layer. This should block most of the leaked polyamide from the RO layer. My filter is this way.

You point to the membrane as a leakage source, but most RO systems also use flexible hosing in the assembly and from past work in medical devices it seems that flexible hosing is also a huge source of phthalate leakage.

Is that something that is also taken into account in higher end RO systems?

Reverse osmosis completely removes heavy metals from water. I’ll take my chances with microplastic over lead.

I don't want to be a downer, but given the pervasive amount of plastics in food, it seems essentially impossible to have a meaningful impact on overall plastic consumption for anyone who depends on a supermarket/restaurants for sustenance.

I'm also vegan and buy mostly organic products and cook at home. I get your point, though. There's only so much we can do. The tofu I eat daily comes in plastic containers, unfortunately.

Organic food doesn't seem to fare any better in the report.

Of course, a reverse osmosis filter system made of...Plastic.

Honestly what else are you going to make it out of? Metal? What about rust? Horrible idea to make it out of metal.

Is this sarcasm?

Rust is fine to consume, but there are also metals that don’t corrode in water.

Semipermeable osmatic membranes cannot be made out of metal

I’m not familiar with this buyers guide site. Is it critical rankings by a human or some sort of automatic ranking / SEO spam?

I tried reading their review. It was completely vacuous.

This isn’t a real review site. It’s an SEO trap for affiliate revenue. I thought HN readers could spot these affiliate spam sites, but I guess not everyone is on to this scam.

> The lab was able to test 705 samples which came from 296 different food products

> Here's a complete list of all the presently-available food samples (excluding vintage foods) we tested that exceeded a published daily intake limit for any of the chemicals we tested:

41 samples in table

> That said, with the 24 exceptions above,

What, what? There are 41 exceptions in that table, and still more than 24 even if you deduplicate.

These 41 samples came from 24 unique products

One thing I'd like to see tested: I have a theory that reusable plastic containers leach out most of their chemicals early in their life, so the amount imparted to any food diminishes with each use. Under this theory, I save and reuse old plastic containers for a long time, and avoid new ones (especially single use). Could this be true, or misguided?

I'd expect almost the opposite. Plastics left in the sun tend to turn brittle, I'd expect that to be a big contributor to microplastics generally in the environment as those plastics break down.

But I agree, would be interesting to know.

I've been switching my stuff over to glass when possible. But, unfortunately unless I become a full-time farmer there's no escaping the fact that my food comes wrapped in plastic that's wrapped in plastic and further wrapped in more plastic. Single use plastics for food should be heavily restricted.

Why not both? My guess would be, they release one type of horrible thing early on, then graduate to some other horrible thing through short term degradation.

We switched out plastic containers for glass and silicone for the most part some time back. Personally I was just routinely disappointed with the quality of the tupperware-type things, so why not spent a few bucks more once and get something that lasts? It still will have a plastic top or parts but you can at least heat it up in the glass part.

I don't have any sources handy but I believe conventional wisdom is that plastic decomposition accelerates with age due to the cumulative effect of UV exposure.

Not exactly food containers, but apparently, textiles release most of their microplastics after the first few washes [1]. So, the longer you wear a tshirt, the safer it becomes.

[1]: https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/microplastics-from-te...

At the same time, some containers like Huskee cups literally start breaking down after a few years [1], so it’s not just microplastics, but you can see bigger chunks of plastic ending up in your food.

[1]: https://uk.help.huskee.co/en-US/what-does-end-of-life-cups-r...

Misguided probably...

"They certainly did not advise putting deli containers in the microwave or dishwasher. Warner puts it simply: “The more you reuse them, the more they would be likely to leach chemicals because of the repeated washing and exposure to acidic things and soap, and scouring them in cycles. "

https://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/is-it-safe-to-reuse....

tl;dr -> if you care about your health with regards to plastic ingestion, just use glass or metal.

Absolutely amazing work. I wonder what kind of funding / model could make something like this sustainable. Presumably, as manufacturing processes change, everything on this list has to be re-tested again? The current website has no way of crowd sourcing + verifying data, but that would maybe be a nice addition

basically you should avoid all wild caught sea food. has roughly 50x such contaminants vs land based animal protein

32,571.4% ? 320X the limit?

Why do we continue down that path, are we that stupid collectively? We know the fertility of men is falling year after year, we know this, yet things go on as if it's not important.

We could calmly debate the amount on the limit, but at this point we know the job we have to do.

Well if <10nm pieces of plastic are swirling around Mount Everest in the "Death Zone", you bet that they are swirling around on your food down here where we have had an abandoned mercury mine leeching into the South Bay for almost 2 centuries, an island next to SF that in the Cold War they Navy would paint ships with radioactive paint to see if they could spray it off with the run-off going into the bay and parts of West Oakland still you can get lead poisoning just being outside in 80 years after the shipyards closed at the end of the war.

I love the Bay Area, native to the East Bay and no matter how hard I try to escape, I always find myself crawling right back to San Francisco's sweet embrace, but in case it isn't clear to the people just arriving and driving the cost up higher than London, Paris or Berlin, its never been anything less than an excellent example of the horrible things people will do to each other and the planet to satisfy their impulse for either money or power. Superfund sites abound in the six counties around the bay, plastic in your food is probably the least of your actual worries.

> Mattie came from far away, from New Orleans into the East Bay. He said, 'this is a Mecca!' I said, 'This ain't no Mecca, man. This place is fucked!' Six months go by, he has no home, he has no food, he's all alone. Mattie said, 'fool me once, shame on you.' Didn't fool him twice, he moved back to New Orleans!

- "A Journey to the End of the East Bay", Rancid

I don't see much that I recognize as "food" in the report, and in the database I see that actual foods — eggs, bananas, suchlike — are no-detect across the board. Conclusion: eat food, instead of whatever these things are.

Actual foods with plenty of detected DEHP/DBP:

Salmon, Chicken breast, Beef (ribeye), Rice, Pasta, Tomatoes, Cow Milk, and a Stanford University Dining Meal (Beans, Chicken, Rice, Cauliflower)

There's only one tomato item and it's ND across the board? Agree on the other stuff, you shouldn't eat animal products because of the bioaccumulation issues.

I punched in all the stuff I ate this week and almost none of it is in their test. It's very skewed to weird processed stuff, there's only a few items from real produce markets.

It's skewed towards what a bunch of Bay area college students and their friends eat. Seems accurate to me.

For reference the guy funding this is the same person this letter was sent to: https://github.com/drop-ice/dear-github-2.0

I wonder if the Starbucks and blue bottle coffee results are due to the plastic in the throwaway cups. The Nestle instant coffee (which comes in a glass jar) had much lower scores in comparison.

Really interesting how microwaving food containers didn't do anything, in fact results usually were lower before microwaving than after.

(search "microwave)

I owe this entire team a beer - but I don’t see Russian River or Lagunitas on the list. Anyway, let me know and I can meet you at Toronado.

Yet more evidence that the Age Depopulation Bomb’s main root causes is plastic endocrine disruptors

Welp not drinking boba again

This should be run globally. Or as globally as it could be run.

so do we yet have baby food companies that have no plastics? I would buy those asap.

If you want one takeaway, it's: rethink your boba consumption.

so these are the ones in my balls (•ˋ _ ˊ•)

Oh god, the almond milk. I guess that’s that habit kicked.

I guess I will have to kick the human breast milk, my mom will be happy.

Can someone explain why this is the case:

The salmon in the first table shows BPA levels at 500-1000% the safe level, with salmon near the top of the range of all tested products, but in the separate "Results" page, if I search for "salmon", the same products show up but the BPA levels are only around the 20th percentile of tested samples.

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