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Comment by kylebenzle | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

0: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10966681/

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.

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.

…and these things are the direct result of plastics?

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.

They aren’t starving by and large which was my main claim. Just compare today to 30 years ago to 60 to 120. Massive improvements in all relevant metrics. We’re doing the right things is the only way to interpret the data. Doesn’t mean perfect but certainly fertilizers and plastics and petro-chemicals have been a massive net positive.

Has it gone down to 10% thanks to maniacally ultra-sterilized foodstuff, quadruple dipped and wrapped in PFAS, or gone up from somewhere to 10% over the course of the last century? No way the latter is the case.

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.

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.

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.

Not to mention the use of plastic sheets to cover rows.

>partially digested micro plastics

I'd imagine they come out in essentially the same condition they go in. :)

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