This is the canary of plastic pollution similar to we knew about global warming in '70s. We know it's only going to get worse, but we're happy to ignore it until it gets really bad.
Broiling, frying and baking makes food more toxic. There's absolutely no getting away from that fact. As soon as you apply high heat to a food, you're performing a poorly-controlled chemical synthesis that produces all sorts of toxic stuff - acrylamide, acrolein, heterocyclic amines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, you name it. The risk isn't particularly high, but it's real.
Most people have perfectly reasonably decided that they are willing to take that very modest risk in preference to exclusively eating raw foods. Some people aren't willing to take that risk and it is their right to do so, but anyone proposing a ban on the sale of cooked food on public health grounds would be rightly dismissed as a lunatic.
The plastics that we use (within and without the food industry) aren't significantly toxic and they're incredibly useful. Without plastics, the food available to you would be more expensive and much less varied. A lot of work has gone into minimising the harms and maximising the benefits of plastics and other synthetic chemicals and that work continues.
The villainisation of plastic is based on prejudice, not science. Some people have decided to hate or fear plastics and are trying to concoct an argument that they are devastatingly dangerous, but that effort has yielded little other than rumour and guilt-by-implication.
Yes, we produce a lot of plastic, because it's very useful. Yes, some of that plastic does get into the environment and can in some cases bioaccumulate. Yes, some species of animals have been meaningfully harmed by plastics, primarily because they are unable to distinguish macroplastics from food and actively seek out and eat pieces of plastic that they then cannot digest. No, there is no evidence that the levels of microplastics or free plasticisers in the environment are significantly harmful to human health or ecosystem health, nor any plausible mechanism by which that could be true or become true in the foreseeable future.
Plastics are not the next CO2 or the next tetraethyllead. They are far too well-studied to hold any significant surprises. Many, many researchers have spent their careers actively trying to prove that plastics are terrible (by fair means or foul), all to no avail.
Maybe that's not so bad? The modern consumer has access to a wide variety of hyper-processed food that is nutritionally bad anyway, the microplastics are just the toxic sprinkles on top.
> No, there is no evidence that the levels of microplastics or free plasticisers in the environment are significantly harmful to human health or ecosystem health, nor any plausible mechanism by which that could be true or become true in the foreseeable future.
What about the xenoestrogens angle, the hypothesis that invasive microplastics are behind the drop in fertility?
This statement is absurd. The vast majority of research is (1) funded by industry, (2) focused on how plastic can be used in industry, and (3) not focused on biological aspects.
The actual research on endocrine effects of plastics show it has a clear negative effect [0].
> EDCs are chemicals that disturb the body’s hormone systems and can cause cancer, diabetes, reproductive disorders, and neurological impairments of developing fetuses and children. The report describes a wealth of evidence supporting direct cause-and-effect links between the toxic chemical additives in plastics and specific health impacts to the endocrine system.
[0] https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2020/p...
To reiterate my original comment, I trust the judgement of the EU regulators. I don't know enough about US regulators to comment. I don't know if that report is just scaremongering about known issues that have already been addressed, or if it's still relevant because the EPA and the FDA are asleep at the switch. It certainly doesn't scare me, because the concerns it raises are ancient history from where I'm sitting. If the US government allows companies to sell you products that contain harmful levels of known toxins, then I don't see how anyone could reasonably conclude that the real problem is that some of those known toxins happen to be added to plastics.
So when is enough? Will it be 2100 when an avalanche of garbage floods a city?
The First half argued plastics are useful yet they might be somewhat poisonous.
The second half then suddenly insisted we cannot believe plastics are poisonous.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
First, don't worry about it...
Then, some is ok...
Wait! Less than some is ok...
Wait again!! Next to nothing is ok...
Fuck!!! Avoid this shit at all costs.
No. Demographics can show you with extremely small error bars the aggregate health effects of smoking and (heavy) drinking. If there was an effect of that magnitude from other variables, we'd know for sure. Microplastics and pthalates and other related contaminants are real, and deserve study. But let's not get ahead of ourselves with the doomerism.
We surely don't know the whole story, but we know pretty well that the effect is less than smoking/obesity/etc. because it would be there in the data if so.
I don’t see how one can be confident about the presence or absence of population-level effects.
Just once, I'd like to sacrifice consumerism at the altar of my and my family's internal organs, versus the other way around. We're a few decades late to finally be putting full product lifecycle accountability in the laps of manufacturers everywhere.
Because to be blunt, and even to adopt your inflammatory frame, "recklessly dumping substances into the ecosystem" has been Generally Accepted As Safe for literally thousands of years. For everything particular you want to shout about, there are thousands or tens of thousands of human impacts that went just fine. We have 8 billion of us out there, demanding zero impact just isn't going to happen.
So... do you freak out about watering your garden with a well? Ever use fertilizer or lime? Eat food at a restaurant with a grill? Buy a cut of meat wrapped in wax paper? Use anything made of smelted metal? Use a refrigerator? I mean, just think about the crazy alien cultures going on in that sourdough starter in that fridge! Everything impacts the environment. Everything leaks.
You square this by measuring impacts and doing the science, not by shouting on the internet. I'm sure that's not as satifying, and tends frustratingly not to have the villains you clearly want to see. But it's the only way that actually works.
For hundreds of thousands, substances that have negative effects (eg human corpses) were disposed of far from populations, precisely because humans learned that consequences quickly. Humans have been cognizant of causation, when they could detect it, for longer than thousands of years. Yes the black plague took awhile to figure out. As we saw with cigarettes, society is always trending to keeping the status quo. Often, to society's own detriment over the short term, along the span of human existence.
> We have 8 billion of us out there, demanding zero impact just isn't going to happen.
That's not relevant.
Which is exactly my point. Things like corpse burial and fecal sewage management and plague isolation and smoking regulation were all done because the evidence of their effect was clear and measured! They did the science.
All the freakouts in this subthread might be true, but right now they are sitting just above the noise floor. All I'm saying is that we should recognize that and not apply moral reasoning that ignores the distinction.
It is almost certainly not true that the pthalate linings on your bean can or whatever is as bad as the black plague (we started with smoking, but sure, let's go where you took us). And arguing as if it were is hurting the discourse and making a solution less likely. To wit: please be serious about this stuff.
Remove all PBDEs: "Why are you putting my family in jeopardy?"
Use PBDEs: "Why are you putting my family in jeopardy?"
Finally, as with many other issues, the unseen element is cost. It's possible to use materials that don't require PBDEs to keep them from igniting rapidly, but will people be willing to pay that premium for their homes and their furniture? The rising popularity of "dollar stores"[2] and TEMU suggests that they won't. And making things more expensive through regulation has the side effect of empowering political forces that would gladly obliterate any kind of regulatory protection for consumers - making things worse, not better.
[1] https://www.ecohome.net/guides/2223/flame-retardants-in-furn...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/more-wealthy-people-shopping...
The terrifying thing is that phthalates in mothers not only cause developmental issues in the reproductive systems of their offspring, but the offspring then carry the same risks to _their_ offspring, even if they have reduced phthalate exposure post-birth, meaning you need 2 "clean" generations to clear out the contamination properly.
I think a lot more studies are starting to look at this and I predict we're going to see a rapid increase in regulation of plastics once the generational impact becomes clearer.
Is that actually confirmed or were the studies just not long enough to determine whether the effects persist for more generations?
How can you be so confident that a) the effects would be so clear, and b) we'd know for sure the cause of those effects was microplastics?
We have an increase in early onset cancer, since the 1990s, more than can be explained by just earlier detection: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-022-00672-8
and "There is a mysterious epidemic of kidney disease called chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology (CKDu) that is occurring in many parts of the world. Unrelated to known risk factors such as diabetes and hypertension, CKDu mostly affects the young and middle-aged" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8437007/
and "Driven principally by aging [...] For most of human history, Parkinson has been a rare disorder. However, demography and the by-products of industrialization have now created a Parkinson pandemic" - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30584159/
And the obvious ones like heart disease - if you can claim a group of diseases are caused by "old age" and another group by "obesity and bad diet" - would we know if microplastics were a cause, an exacerbator, a trigger?
As always, xkcd makes the point best: https://xkcd.com/882/
The world isn't falling apart. You're just digging around to find enough "maybes" to P-hack your way into believing it.
[1] About the right order of magnitude for smoking all by itself.
There's nothing doom-tastic about being smart and practical. Furthermore, due to the ubiquitous nature of these chemicals we'll never be able to be certain of their ill effects. There will be no way to rule out other things so their assumed innocence will persist. Why so much risk?