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Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

It's worse than that. It's showing up in rain and snow, and our water supply because most filtration systems don't catch micro/nanoplastics. It's in our bodies.

I think we will eventually find it's also largely responsible for the tremendous drop off in birth rates and reproductive health that the world has been experiencing the last 10+ years and possibly other neurological and "brain" issues that have increased in frequency. Infertility of people in their reproductive prime is at an all-time high. We already know BPA has a lot of these side effects.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/17/micropla...

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/05/us-birth-and-fertility-rates...

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Sorry but I can't abide the scientific ignorance being displayed all over this conversation.

(1) The first article you cite "Microplastic particles now discoverable in human organs" only announces that some scientists made a technique to discover such particles. The only ones they found were ones they inserted on purpose to verify their technique. That headline leads people strongly to incorrect conclusions like you have made. That's one of the main techniques of fake news.

(2) Fertility rate has nothing to do with how many people can't get pregnant who are trying. It's just a variation on birth rate.

(3) Mother Jones - here cited many times as factual - shows a picture of a bird with a plastic mesh around it. That is not what "toxic" is. Maybe powerful lobbyists got Canadian legislators to pretend that plastic straws are "toxic", but again that flies in the face of scientific fact.

Plastic is an amazingly inert substance that is unlikely to cause harm outside of physical constriction. In honor of this thread, I'm going to go eat a Lego. You can rest assured that I'll be back tomorrow to collect my downvotes.

I upvoted you because I want you to come back and tell us how the lego tasted.

Ha, your technique worked! It didn't taste like anything - one of those characteristics of non-reactive chemicals. It did get stuck in my throat on the first try, so I got it down with water like a pill. (It was one of those short/round/1-studded pieces.)

The minifigs taste better ;-)

>Plastic is an amazingly inert substance that is unlikely to cause harm outside of physical constriction. In honor of this thread, I'm going to go eat a Lego. You can rest assured that I'll be back tomorrow to collect my downvotes.

This also shows scientific ignorance. Some plastics can be somewhat inert (although their manufacturing process maybe embed random trash in them), but microplastics are a whole other beast. The smaller something is, the more likely its physical properties are to differ from its bigger counterpart.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7068600/

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