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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

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> If you look at a piece of plastic through a powerful microscope, you'll see alternating layers of hard material and soft material. […]

> [The researchers] discovered that the process [of forming microplastics] begins in the soft layers, which grow weaker over time due to environmental degradation and can break off even when the plastic is not under stress. By themselves, these soft pieces break down quickly in the environment. Problems arise when the failure of a soft layer allows hard layers to break off.

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I’m eager to see research confirm whether microplastic contamination is harmful for humans. Given that 'These can be smaller than a virus -- just the right size to disrupt cells and even alter DNA.’, I’m not too hopeful that this is harmless.

I too would love to see a follow-up study. Unfortunately the research was done at Columbia University, which has suffered massive arbitrary grant freezes....

It would be a disastrous blow to oil indystry if everyone agreed we have to move away from both plastic and oil.

We produce more and more plastic each year, every new law reducing oil consumption is greated with doubling the amount of plastic we produce.

Microplaatic is in our brain now, causing damage that is irreversable.

Freezing grants is just one of many reasons why we need to put stop to that cancer which is oil industry.

Could you send me some links for the irreversible damage that micro plastics cause in the brain.

That’s about as likely to happen as everyone deciding to stop doing illegal drugs because they’re bad for us.

Plastic is a fantastical space age material and we never gave it the fear or respect it deserves. Its usage should have been regulated from the beginning.

Disposable plastic shopping bags are kind of insane if you think about it.

Arbitrary?

Yes.

If only Columbia was a private university with a 15 billion dollar endowment, then they wouldn't need the government's permission to poke at some plastic.

This is a ridiculous bad faith talking point. That's not how endowments work, nor would it be possible for universities to spend them down for very long. Scientific research is an engine of innovation in the US, and it's penny wise pound foolish to attempt to save money by cutting of NIH and NSF dollars.

Private universities can, in fact, fund their own researchers.

No - these universities do not have the funds required to sustainably conduct research at the scale that it currently does.

They absolutely do have the funds required to sustain research. If they're spending their own money instead of the government's, then maybe they would have to be a bit selective and cut out the crap, but that wouldn't be such a bad thing anyway.

That's not how most basic science works. It's easy with hindsight to identified research that didn't work or seemed dumb at the outset, but some small percentage of exploratory projects turn out to be major advances. Studying algae ion channels was not intended to be applied research but ended up with the discovery of green fluorescent protein, which won a nobel prize and opened the door to immunohistochemistry, optogenetics, and other crucially important biomedical advances. There are countless examples like this. It's trivially easy to find failed research too... but that's the process. It's only expensive if you ignore all of the innovation that comes downstream of the initial grant process.

Why is this getting downvoted ? Past grants for this type of research at URI, for example, are in the $4M - $8M /yr range.

[0] https://rochesterbeacon.com/2024/04/17/new-microplastics-res...

Because my take doesn't conform to the group narrative.

Yes, I read that 75% of scientists in the U.S. are considering leaving due to grant freezes and politicization.

If I recall correctly from the previous big discussion on the front page about microplastics, the one about a spoonful of the stuff in your brain, the general takeaway was that it's pretty universally agreed upon that it's bad, the medical community is mostly disagreeing over just how bad it is.

Also what plastics we even mean, and which ones are bad and which are indifferent.

Using ‘plastic’ as a category is about as precise as ‘metal’.

Asbestos is chemically inert. Yet it causes lung cancer. Why?

The answer is simply that it continually damages the cells in the lung due to it's needle like structure.

I assume (but critically don't have proof) that if we find a cancer link to plastics it will be due to a similar sort of structural interaction. I don't think the specific type of plastic matters, though I'm sure some will be worse than others.

In this specific case, very unlikely that plastics as a whole cause cancer due to some structural form issue. Saying ‘microplastics’, to compare to asbestos, is similar to saying ‘silicon’. Asbestos is a particular form of crystalline tube shaped silica (aka silicon dioxide).

Many other forms of silicon are both cancer causing, and completely inert.

I suspect plastics will similarly have only small portions that are really nasty. We’re making a huge variety of novel types though every day. Which is part of the concern.

what we call ‘plastic’ has such a huge variety of molecular weights and compositions it’s like trying to find common ground between say nickel, stainless steel, and uranium.

We already know some plastics cause cancer, and some precursors to the same plastics cause cancer.

And a bigger issue IMO is plasticizers which modify the plastics structure to make them more malleable and less brittle.

Even asbestos divides into several families with very different levels of carcinogenicity. Crocidolite "blue asbestos" was first banned long ago due to its severe effects, but chrysotile (white asbestos) is far less dangerous.

There is this interesting study from last year that looks at the health effects of chrysotile, in a population exposed to far more of it than possibly anywhere else on earth: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38247448/

We are observing uptick in colon cancers. One of the theories is that microplastics might be contributing to it

The difficult part is that microplastics are so widespread that it's difficult/impossible to even find a control.

There really isn't an animal alive that doesn't have some degree of microplastics in their body.

We've basically turned microplastics into the new baseline condition of life on Earth

The important point is that this mechanism works only for the so-called semi-crystalline plastics.

Even if they are less frequently encountered, there are also completely amorphous plastics and completely crystalline plastics, and these appear to not be prone to fragmentation into micro-plastics.

The conclusion is that there should be efforts to develop alternative plastics to the more frequently used semi-crystalline plastics, which have this serious disadvantage of generating persistent micro-plastic fragments.

Therefore this article offers a potential solution to the micro-plastic problem, which might work, like when freons have been replaced with less harmful refrigerating agents, even if those may have a slightly less refrigeration efficiency.

Honestly, what struck me most is how passive this whole process is. I always pictured microplastics coming from wear-and-tear or active grinding, but the idea that plastic can just sit there and quietly shed nano-shrapnel over time is pretty unsettling.

Yeah and all the store of plastics in all the landfills and waters everywhere is shedding as we speak. I mean, its bad, but what can you do.

> what can you do.

We could stop the manufacturers from producing more and more of the stuff every year. That would be a pretty important step.

Burn the plastic instead of dumping it

If you look at some plastic that has been outside in the sun for a while (a year or five) such as a toy or a plastic bag, it gets very fragile. If it's thin like a plastic bag, just the wind can break it apart. For thicker plastic parts, probably rain is enough to flush off the outer layer or powdered plastic every now and then.

Now that you say it, I'm picturing all those old sun-bleached plastic chairs or toys that basically crumble if you touch them

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