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Comment by captainbland | Hacker News Reader

Two possibilities: microplastics turn out to be bad, and we're stuck with a generation (at least) of health effects until we can get rid of them.

They turn out to be safe (enough) to eat and end up being turned into some kind of food filler in lower end products.

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I doubt we're ever just going to "get rid of them", how would anyone supposed we do that?

Microplastics have been found in ice in Antarctica this stuff is here to stay and is accumulating in our bodies and the environment more and more each day.

Ok, I admit that may have been a little bit of hyperbole. But I expect in such a scenario some (very expensive, wide reaching) mitigations might be put in place such as banning the relevant types of plastic and introducing some kind of specially targeted filtering/treatment in fresh water supplies in areas where that's logistically/politically possible (assuming an effective system for it can be found).

Possibilty 1a: microplastics causes reproductive issues that contribute to plummeting fertility rates, mass human extinction ensues and consequently the problem sorts itself out quite nicely.

Remember the melamine baby formula scandal ?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trace-melamine-found-in-us-baby...

But what if they keep building up, like acidification of oceans?

super powers like telekinesis and eye beams

It's the same problem: the extraction of fossil fuels. We have plastics because they're close to free as a byproduct of that process and the ocean is acidifying mostly because of dissolved atmospheric CO2.

Spoiler: they are bad.

Everything is bad in extreme, we care about how bad. E.g. what’s the risk equivalence of X ppm micro-plastics compared to Y amount of sugar intake.

> we care about how bad...compared to Y amount of sugar intake

Microplastic pollution has an effect on the entire biosphere of the planet. It's just another factor contributing to the accelerating global extinction event we've set in motion.

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