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Comment by ButlerianJihad | Hacker News Reader

Even more so: plastics are not a specific chemical and they are not a specific material. Plastic is a category of materials that is very broad and very wide. You can make plastics out of almost anything. Therefore, to hate on plastics is to basically hate on an entire category of engineering and material design but not to actually know what a plastic is... sheer ignorance.

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Yes, it's a category of materials that is overwhelmingly populated by a much more specific, ultra-cheap and therefore ultra-pervasive, set of chemicals which are shown in study after study to have worrying characteristics.

Anything that shows evidence of omnipresence, endocrine disruption, bioaccumulation, and inter-generational transmission should be extremely, extremely closely scrutinized.

To think otherwise is absolute braindead contrarianism, full-stop.

Personally, I think that the Microplastics Moral Panic is a textbook study of F.U.D.

There is practically nothing that ordinary people can do for prevention, mitigation, diagnosis or treatment of microplastics in our bodies, so I therefore conclude that it is futile and wasteful to worry or argue about it, unless you have abundant free time and resources to get paranoid strangers all in a frenzy, for no good reason.

Did this apply to people freaking out about lead a couple decades ago?

What about those advocating for smoking bans in shared spaces?

Cholera outbreaks near the city water wells?

Or are microplastics special in some way?

We didn't ban water or metals because of the things in your examples.

Discover what plastic is harmful and we can't start to talk.

This is a fine argument against banning plastics. This is unrelated to "Microplastics Moral Panic is a textbook study of F.U.D." though.

If microplastics are a case of FUD, then there's nothing to look into. How and why would anyone discover anything surrounding a case of moral panic/FUD? By definition, there's nothing to discover.

I half-assed try to avoid plastic in contact with (especially very) hot food or drink, and avoid it in long-term food containers, in no small part because I've seen things like plastic cooking spoons losing non-microscopic parts of themselves in food, and I find the stains plastic storage containers acquire after a little use kinda worrisome (I'd rather my reusable storage containers not be that permeable, thank you very much), but otherwise agree that any real amount of effort to avoid microplastics would probably do more good if it took the form of a 20-minute jog per week, i.e. "don't even consider worrying about it unless you've really, really got all your other health stuff sorted out"

Like I'm pretty sure the bigger health risk with a plastic soda straw is the soda, not the straw, you know?

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