An interesting exercise is to view https://www.plasticlist.org/ and sort the items from highest to lowest.
Whatever your gut tells you about what has the most or least plastic in the food you're eating is probably incorrect.
War rations from the 1950s had the most, along with fast food cheeseburgers and Whole Foods grass fed steak.
Kraft Mac and cheese was low, especially after microwaving.
Previous discussion:
Plasticlist Report – Data on plastic chemicals in Bay Area foods https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42525633 - Feb 2025 (200 comments)
And another discussion for the same link is currently underway on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44366548
p.s. thank you, what a terrific resource
How microwaving can decrease the amount of microplastics? Any link for an explanation?
Nat Friedman, who I believe commissioned this site, said he was surprised at this finding: https://x.com/natfriedman/status/1872836471398539379
Direct link to a paper in replies if you don't use X: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286203208_Effect_of...
Microwaving causes individual particles to join into a delicious plastic-cheese emulsion, making them undetectable.
I figure it made the plastic less detectable by whatever measurement method was used.
This is interesting -- it does put into context some of what was hyped up recently in the news, for example, the Fairlife Core Power microplastics. While it is higher in Core Plastics, it's not off by an order of magnitudes compared with other milk products.
The other question I have -- what does someone who consumes very little microplastics look like? Increased lifespan, decreased risk of cancer (by how much), does it have lead-like outcomes, etc... Avoiding microplastics seems like a lot of inconvenience (at least for an individual) -- I'd want to make sure the payoff at the end is worth it.
I would think -as microplastic particles have been found even in creatures in the deepest parts of the ocean- that it is nigh impossible to avoid them.
Is this going to be one of those things where in a 100 years people laugh at us for putting everything in plastic like we look back at romans etc using lead and mercury for stuff
I don't think so, plastic wrapping is a massive boost for keeping food hygienic in transport and both to avoid waste and reduce pathogen contamination. Probably a much bigger benefit than the microplastic contamination.
It might be they will be like "shame they didn't have this awesome new material that has 0 environmental/health impact that we have today" though.
There are no clear substitutes for plastic in a lot of applications even when you disregard price.
We will see. It's microplastics in semen and brains that may be seen as negligent pollution. Our generations haven't inherited much active pollution, futures have more opportunity for it.
The future is not known. Let's see. We obviously didn't all die of food poisoning before the invention of plastic.
I think most people would be okay if "only" the 80% of food that could manage paper packaging switched.
I'm curious what paper packaging you have in mind, that isn't also lined with plastics. Maybe we could use more wax lined items? I don't know. But it is down right comical how people will avoid some macro plastic things only to be using something that has micro plastic by design.
I think that if people are trying to avoid plastics but unknowingly using them anyway due to misleading design or greenwashing then their heart is in the right place and we shouldn't sneer at them. At least they're conscious of the problems and trying to do better. Call out the companies who are doing this. Don't blame people for being confused by something designed to be as confusing as possible.
Totally fair. My exposure has been large on folks that virtue signal that they avoid plastic things. To the point that they are largely sneering at people that don't make the same choices they do.
To your point, though, we could use less sneering overall.
For that matter, what's wax? I bet at least some waxes are basically plastic these days.
Waxes are pretty similar to plastics and can be produced by similar processes from the things. The main difference is that they're a lot more biodegradable.
If asked their opinions, probably true.
If you watched their actual choices, when confronted with shiny transparent-and-or-colorful familiar plastic vs. paper replacements...yeah.
(And as soon as you have paper packaging, the big companies want to "improve" it with 57 varieties of chemicals & coatings & treatments & crap. Not to say that manufacturing paper is anything resembling clean & green, either.)
Isn’t the better material for transport, silicone?
> I don't think so, plastic wrapping is a massive boost for keeping food hygienic in transport and both to avoid waste and reduce pathogen contamination. Probably a much bigger benefit than the microplastic contamination.
One can make even grander claims about having plumbing vs. the effects of lead poisoning.
Yes, but its going to be like the romans where their use of lead was nowhere as problematic as people like to think.
Lead is so obviously bad for that we have known it for thousands of years.
And it wasn't until the 1970s that the US banned lead paint in houses. 200 years after Ben Franklin wrote that it was bad.
Like, clearly plastics are bad. And yet, humans like the convenience, the utility.
"Plastic is bad" is the current fad. There is nothing clear about it. Sure Macroplastic causes well documented damage. I don't know of any proven effects of Microplastics in large animals/humans. The argument seems to be more "it can't be good". I'm not at all invested in plastic and I'm all for protecting our environment, but I sense some sort of mass hysteria going on here again. Good that people are documenting the spread of man-made stuff and look for negative effects, no need for the permanent fearmongering. Also plastics are very different, some are rather bad (pvc,epoxy) others quite harmless (pe,pp).
I think that's more because we don't have better options than anything else.
And the profits! Why would someone exchange a personal short term profit for the society health? :-)
What profits? Cardboard wrapping is cheaper than plastic. Plastic is chosen because it’s better.
But then people on the internet can't rant about a cartoon caricature of what capitalism actually is.
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Also, as a reminder, leaded gas (avgas) is still used all over the United States pumping lead into the environment. If you live near an airport you are especially at increased risk of lead exposure in the environment.
The FAA finally approved 100UL gas for small airplanes. I'm not sure how widely it's available now.
This is just for general aviation though. Jet fuel has no lead in it. Not that this means it’s healthy, just that jet exhaust pollution does not include appreciable amounts of lead.
Also also, shit tons of poor folk all over the country live in homes full of lead pipes and paint that their landlords are too cheap to fix.
Asbestos too, though that's less threatening as long as it's not being actively fucked with.
Generally speaking, it's better to cover up asbestos than it is to remove it. Remediation attempts can easily go wrong, moving the asbestos from "hidden and staying put under tiles" to "free floating dust in the air and your lungs". One of my parents' friends got mesothelioma from doing just that.
I remember, about 1968-1972, my parents replacing the dishes we ate off of. The old ones were some kind of glazed pottery-type stuff. I didn't at all understand at the time, but I'm fairly sure now that they replaced them because of concern for lead in the glaze.
Then there’s also the radioactive glow in the dark cookware that used to trend.
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yet as late as the 19th century lead was in make up
The time it takes us from finding out something is dangerous to finally doing something about it is astonishingly long. Lead, Asbestos, CFCs, PFAS, etc
And we have a President currently trying to bring back clean, beautiful asbestos (it's still used in a few places actually). A wonder material, good for protecting against hot stuff.
Yes. Humans in general are very bad at dealing with delayed consequences.
Typically because there are entrenched financial interests incentivized not to change.
And because our brains evolved in very different environments - where serious hidden delayed consequences were very rare, and life was short & cheap.
The EPA is currently reviewing its ban on asbestos.
It's not uncommon for the pipe supplying mains water to (older) houses in the UK to still be lead.
We live in an older house in the US. We got a note in the mail from the city that pipe from the main to the house might be lead. They looked at building plans/ permits. The length is (15ft) so the impact is minimal if it’s actually lead. The piping inside is copper and pvc for drains. But we had the water tested anyway. Lead isn’t good for you.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/health/2024-11-19/thousands-of-mas...
Its not really common either. much as been replaced. In areas where it is common the pipes are often old enough that the lead is covered with limescale sealing it off from the water (lead pipes would now be many decades old), and I have read that water supplies in some areas have additives to seal off lead too. You can also have your supply tested (free AFAIK).
Water pipes are plastic now, funnily enough.
WIth the right mix of minerals in water it's generally safe, but like in Flint municipalities can screw up that content of ions/minerals in water and leach it out (remove the protective patina)
Does lead leach into the water like plastic pipes do ?
Old lead pipes had hard untreated water flowing through them. The lead pipes would internally (normally) be coated with salts, and the lead did not (normally) leach into water. But soft water does not have calcium or magnesium in high enough quantities. Also, even with hard water, pressure changes could loosen the scale deposits.
Microplastic risk is not anywhere close to lead, we should not even be discussing these two things in the same paragraph.
Lead is bad because it mimics calcium and iron in our body, binding to proteins, sneaking into bones, causes anemia, disrupts brain function...
Plastic is inert, it is made of long chains of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. These long chains do not break down easily. Microplastic, while it does not pass through the body, and can accumulate in organs, its impact is still under study. We aren't ingesting high doses.
BUT, bad pipes may leach other stuff. Some additives in certain plastics seem to mimic hormones and potentially disrupt them. Some additives are carcinogenic. (but only in high doses I guess). Certified modern pipes are safer.
Yes, depending on alkalinity and so forth --- see Flint, Michigan in the news a while back, or on-going efforts to remove solder containing lead from the plumbing aisle.
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Yes, the only reason we are ok with some old lead pipes left is because they're coated in scale build up. As long as that's not disturbed it's not dangerous anymore.
Clean, beautiful lead.
I can hear him saying it, shit.
I’ve been joking he’s going to try and bring back leaded gas.
> Lead is so obviously bad
Yeah, though I’m much more concerned about those that are not so obviously bad, that we still don’t know how terrible they are. You know, the unknown unknows.
…and yet we actively used it in water pipes, painted our walls with it, and poisoned the air by putting it in gasoline—all in the 20th-century.
It's almost like the net benefit of lead was actually quite high or something.
How does this obvious badness manifest, exactly?
I can drink water from a lead pipe all day and suffer not even a headache.
EDIT I'm serious. What is the obvious manifestation? Because the manifestations I've heard of aren't so obvious.
If you do it for decades (or have low pH water?), you will slowly get dumber and probably get dementia or something.
Yes. But that isn't obvious. I asked for obvious.
Obvious is "every time I do it I get a headache".
And ironically the best way to get the plastics out of our systems is blood letting. So in the future, we are the backwards ones, and the modern peoples use leeches to make themselves healthy.
They'll laugh at us for trusting any information we get from social media, too. It's the epistemological equivalent of licking the floor of a public restroom.
Do we laugh at Romans for using lead and mercury?
I'd say they did things that were harmful that they did not know they were harmful. Unless they did it in the face of clear evidence of the harm, what is there to mock?
I expect the people in 100 years from now will laugh at us for doing all of the things that we absolutely know are harming the environment right now. Perhaps they will even laugh at us for hand wringing about plastics on the possibility that they might be harmful while doing next to nothing about the things we do actually have evidence for,
Apparently, the smarter or more informed ones did know, or at least suspect, that lead is bad for you. There are writings from the time which mention this. Also, led pipes were not as bad as some imagine, since they would, after a while, become protected from leaching by a layer of calcium deposits.
And those smart ones got vilified and banned from every forum for speaking disinformation, just like today.
Having your opinion rejected does not necessarily mean that your opinion is the correct one, sure there are many people shunned from discourse that are in some way correct, just as there are lots of people who are shunned for being quite in the wrong. Sadly we can't rely on public opinion, no matter which way, to judge the worth of an idea.
I have to add that I hear this premise expressed quite often from people peddling low-evidence medical advice and not-quite-believable conspiracy, who try to give credence to their theory by pointing out that the people-you-don't-like disagree with them, no matter what the grounds of disagreement actually are. (I've seen people refer to this thought pattern as the "Galileo fallacy", although we also shouldn't let these named fallacies turn us away from actual interesting ideas just because the public disagrees, too. It's a balance.)
That's strange. I usually hear this expressed by people who have personally had their views censored out of the public sphere by some authority who was actively marketing the opposite view.
I usually hear what you've expressed from people who are glad that other people were censored: a vague argument for the existence of the possibility of censorship that isn't meant as political suppression, one which usually relies on accusing any possibly censored hypothetical person of likely being crazy, stupid, or a foreign spy.
Rather than an argument, it's an encouragement to use those priors when calculating the odds of the next "conspiracy theory" being censored off the internet actually being true. Remember, arrested people are usually guilty, because most of the guilty people I know about were arrested...
It is optimistic to think they will "laugh" about the environments harm. That would mean they would not suffer a lot of the consequences of said harm. Let's hope it will not be that bad to become fanatical about it.
Where there’s an engineer, there’s a way - it just may not be the solution you seek.
I would be less inclined to laugh at Romans, since my grandparents still used lead in plenty of dangerous applications. Why do we need to go any further back than 100-years?
I mean laugh out of context I dont think anyones specifically laughing at something they didnt know but in the context of smuggness of what we know now
We wont do a damn thing about the dangers of micro plastic now until it gets incredibly bad that we cant ignore it.
Id say they would actually laugh at us for that though in the future
What are the confirmed dangers of micro plastics?
I'll concede that they are everywhere, and they are detectable. What is the established consensus on the harm that they cause?
It remains underexplored, but there's many papers released and many studies being done to try and confirm. A big one is hormonal; BPA is a xenoestrogen, emulating the effects of estrogen on human bodies, with studies showing links between it and reduced fertility. There's been ~19000 studies on it so far, most since the 2000s (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=bisphenol+a).
Jump-off points:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics_and_human_health...
It seems like there are issues with determining what harmful levels are.
The BPA wikipedia article says the primary source of human exposure is from canned food. That seems like it could be solved with a specific fix. It is not stated, but I would assume that the exposure from particles distributed in the environment would be insignificant if there is a known primary source that humans frequently interact with.
And there are so many alternatives and we don't know if they aren't even worse than BPA. Also unless you get bottle water/soda/etc in glass you are gonna get it there too, even aluminum cans are lined with the stuff.
Infertility, increased risk of cancer. There are a few research papers about those topics
What's interesting is, with the Internet, they will be looking back and seeing what we're saying we think they'll be saying about us.
Assuming archives are up, hello from the past! :wave:
And also "harmful compared to what?".
It is often the case that something with desired good effects also has undesirable bad side effects, but the good effects and their value outweigh the bad effects.
I don't know if the Romans made tradeoffs like this; they were well aware of its chronic toxicity which resulted in plumbism. But you have to remember that we're talking about a diverse ancient empire. People today know that stuffing your face with garbage food and in large amounts is bad for you, and the speed of communication and scope of regulation are might higher, but the "practice" is widespread anyway.
The environment? In 100 years? Laughing?
Come on ...
Like asbestos? Oh nevermind... that's legal again
I would like to thank the activists at r/asbestosremovalmemes for normalizing eating it, first step in normalizing it and making sure everyone will be entitled to compensation.
Are... you under the impression that people who actually study history mock the Romans for their... use of lead? You need to read more actual sources than the hindustanitimes.com listicles if you're coming to this impression.
This has to be judged against the alternative, which is… I’m not sure in many cases. As just one example, think about how much more of a pain it is to package/ store/ transport/ consume milk in bottles compared to plastic. Of course there’s also paperboard — I think (I Am Not A Packaging Expert) milk is actually easier to handle with noon-plastic than many other foods. Consider what it would mean to avoid plastic for selling meat I think that means going back to individually prepared paper packages, which would be much more expensive.
This is not to say it might not be worth it in some cases, just that it is a trade-off, and plastic is remarkably good at what it does.
There are a few options but they are pretty radical departures. There are a few grocery stores, typically natural food co-op type places in the US, that will have no packaging. These places you weigh out your peanuts and put them into your own bag, or they might have burlap or similar. The issue is more when you get into wet things. Meat, cheese, etc. these can be wrapped in wax paper. But thats not going to work if you have a central butcher factory.
I’ve heard of a grocery store in France that packages everything in glass. https://ledrivetoutnu.com/pages/le-super-tout-nu?srsltid=Afm...
I think about this a lot actually. I grew up with glass milk bottles and paper meat packaging.
Even being able to estimate this is incredibly far outside of my expertise or knowledge, but I suspect for most products plastic is only cheaper because the externalities are not factored into the price. It seems totally possible to me that for a lot of things glass packaging would be cheaper than plastic if plastic were priced appropriately.
Other things I'm not sure. We could probably approach it differently, using different plastics and requiring re-use. It would be interesting to hear a genuine packaging expert's opinion on the balance point here, I doubt it's truly zero plastic for food. But maybe.
FWIW I think any non-glass non-plastic food packaging is also actually plastic. Paperboard and aluminum & steel cans all have plastic linings at least. I think almost exactly everything does these days. Glass being the one exception still.
To my chagrin, I recently learned that plain old parchment paper is made with plastic. In trying to avoid plastic as much as possible in the kitchen, I seem to be falling back to the ancient technique of slathering every cooking surface in butter or lard, and even that doesn't always cut it. (Try cleanly removing a cheesecake from a springform pan without the use of parchment paper or Teflon coating...)
By the way, even glass bottles aren't safe, apparently, unless the cap material is carefully vetted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44332912
Oh interesting about the parchment, I had heard once that it was silicone-coated paper and never verified that. It seems like it mostly still is.
At one point (my original training & first career was as a cook) I got interested in what was used before modern culinary parchment paper, which I'm sure you know is pretty new and totally unrelated to what was called parchment historically.
Seems like the answer was a huge array of per-application techniques though, with wax paper being the most similar to parchment but obviously not appropriate for a lot of things. Sometimes a layer of beeswax was used directly, melted into the pan and cooled; a lot of things that will absorb oil and stick don't do that with wax. Though others will stick to the wax and then it's a mess. Like I said per-application.
I believe cheesecake is a pretty new food but there are some similar/related dishes in slavic & french food traditions. For crustless custards the french moves have mostly been to just cut it out of the pan and then clean up the sides in a separate step. Either smoothing with a hot knife, or by applying some other intentional rough texture like crosshatching, or coating it in ganache or piped pastry cream or something to hide the damage.
For the slavic moulded easter cheeses (pashka) they lay wet cheesecloth into the pan first and the final food just has that texture on it along with the moulded pattern. Though those aren't baked, but some modern cheesecakes aren't baked either. I have also known pastry cooks that just ran the crust all the way up the side of the pan. Not quite the standard move and it changes the crust:filling ratio by quite a bit but it's not freakish either.
Sorry if this is an unwanted info dump, it's an interesting subject that I've also spent some time on in various ways over the years.
I grew up in a world where there was broken glass bottles everywhere - in parking lots, in playgrounds, on the street. I've never seen that externality of broken glass calculated.
Were those from milk bottles or from alcohol bottles?
Have you seen plastic bottle/bags lying everywhere?
At least you can actually see (and sweep) that detritus.
You’ve never seen glass bottle deposit requirements? Mostly solved this problem where I live.
There are many sustainable alternatives to plastics for perishables.
Which are most cost effective?
Who pays for The Ocean Cleanup, for example? That's an external cost.
I hate to doubt studies, but with advice like: "Invest in a zippered fabric bag and ask the dry cleaner to return your clothes in that instead of those thin sheets of plastic." I am doubtful. I assert that the number one source of microplastics in a house will be clothing. Your "lint trap" in a dryer? Largely microplastics.
Dust in your house? Again, largely made up of fabric fibers. Which are increasingly plastics. Especially so if you have a carpeted house.
I'm not fully against some of these ideas and studies. And I am all for reducing our exposure to microplastics, where we can. But folks largely ignore the microplastic lining in cans, thinking they are avoiding that plastic bottle. We seem to have done a great job of avoiding large plastics in the fear of microplastics. Meanwhile, folks have very little intuition on where the microplastics come from.
You're omitting the fact that cotton and other non-plastic fibers do exist and are a valid clothing choice in many circumstances.
No? I'm pointing out that people tend to not pay attention. Synthetic fabrics make up the majority of all carpets. And are a growing majority in clothing.
My overall point is that the majority of the plastics that make up "microplastics" are not things that people think of when you say "plastic."
Fabric fibers get into the bloodstream through inhalation, based on recent studies I've seen (feel free to challenge if this isn't settled science).
This seems to make that cheap polyester shirt infinitely more of a risk origin than some cereal with microplastics.
Thanks, good insight. Reminds me of people wanting to save CO2 and then do the silliest thing but ignore the big chunks.
Can you share a good source with some details on where the bulk of microplastic exposure comes from?
Sadly, I make that largely as an assertion that I don't know how to disprove. I do remember seeing a study on it at one point, but did not save it. I think this and tires were much higher than people contend with.
At a personal level, it is just kind of eye opening to see how much lint I generate in the dryer on a regular basis. Granted, cat hair also makes up an amusingly sizeable portion of that source.
If you do find a good read that is counter to this, please share. It would not be the first thing I was personally wrong about. Probably wouldn't be the last, either. :D
Textiles do make a huge amount of microplastics. This has been known for awhile.
As for dust in the home - I have not heard these are microplastics. And given how it reacts I do not think it is.
The tire thing was a more recent discovery but makes a lot of sense - tire dust cannot be good for us to inhale or be getting into our bodies via other methods.
I don't think I've seen too much discussion of home dust, all told. Just going on a general view of what else could it be? Yes, dead skin and such makes up a lot. But as we use more and more synthetic fibers, those are spun far thinner than the thinnest plastic sheet. By design. Hard to believe that they don't make up a large portion of the microplastics out there.
Would be delighted to find out I'm wrong on this.
Just from a few days ago:
> Microplastics ... in glass bottles contain more microplastic particles than those in plastic bottles, cartons or cans. This was the surprising finding of a study conducted by the Boulogne-sur-Mer unit of the ANSES Laboratory for Food Safety. The scientists hypothesised that these plastic particles could come from the paint used on bottle caps. Water and wine are less affected than other beverages. [1]
[1] https://www.anses.fr/en/content/caps-glass-bottles-contamina...
we probably just need to train soil bugs to treat plastic like dead leaves. researchers like rillig(germany) and Ting Xu(berkeley) already did something there in this direction. next move maybe just making sure these bugs don’t mess with roots and stay alive in real farm dirt. if that clicks, soil fixes itself while we sleep literally
That's how you could break down macroplastics into microplastics but how would those bugs digest the microplastics? And how do you achieve that without breaking down plastics you don't want to be broken down - after all, durability is the main reason plastics are used everywhere.
While such things are actually already possible as of now, there are always forces opposed to overall progress in health. You can probably guess who will not like it. So people need to become more clever/savvy in terms of how to implement such strategies without getting shot down in the process.
there are some bacteria that can process it but they are rare and not very quick at doing it. I don't think that's a solution.
Best idea of a solution I can think of is modifying bacteria to consume microplastics and releasing them into the wild. Make them a permanent part of the ecosystem.
Problem is they'd probably also start consuming macroplastics, and every plastic thing we use would degrade.
Then it evolves starts eating everything ahhh horror movie plot
Yes! As an agriculturist I've been TRYING TO sound the alarm that every single food supply chain is contaminated with plastics.
EVERY SINGLE soil sample we've been testing has some amount of plastics.
Farmers are feeding plastic to our pigs, then spreading the waste as fertilizer. Imagine our farm fields being covered with a thin layer of partially digested micro plastics, neurotoxins and Roundup-like herbicides.
There is no longer any industrial food stream not heavily contaminated with plastics, the weird thing is no one seems to care at all!
I’d be surprised if there weren’t microplastics in the veggies I’m growing in my organic backyard garden. They are in the water and since uptake by plants has been shown[0] I’d assume they are basically unavoidably at this point. Of course limiting consumption is a goal so avoiding the industrial food system and eating mostly things at the bottom of the food chain are good ways to do that.
There's no escaping it. Every bag of store-bought soil I've used as a hobbyist over the past couple of years contained visible plastic scraps and who knows how many microplastics.
Learned helplessness. What can we actually do about it?
Talk about it (worked for the ozone layer and some pesticides), use less (not that hard), support any alternative. And I think this works for any topic. The helplessness is a feeling, hard to assess the impact of individual actions, so why bother? You do what you can/think of and continue living - with a critical mass things will move in the right direction.
> Talk about it (worked for the ozone layer and some pesticides)
Partly, if not largely, because we were lucky enough to have an influential politician who had been a chemist:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22069768
It was also a much simpler and cheaper to fix issue than micro-plastics because it involved replacing a few substances, used for particular things, that had alternatives.
Vote for political parties that have it in their party program. Prefer buying products without plastic packaging, this includes bottled or canned products; find markets if you can't find it in your local grocery store. Donate or join up with anti-plastic activist organizations.
Direct action against manufacturers. You don't have to be a wizard to cast fireball.
IMO a start would be to require that plastic-producing companies accept all their used products back at end-of-life and incinerate them.
Wait for the science to deal with it, or become a scientist yourself. With how ubiquitous it is, it's going to be hard to filter it out of the entire planet, so chances are you'd want to find something to deal with it in humans.
Plus any planet-wide solution risks having its own side effects which may be worse.
Science doesn't "deal with it". Science just gives us the facts. Politics and economics has to deal with those facts. And politics/economics today is inadequate for dealing with our most complex problems. Leading to either learned helplessness or populism.
I guess we need to upgrade politics somehow.
Not to mention the use of plastic sheets to cover rows.
Well, people have never lived longer and basically starvation and even hunger for many people has been eliminated. People are far more likely to get sick from eating too much and acquiring a disease than they are from any of the things you’ve mentioned.
Everything is a tradeoff I guess. The question is if this is a good one and if so how can we make it a better one. Alarmism is going to fall on deaf ears when the reality isn’t as bleak.
Almost 10% of the population don’t have enough food even though we produce more than enough for everyone.
https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/the-hunger-crisis/world-...
It’s not even that we’re destroying the planet and our health so that everyone has enough.
There’s no way you can send rotting food waste to the 10% without food.
Parent claimed
> basically starvation and even hunger for many people has been eliminated
That's false unless by "basically" they mean "everyone but 750 million people.
…and these things are the direct result of plastics?
>partially digested micro plastics
I'd imagine they come out in essentially the same condition they go in. :)
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I started trying to reduce my exposure to plastic packaging a few years ago, but it’s hard to avoid it completely. Even when you buy “organic” or “sustainable” food, it’s often packaged in plastic.
It looks like the URL to the study is not valid https://doi.org/10.1038/s41538-025-00470-3, or maybe they did some change
This article seems a bit breathless. I wonder if the author realises that plants grow in the dirt and risk having insects crawling all over them. And the sheer number of lifestyle diseases people have. It'll take more than plastic having negative health outcomes for it to be a problem; it'd need to be some pretty substantial problems to outweigh the use people get from plastics.
> One of the studies included in the new review found 1 liter of water — the equivalent of two standard-size bottled waters bought at the store — contained an average of 240,000 plastic particles from seven types of plastics
How many non-plastic particles? I've heard it said there's enough uranium in seawater that we can theoretically use it to generate power.
>plants grow in the dirt and risk having insects crawling all over them
Non-sequitor.
>And the sheer number of lifestyle diseases people have.
Red herring. Other peoples' diabetes or obesity doesn't really impact me. Plastic has contaminated water and soil, it's not possible to opt out of the consequences of others using it even if you do not use it yourself.
>I've heard it said
Must be true!
https://www.acs.org/pressroom/presspacs/2023/december/extrac... if you want to read up on it. It's quite a fascinating area.
> Non-sequitor.
> Red herring.
> Must be true!
Someone took a class (or two) on Arguments!
A lemon ... some metal ... Voom! Power!
Must be all that uranium in the lemons too.
> plants grow in the dirt
and water is wet. What is your point?
What is the article's point? It strings together a bunch of facts into a fact string. Everything causes cancer and it turns out microplastics cause cancer since they are a thing. They (might, correlation and causation) double the risk of heart attacks which is comparable to a lazy bloke having a desk job. Might be lazy blokes with desk jobs have more microwave dinners though so who knows if that is a real signal.
That they were pointing out an obvious, which you doubled down on
Reads more like plants grow in dirt, which is bad. AND it has insects crawl all over them, which is bad.
Neither are true, anymore than water being wet is bad.
If you want a good explanation of PFAs, Veritasium did a video on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY
The safe allowable ppm counts are insanely low for this shit.
I saw that a while back. Probably the most terrifying video I have ever seen.
Also how willing people were to go along with covering up the danger. Not just businesses and politicians, but ordinary people in a company town.
Of course, in a world where we support corrupt legal concepts such as 'limited liability', this kind of thing was bound to happen and guaranteed to get worse.
I propose a new model; 'total liability'.
Every time something bad happens, you identify every person who contributed to the harm, calculate each person's liability and they have to pay. If some of the culprits cannot be identified, then the remaining culprits who can be identified have to absorb the unallocated liability... Not allocating full liability to people who do harm is akin to allocating it to everyone, including those who played no part in the harm. This is immoral and creates perverse incentives for continued harm.
For example, someone discards an empty plastic Coca Cola bottle on the ground in a public park, the person is fined maybe 95% but 5% of the fine is directed to the Coca Cola company for having made the decision to make the bottle out of plastic instead of tin or glass; thus being complicit in the harm. The money for any harm done, by any entity should go directly towards UBI and be paid out equally to all citizens.
The government could also use statistics to fine companies based on reasonable estimates of current harmful practices. For example, how much damage is microplastics causing in terms of medical costs globally? Make a list of all companies responsible, fine each one proportionally to their contribution to the harm.
People should be paid for identifying, reporting and successfully proving harmful practices (they deserve a commission, like a lawyer).
Identifying and reporting problems adds value to society and should be rewarded.
The majority of the proceeds should go to UBI. Why UBI? Because diffuse harms require diffuse remedies. It's not possible to award damages for widespread harm in a fair, non-corrupt way, so distributing to all citizens equally is the best approach. It's not perfect, but people know how to count and it's easier to identify and prove fraud if the rule is simple like 'each person gets the same amount of UBI'.
This is a great strategy for ensuring that you don't have any kind of technological economy
God forbid someone think of unintended consequences or externalities before doing something.
This comment hits the nail on the head. This is what's missing.
We are deeply confused. Even regulations (which many people think are good) are are actually an awful workaround the concept of 'total liability'.
The term 'limited liability' speaks for itself. What a massive hack it is! If liability is limited; it immediately begs the question; who is paying for all the excess damage which exceeds liability limits?
I hate how people keep saying stuff like "Show me the incentive, and I show you the result" yet those same people will say "We need to regulate X..."
What are regulations? Nothing is worse than regulations in terms of creating perverse incentives and encouraging neglect. What regulations do, psychologically, is akin to saying "So long as you stick to these guardrails, you can do whatever you want! You won't be held liable, so long as you're compliant with our regulations. It's on us, the government, not you."
This is a horrible message to convey. What should be conveyed instead is "There is no regulation, YOU are responsible for the harms YOU cause. If YOU cause harm, YOU will PAY. You better think hard about what you're doing, make sure you're not causing harm. Regulate yourself! Because if you don't, you will lose it all and it will all be your fault."
The messaging behind regulations disempowers individuals and encourages neglect... It's horrible in terms of incentives. Also, it makes a deeply misguided assumption that the government is capable of understanding some industry or process better than the people who created the industry/process...
Reality shows us, clear as crystal, that regulations always lag behind, are full of loopholes and basically kill all competition from smaller companies, allowing large companies to be even more neglectful.
> Regulate yourself! Because if you don't, you will lose it all and it will all be your fault.
It shocks me that there's people who still believe this. Suggesting regulations encourage otherwise moral businesses to be unethical is extreme propaganda. Just because someone finds a loophole in a regulation does not mean the alternative (everyone can do whatever they want and God will sort 'em out) would be better.
We have fire codes, which are regulations, because building fires were relatively common and often catastrophic in the 19th century. Did that lead to more house fires?
… * where the benefit to society does not outweigh the cost to society.
That is not a priori a net negative.
We'll all have jobs in blamefinding software companies. BaaS.
Maybe the technological economy is the problem
But countries competing with your home country will have one
Cool! So we “lose”. Then what?
Exactly, technology is supposed to be a tool; a means to an end, not an end in itself. Efficiency isn't always a good thing; at some point, you've got to stop and ask "Efficient for whom, and towards what goal?"
Before food was packaged in plastic, what did people put it in? Metal?
Wood boxes, baskets, sacks, pots, bottles, metal tins eventually.
If the food is slightly acidic though wouldn't that leech metals into your food?
Acidic foods went in glass containers. I have old books on food preservation, and they talk about which foods can't be stored in metal cans, which must be pickled (or later pressure canned) to prevent botulism, and so on. There used to be a lot of knowledge involved in storing and preserving food, because the method had to be suited to the food in question.
That's why canned acidic foods are some worse offenders when it comes to leeching stuff.
There's a plastic lining in the metal cans now.
If you know how to prepare it, a lot of food comes in its own packaging and you carry it in a basket or, well, walk it home and store it in a crate or a sack or on a shelf or in jars or hang it from the ceiling.
Are you not on good terms with any living individuals born before 1970?
Before food was packaged in plastic a lot of it wasn't packaged properly, went bad, and caused sickness and death. Plastic food packaging has saved innumberable lives and continues to do so. And that's not even considering the prevention of food waste.
The widespread use of plastic food packaging is relatively new.
By relatively new I mean within my lifetime.
There were not "innumerable" deaths in the US due to "improper food packaging" leading to sickness and death in my youth.
The only plastic products I recall from my youth were plastic bread bags for sliced bread, and plastic milk bottles. Everything else was glass, metal, or paper. I am pretty sure I did not see or touch a plastic soft drink bottle until my teens. If you wanted a lot of soda you got "The Boss" from Pepsi, which was a half gallon glass bottle.
IIRC, some sliced bread used to come securely wrapped in some kind of waxed paper too (in the UK).
Waxed paper, glass jars and bottles, metal cans.
Also I imagine just less processed crap and takeaway containers in general. They didn’t have plastic wrapped baked goods shipped from another country. It was just baked in the store you bought it and served on a plate.
Some glass bottles can contain more microplastics than plastic bottles...
[0] https://anses.hal.science/anses-05066642/file/Chaib_JFCA_202...
[1] https://www.sciencealert.com/glass-bottles-actually-contain-...
I'm reasonably sure however that the glass bottles themselves are not contributing to the pervasive abundance of microplastics in the environment. The article also cites that it comes from the paint on the caps. I'm sure that can be fixed.
Since it appears to be from the outer paint on the cap, it's relatively straightforward to select bottles with unpainted caps.
In the article, scientists developed a procedure to decrease amount of microplastic in such situations: a blast of air on caps. But "just use glass" doesn't mean "microplastic free".
Also: plastics protect food from contamination and infection with biological agents that would cause sickness and death. The benefits far, far, far outweighs the slight downside that might exist.
The current zeitgeist is clearly anti-plastic. Only time will change their minds. Fortunately, the healthcare industry (hospitals) will always use plastic for preventing contamination in a very economical way.
yeah but there don't seem to be conclusive studies that show that "microplastics" are a detriment at all.
You'd assume that there is a study that tested 200 people with more and less microplastic intake over a year to show that it actually has an effect, but I guess you'd have to do 20 studies to get a p<0.05...
That's a big maybe, we simply don't know yet. Clearly it's better than botulism or salmonella which can kill you in a day or two, but you can't just rule out their prevalence.
I have adopted for the last 5 years glassware and stainless kitchen items to avoid plastic as much as I possibly can. But then I read something in the last week or so that said recently made glassware has more plastic leeching than some plastic containers...FFS....
If we were using lead pipes and I spoke discouragingly about that, I'd be flagged and censored.
Now it's the vaccine.