These plastics are going to follow tobacco and alcohol.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t see how one can be confident about the presence or absence of population-level effects.
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?