Apart from food packaging, one great way to easily ingest plastic is to use synthetic clothing. Just a basic rubbing of a synthetic sleeve on your nose causes thousands of polyester particles to release in thin air, readily breathable.
Not just clothing, but also bedding is a huge issue. With pillows, mattresses and towels mostly made of synthetic fibers.
My usual instinct is: try rubbing the synthetic material; if it releases thousands of particles in thin air, stay away from it
Clothing industry has somehow gotten by unscathed during all the environmental awareness that has spread in the past 20 years. I am pretty sure clothes are the #1 cause of the microplastics that have inundated the ocean and our water supply.
We have been heavily pushed to drive less, recycle more, and use less water, but I have not seen messaging about not buying new clothes you don't need.
> Clothing industry has somehow gotten by unscathed during all the environmental awareness that has spread in the past 20 years. I am pretty sure clothes are the #1 cause of the microplastics that have inundated the ocean and our water supply.
Surprise surprise, it has actually been studied. One recent review article of the field:
From figure 2b) we can see that while microplastics from synthetic fibres are certainly an issue, they are far from #1. Dwarfed by tires, paint, and macroplastics (large plastic pieces thrown away slowly grinding down into microplastics e.g. by wave action).
Pretty sure PP was referring to mainstream criticism and concerns which tend to be about plastics in foods, etc. but less acknowledgement of the problem of fast fashion switching from cotton to plastic based textiles.
Or perhaps we could all agree to stop wearing so much clothing in warm climates? I have a hard time believing that out of all mammals that ever came to be on this planet, we just so happened to be the only ones with this unique need that our biology failed to provide us with.
There are newer more sustainable production processes for various natural fibers.
TIL that there are special laundry detergents for synthetic fabrics like most activewear like jerseys; and that fabric softener attracts mosquitos and adheres to synthetic fibers causing stank.
You still have massive downsides to new cotton or wool clothes. There's just less of the micro plastic downside. Clothing is just a place where we take a massive hit on everything from carbon output to micro plastics.
Another issue is clothing repair. I think the clothing repair thing is kind of brilliant. But for clothing repair to work you would need to disincentivize buying new clothes. Which subsidizing clothing would work against.
> for clothing repair to work you would need to disincentivize buying new clothes
Why? I repair clothes. I also like buying new ones. In between I ruin and lose items, or find that I no longer wish to wear them for purely stylistic reasons.
Older clothes weren't just made better, people also took care of them better. Partly because of cost, but also culture -- fewer changes in fashion trends with slower and more local communication, cheap labor to launder your clothes by hand (which puts much less wear on the garment). Also a culture of repairing and mending (also easier to do this when you have fewer things to occupy your free time).
Yes. But really, it was much worse in many ways. A 100 years ago, say, the people doing clothes repair for a living were desperately poor, and often being single women they often had to resort to prostitution to feed themselves as the income from repairing clothes simply wasn't enough.
I do think that from an environmental standpoint we should repair and recycle clothes a lot more than we do, but lets not romanticize the past. The small clothes repair businesses disappeared for a reason as living standards improved. Furthermore, today factory production of clothes is incredibly efficient and tends to be done in low-income countries, further making it even harder to restart some kind of clothes repair industry in high-income countries.
The problem isn't really "buying new clothes," since most of the microplastics are released in the laundry. Sewage treatment plants aren't designed to remove them, so they get released with the discharge water. It can also clog up septic leachfields.
They do make purpose-built products to filter microplastic lint from laundry[1][2], but a more hacker approach is to just search for "pool filter."
I wish they made comparable products for the dryer.
There's an entire big and celebrated business sector that spends every working hour taking intact plastic products and grinds then into fine shreds, a process likely to contribute more than a fair share to microplastic dissemination. Maybe worth investigating, a good candidate for more microplastic release than the clothing industry.
Plastics recycling also kinda barely exists. Only 5% of plastic in the US is recycled, the whole thing was a greenwashing operation by oil companies to encourage additional consumption. Realistically putting the plastic deep underground back from whence the hydrocarbons came is not a bad sequestration strategy.
The way we used to "recycle" plastic was to put it on a container ship along with glass and aluminum and send it to China. Once it arrived, they would recycle the glass and aluminum and bury or burn the plastic. We reduced the quantity of (valuable) aluminum and glass over time until China got mad and told us to stop shipping them just the garbage (plastic). That was largely the end of the show.
Countries like Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland incinerated 50-80% of their plastic waste. Germany incinerated around 50%. Countries in Eastern and Southern Europe generally had lower incineration rates and higher landfill rates. Approximately 42% of plastic waste in Europe was being incinerated in waste-to-energy facilities.
Same for aluminum, which is highly recyclable. A ridiculous amount of it ends up in landfills for no reason other than people can't be fucked.
Plastic recycling is just another American "we tried nothing and are out of ideas." Much of the lack of recycling for plastics, when it comes to bottles, isn't some grand conspiracy so much as people just throwing bottles in the trash or on the side of the road, because:
* There aren't omnipresent recycling bins to go alongside trash cans.
* There aren't local programs for recycling pick up.
* Some people can't be bothered and the government isn't punching them in the face, as it should.
Only a half dozen states have a can/bottle deposit, even. Each state should be required to have deposits and municipal recycling pickup in any city of appreciable size, and heavy penalties for littering, or all sorts of federal funding should be withheld.
> Plastic recycling is just another American "we tried nothing and are out of ideas."
not sure where this comes from -- this statement is definitely not accurate. Is recycling of plastics "going well" ? no. Please note that USA is composed of States, and then Counties. In the USA law system, counties have the most jurisdiction over most waste laws. Some State laws override those, including toxics handling; then Federal laws including interstate commerce (transportation) and many more toxics regulations.
Counties do vary dramatically. In fact most counties in the whole USA are different in important respects. There is no single USA this way. Overall, recycling is very dependent on economics. It costs money to recycle, and sometimes you get some of it back on materials markets. The costs to the environment are not accurate with respect to markets.
The comment then proceeds to dictate advice to "each state" and that is never going to happen, by definition, for legal matters under the jurisdiction of states, in simple terms.
> We have been heavily pushed to drive less, recycle more, and use less water, but I have not seen messaging about not buying new clothes you don't need.
It's there if you follow the right people on social media.
Campaigns that center around personal responsibility, however, aren't ever going to work, and there's obvious reasons why people are willing to pay to push this narrative but not the buying fewer clothes one (at least here in the US).
It hardly moves the needle - apart from often needing huge amounts of awareness education that busy people hardly have time to think about, there usually aren’t enough affordable alternative options for ‘personal responsibility’ to work, but when you regulate to reduce the sale of the bad stuff it just forces it to happen.
Often regulation forces better alternatives to reach the scale where economy of scale can make it affordable, whereas with the ‘personal responsibility’ model the alternatives will often just stay the far more expensive, premium option.
Oh no, I love my lululemon clothes. New fear unlocked. It makes sense though, these clothes still generate lint and it can only be thousands of synthetic particles and dirt.
Hum, almost all of my t-shirts are 100% cotton, or at least that's what the label says. I use mostly the same clothes from 15 years ago so maybe synthetic is more common nowadays? I think the only t-shirts I own that are not 100% cotton are those I've got for free on things like marathons and hackathons. Does it contain phthalate? I have no idea, there is no label saying what they are made of. Probably polyester. Does it have phthalates in any meaningful concentration? This review says basically that "it varies a lot" and "needs further study". https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138266892...
Interestingly Table 4 in that link shows "Plain weave cotton" and "polyster" having similar levels of phthalates.
I don't think phtalates are needed as plasticizers in polyster, so I guess they are coming from the dyes or something else used to treat the fabrics, meaning that the choice of cotton or polyster may not matter for phthalates specifically?
I wear mostly the same clothes too from 15 years ago I'd agree synthetic is more common nowadays? Shirts, underwear, hoodies, jackets, relzed fit stretchy pants/trousers all seem to be something just not cotton anyway.
When I was younger, it was common to add starch to make the cotton easier to iron etc - that would definitely make it stiff. Thankfully we don't do that anymore. Comfortwise, Cotton beats practically any other fabric + it gets softer the longer you use it so in a way it actually incentivizes reuse.
All else being equal you're generally safer being exposed to stable things that don't break down than unstable things that happily react with all sorts of things (and tend to meddle with the chemical processes required for life).
If you get to choose between breathing tires and milk jugs pick the milk jugs every time.
> All else being equal you're generally safer being exposed to stable things that don't break down than unstable things that happily react with all sorts of things
There's a similar paradox in nuclear radiation. (Sometimes expressed with a puzzle about differently radioactive cookies and what to do with each.)
Gamma rays are scary because it takes a lot of lead shielding to even slow them down... but that also means that they aren't stopping to interact with things--like yourself--as they travel.
Alpha particles seem relatively safe because they don't travel far and are blocked by your skin... But that means they're doing something to that skin, and luckily for you any damage is being dealt to already-dead cells on the outside.
But if you had to put one of them inside your body, it's quite possible the gamma ray emitter would be the safer option, simply because more of its energy would escape harmlessly.
> But if you had to put one of them inside your body, it's quite possible the gamma ray emitter would be the safer option, simply because more of its energy would escape harmlessly.
That's definitely the case with Polonium-210. Even though it emits alpha particles, it's very dangerous to ingest.
> All else being equal you're generally safer being exposed to stable things that don't break down than unstable things that happily react with all sorts of things
Unless the other thing is asbestos or generally any kind of mineral/anorganic material - pneumoconiosis [1] is nasty in all its variants. There is no mechanism at all for your body to break down or expel anorganic contaminants in your lungs.
> If you get to choose between breathing tires and milk jugs pick the milk jugs every time.
Well, plastic, glass or metal, no matter what the jugs are made of, they'll hurt your lungs just like the tire dust will.
I think that's somewhat misleading, the lung has a mucus layer and cilia to move particles caught in the mucus up and out. But I'll agree that it's not a completely robust system. Anything that gets past or can't be moved by the mucus layer is going to be a problem, especially particles that can't be broken down by the macrophages.
>Unless the other thing is asbestos or generally any kind of mineral/anorganic material - pneumoconiosis [1] is nasty in all its variants. There is no mechanism at all for your body to break down or expel anorganic contaminants in your lungs.
Yup. I was thinking of heading off comments like yours by mentioning silicosis or lead poisoning but didn't want to clutter up a simple clarification.
Anyway, still mostly safer than "happy to react with things" compounds which is why people like you get to make comments about it here and now vs it simply being a thing everyone has accepted is not good to breath for hundreds of years (like certain wood dusts)
I doubt this. Sure, reactants aren't good, but impossible to biologically break down neither. Causing havoc and bioacumulating seem to be two ends of a spectrum, where you want to be in the middle. Stuff that safely and easily broken down.
Bulk no. Tyres are apparently only 19% natural rubber. Slightly more is synthetic, and the rest… well none of it is good ground up on roads then breathed in. I lived for a while next to a moderately busy road. Feck it was filthy even with windows never open.
Even my mountain bike tyres now contain graphene which doesn't sound like a good idea for the sake of an unnoticeable improvement, and prob only as a racer. Seems a case of new jargon selling more. So they keep adding new compounds.
What is important is to take start with a very real problem that should be resolved in this universe, then project the discussion into a very close but different one and argue there.
Now it doesn't matter if you win or lose in that universe because it doesn't matter. It isn't our reality.
Well the purpose of such hypotheticals is to isolate a smaller part of the problem and examine it more closely outside of the larger context, to decompose the matter at hand in order to more easily get a grasp. I think there's value to that, of course as you pointed out only as an aside to the larger discussion, not as a replacement.
The person you originally quoted did mark their post as a nitpick.
Nobody is going around purposely breathing in plastic dust, there's been dust everywhere forever, and breathing in dust is a natural and unavoidable part of life.
What, exactly, do you think is normalized here? That people wear clothing? That people didn't throw out every polyester fiber the moment somebody said plastic can break down into small pieces? That people aren't freaking out over a danger that we know roughly nothing about so far?
People really need to stop finding excuses to freak out over things.
I think about this every time I clean out the dryer lint filter and a plume of lint dust comes off of it. I try to avoid breathing it in but it’s likely some is making it into my airways.
Try shaking out a piece of clothing in full sunlight. It helps you see the millions of future dust particles that will come off your clothing.
Over the years I found that of all the dust in my home the vast majority comes from my clothing. I deduced that because the collected dust looks the same as what I find in the dryer, and it feels like cotton too (my by far most warn kind of fiber).
That means rooms are full of tiny particles from your clothes, if I assume that my home is not an anomaly (and why should it be).
Direct sunlight really helps to see how much dust there is all around us, and how with every little movement we create more. That does not even show the particles too small to be seen. The difference is gigantic - without that sunlight you don't see any dust and think the air is clean.
I'm not too concerned, since humanity must have dealt with this for a long time. Particles from fire especially, and there are lots coming from even the tiniest flame. My main worry would be chemicals we add to clothes, but given that by now we ingest plastic pretty much all the time, with every meal, with every breath, we just have to wait and see. I don't see a way to end this long-running experiment.
The lint is also the residue from your clothes being worn away. If you can, consider not using the dryer at all, especially for synthetic clothing which air dry quickly compared to cotton.
Get a high-end vacuum with a hepa filter (such as the 0.3 micro rated S-24035 by DeWalt) and turn it on and hold it near the lint trap panel as you open the panel up.
> Not just clothing, but also bedding is a huge issue. With pillows, mattresses and towels mostly made of synthetic fibers.
Preach. I vacuum my bedsheets every day because my cats are insane shedders and I'd otherwise get breaded with cat fur, but the vacuum is full with so much what is clearly not cat fur...
I often wonder about carpet or seats and couches. Also made of all manner of synthetic fabrics. Even besides the effects of living in the same space flame retardants slowly gas off over the decades, we rarely deep clean any of this, so when we sit down a cloud of craps wafts up into our lungs.
I prefer noncarpets, but hard seating of course not.
Some of my polyester t-shirts have lasted more than 10 years without any loss in colour or quality, it's a damn shame they cause microplastics since it's probably better that people don't buy clothing every month if clothes lasted longer.
My mattress cover is like that, as it's made from polyester. When I pull it from the dryer it produces an invisible, but irritating cloud of particles.
All that while most of the shavings accumulate in the lint collector, so it could have been even worse.
For at least 10 years now, I only by 100% cotton or cotton-linen blend, or 100% wool - nothing else! Yet, there's so many sources of microplastics that can't be eliminated, unfortunately!
Yep. Specifically, why are 100% cotton socks so ridiculously hard to find now?
It used to be that they were a little more expensive - now you need to go online to find them.
'Fun' fact - the average brain has about 7 grams of microplastic [0] in it now, up 50% from 2016. At that rate...
SEVEN FUCKING GRAMS. Guys this is beyond stupid.
Even if plastic were totally inert, as I've heard people insist with certainty (where are they getting these ideas!), 7 grams of plastic in your brain is terrifying.
I wonder if anyone's done a study for similar-but-natural compounds... Does lignin accumulate? Could we find a whole bunch of it in the brains of carpenters?
>Specifically, why are 100% cotton socks so ridiculously hard to find now?
My theory is that it's because of Amazon reviews. For most socks on Amazon, there will be at least one reviewer posting pictures of how their socks got holes after a few days of wearing. These reviewers are ridiculous and seem to have sandpaper for flooring, sweat corrosive acid, or deliberately wear down these socks just to post the review. I've bought many different socks from Amazon and none of them get holes even after years of wearing them.
Anyway, I think that seems to have spooked socks manufacturers.
Also, don't worry, there's not actually 7 grams. The study that suggested that was ridiculously bad.
When you extrapolate 100,000-fold from uncalibrated micro-scale experiments, you get insane results, but the typical internet reader doesn't get past the abstract of the paper and instantly activates panic mode, instead of questioning the insanity.
Let's assume you're right, and there's 3.5 grams of plastic in your brain (there isn't, but let's run with it).
You've been secretly living with this horrible condition for long enough for it to happen -- remember, this is happening a nanogram at a time, for years and years! This is not a fast process!
Are you dead? No? Hm.
Perhaps you ought to rethink your priors. I'm not saying you're absolutely wrong -- maybe the right answer really is that "0 is the right number". But maybe the answer is that it doesn't matter that much, and you're exaggerating the impact. More to the point, when you simply leap to the most exaggerated conclusion from a bad paper with sketchy methodology, you're not doing science, or being data-driven -- you're just panicking.
Why assume? There's multiple studies showing microplastics in human brains. Are they all "sketchy" too?
What organ in the body hasn't been shown to be contaminated? Significant and increasing levels have been found in lungs, livers, kidneys, spleens, intestines, hearts, placentas, blood, fat tissue, lymph nodes... All sketchy studies in your view? No? Then why the exception for brains?
Microplastics have been found from the top of Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. They're in 60-80% of all wild species examined. Sketchy? Exaggerated? Bring the data if you have it. It would want to be very strong stuff..
To loudly cast doubt on a study like this, and claim you know the weight of microplastic in people's brains is under 3.5g, you'd want to bring some substance... You haven't brought any; none at all.
> Are you dead? No? Hm.
Do I really need to explain that health is a spectrum - that 'alive' is not equivalent to healthy? That "not immediately sick" isn't the same as thriving? Binary thinking isn't very helpful on issues like this, and it's hard to believe you're arguing in good faith when you say things like this as if you've made a substantive point.
> Perhaps you ought to rethink your priors.
Which priors are those - that I don't want foreign substances accumulating in my brain, much less most brains on the planet?
Why would I? This is a plausibly catastrophic scenario, and you've brought absolutely no evidence that it isn't. None. At all.
> maybe the answer is that it doesn't matter that much, and you're exaggerating the impact.
I don't want to roll the dice on this one, and I think that's the only sensible approach. We have all sorts of alternatives; they're just not quite as 'cheap'.
People have posted elsewhere in the thread about a growing body of scientific links between nasty health outcomes and higher levels of microplastic in people's fleshy bits. You ignored that though... Why? ... Do you have a vested interest? Are you scared that this could actually be an issue, and you don't want to face it? What are your priors - that if you haven't keeled over yet then you're healthy?
> maybe the right answer really is that "0 is the right number"
It is. There's no conceivable advantage from having more than that.
> maybe the answer is that it doesn't matter that much, and you're exaggerating the impact
It's baffling to me that anyone would assume that it's fine and dandy that we're finding increasing amounts of plastic in human brains, or even deny it. To me, that's a ludicrous leap of faith; requiring an utterly unhinged level of naivety or optimism.
> maybe ... you're just panicking.
... You remind me of that old cartoon about climate change - "What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"
Because chemical effects are not the only undesirable effects something can have. E.g., mechanical, electrical.
In any case, in one study [0], "researchers looked at 12 brain samples from people who had died with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. These brains contained up to 10 times more plastic by weight than healthy samples." Another [1] found "nanoplastics accelerate the aggregation of β-amyloid peptides" and that they exacerbate "the neurotoxicity induced by low-concentration peptides".
Even if they're _chemically_ inert, physical accumulation of particles of foreign matter in your brain might be causing problems. When it gets inside of cells, is it in the way of any processes? When it's between cells, does it trigger scarring? Do the particles clog capillaries? And because the study referenced was only able to find these particles via autopsies, if microplastics in your brain were causing health issues for you, you probably would never find out or be able to mitigate.
The simple answer is that it isn't supposed be there. The more interesting one is: how much would you say is too much? Would a kilo of microplastics towards the end of your life do it?
When it has adverse effects (and no benefits), then of course it’s too much. But GP seemed to be saying they find it terrifying even assuming no adverse effects, which I found curious.
A huge number of people have implements in their bodies (in their teeth, most often), and much more than seven grams of “foreign stuff” in their stomach and intestines all the time, so that by itself doesn’t seem anything to be terrified of.
> In Italy, researchers followed 312 patients who had fatty deposits, or plaques, removed from their carotid artery. Almost six in 10 had microplastics, and these people fared worse than those who did not: Over the next 34 months, they were 2.1 times as likely to experience a heart attack or stroke, or die.
> But GP seemed to be saying they find it terrifying even assuming no adverse effects, which I found curious.
It being in my brain is an adverse effect. Inert material in the brain is a problem itself.
Do you want inert rocks in your car engine? Taking up space, interfering with natural processes, etc?
The brain is incredibly complex; far, far, far beyond our current understanding. You don't want anything in there that isn't supposed to be, and plastic isn't fucking supposed to be there.
And, did you miss the part where this is up 50% from only 8 years ago?
... Tbh I'm aghast that anyone needs this explained to them.
The story of phthalates really highlights the drinking from the fume hood aspects of our commercial norms. Phthalates are designed to squeeze between hydrophobic polymers such that their bulk mechanical properties are changed, while remaining chemically inert and not subject to breakdown. The question of what this would do in the human body, which is full of polymers with very sensitively evolved mechanical properties, was obvious - yet it was not asked in a funded capacity until we had been letting it accumulate in our kids for decades. The position of our institutions on this is a clear case of preferring not to know.
This whole thread is a great example of an interesting phenomenon... whenever people talk about this people come out of the woodwork to nitpick the details of whoever is criticizing the wonton use of likely poisonous compounds. Theyll argue things like this about the details of the exact likely bioactivity of the compound, or go on about how its impossible to have modern society without poisoning everything in a huge perfect enemy of the good argument.
Like, go drink from a cup of pthalates if youre so ok with it being in your brain, balls, ovaries, etc. No ones arguing we need to ban plastics, but maybe coating the world in single use water bottles without considering the effects is suboptimal. Shouldnt the onus be on proving its safe before spreading it everywhere, rather than proving its dangerous?
I'm not nitpicking the parent. The parent comment is just wrong, full stop. You should not listen to them.
They have an incorrect notion of what a phthalate is (usually a slightly greasy ester or an alcohol), how polar/hydrophopic they are (mixed; generally ampiphilic), and whether or not they tend to bioaccumulate (in general, they do not).
Your broader point is well-taken, however, but not in the way you intended: chemistry does not reward a shallow understanding. The details matter a lot.
You're arguing as if you understand all the side effects of the biochemistry on the biology. None of us do. Theyre correct about one thing: its probably not good for you.
But sure, you might be more right on the basics of the biochemistry.
I guess I'm just frustrated about the state of the world - im not a degrowth person I just want a better balance.
There seems to be plenty of evidence for, for example, their role in endocrine disruption.
Sure, but I didnt claim he made a valid argument either. What I am claiming is when someone says things like
"The question of what this would do in the human body, which is full of polymers with very sensitively evolved mechanical properties, was obvious - yet it was not asked in a funded capacity until we had been letting it accumulate in our kids for decades"
which the article I linked supports, people come out of the woodwork to argue we need "more evidence/an exact biochemical pathway" when we dont have the understanding/technology to actually do that.
You're assuming we're all being poisoned. We might not be, and clearly if we are, it's not a huge effect because we're still not obviously more diseasous than before. It could even be that the benefits of these chemicals on civilization outweigh the health costs so we're better off using them.
You're assuming were not all being poisoned, lol. Did you even read what I wrote.
There's plenty of evidence we're increasingly fucking with our bodies, again see the rising rates of cancer in youth. Yes, there are likely many causes for that. You'd have to be criminally negligent to argue a class of chemicals like phthalates is in the clear. Yes, the details are complicated. Yes, the dose makes the poison. Yes.
I believe we're smart enough to find a way to have/eat out cake, but smart people are arguing in this classic way about details that miss the main point people should care about, downplaying the issue in a way that laypeople cant understand the nuance of. So we keep following the $$$ and likely poisoning ourselves.
You can't just say "squeeze between hydrophobic polymers", as if that's a single thing, and therefore any such "hydrophobic polymer" will be vulnerable to a phthalate.
In particular, DNA is not hydrophobic -- it's an extremely polar environment. The known DNA/RNA intercalating chemicals are also very polar (at least, in critical selected locations). For example, Ethidium Bromide:
Point being: assuming that the paper in the headline is true (which I do not assume, but I digress), your theory of the mechanism is probably wrong, and therefore misleading.
Edit: having now looked at the paper, they're discussing one specific chemical (bezyl butyl phthalate) which is actually quite polar. It's also an ester, and trivially broken down by common enzymes into a number of different child compounds, any of which could be individually responsible for the claimed effects. Biochemistry is complex.
It gets into hydrophobic binding sites, and accumulates in lipids.
> Aromatic compounds, aliphatic hydrocarbons, and halogens are the hydrophobic parts of ligand PAEs. Hydrophobic contact is caused by the spatial proximity of the non-polar amino acid side chains and the hydrophobic substituents on the ligand PAE molecules. Water molecules are released from the hydrophobic region upon hydrophobic contact, and the unconstrained water molecules released can participate in the energy-favorable hydrogen bonding interactions, which enhance the overall binding affinity of the ligand [37,38,39]. Therefore, the hydrophobic interactions between ligands and receptors affect the ability of PAEs to bind to hormone proteins and influence the ability of PAEs to bind to DNA response elements.
The paper is about DNA mutation. DNA is not a hydrophobic binding site. It doesn't interact with hydrophobic binding sites. Moreover, the chemical studied in this particular paper is not particularly hydrophobic.
Your theory is wrong, at least in this case. Also, this paper says the opposite of what you think it says:
> based on the three-dimensional potential energy surface information, it was discovered that the hydrophobic, steric, and electrostatic fields of PAEs significantly influence their endocrine disruption effects on humans.
They're saying that hydrophobic effects matter, but non-hydrophobic effects also matter. So everything matters.
FWIW, the paper is not particularly worth citing. Someone made an ML model that said what any competent chemist could tell you by looking at a phthalate.
Who said DNA was hydrophobic? I'm sorry, but we're not disagreeing. Phtalates are very lithophilic and that's a major mechanism of their accumulation in the body.
If phtalates were highly polar, they wouldn't be soluble in plastic. That means they're going to bind to fat tissue and non-polar receptors.
>the chemical studied in this particular paper [...]
Also, the paper didn't study "a chemical," it covered about 30.
I'm telling you that you're overgeneralizing based on incorrect information. The paper being discussed here directly refutes your hypothesis of action, because it's about a particular chemical that is known to be metabolized, causing downstream effects in an extremely polar molecule (DNA).
Generally, "pthalates" are not a thing, but rather a whole bunch of different things (some are hydrophobic, some are not), and many of them are metabolized by the human body, so they don't actually accumulate. You have to be more specific.
> If phtalates were highly polar, they wouldn't be soluble in plastic.
Setting aside "highly polar", which is not specific, you are wrong. Many/most pthalates are far from what chemists consider "hydrophobic", and are in fact esters, alcolhols and acids.
> Also, the paper didn't study "a chemical," it covered about 30.
>Generally, "pthalates" are not a thing, but rather a whole bunch of different things (some are hydrophobic, some are not), and many of them are metabolized by the human body, so they don't actually accumulate. You have to be more specific.
I am being specific enough to be talking about the hydrophobic pthalates that do accumulate in the human body. If I was talking about the other ones that claim would be trivially wrong... when the popular media says cyanide is dangerous, they're talking about the dangerous molecules with R-CN, not the safe ones.
> I am being specific enough to be talking about the hydrophobic pthalates that do accumulate in the human body.
They're all amphiphilic, to some degree. That's how they work. It's also common to the chemical group that they break down quickly, because they tend to be esters and alcohols. Any phthalates that bioaccumulate would be the exception, not the rule.
I think this does have some ongoing influence on why more detailed analysis of common chemicals is not required.
From what I can tell, it looks like phthalates started with excess coal tar which contained tonnes of a solid waxy aromatic hydrocarbon called naphthalene that nobody probably had much of a way to monetize for quite some time.
Plenty of money was surely being made in other ways so regardless of the accounting methods, the surplus ends up being a no-cost item. When there are tonnes of an unutilized resource like this the full-scale effort would turn every tonne into something useful, and all it has to do is be the least bit useful and the least bit worth money for it look pretty good on paper. Plus the longer it builds up without having a good way to get rid of it can make a difference. Especially if one of the physical properties of the asset has something to do with combustibility and/or toxicity.
This gives extreme financial leverage compared to comparable chemical processes where a major raw material has a nominal cost, or even an attractive cost.
Anyway, naphthalene was an early source of cheap phthalic acids & anhydrides.
Also some oil fields have enough naphthalene content for it to be accumulated in the bigger refineries along with other waxy hydrocarbons which are processed in abundance.
Plus to meet increasing demand phthalic anhydride can also be made from ortho-xylene which many more refineries are commonly processing a stream of. This may not be zero-cost raw material, but it is still a hydrocarbon which is in bulk and easy to add value to if you're going to do something other than burn it for fuel.
In the 1980's the phthalate I would see the most of was "di-octyl phthalate", known as DOP. It was mostly di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate since the "octanol" that formed the diester was usually 2-ethylhexanol, not much n-octanol involved.
The 2-EH itself was some nasty-smelling stuff, one drop on your foot and you would have to leave your shoes outside when you got home. It was a byproduct of butanol & isobutanol manufacture, which themselves are relatively clean solvents. The 2-EH was clarified but it is a low-volatility solvent that doesn't dry up very fast, and stinks so bad it is not an ideal paint ingredient. There was no published laboratory testing procedure but I did do some pioneering chromatography anyway and there was a rich array of minor byproducts which are still most likely not fully identified chemically yet.
So 2-EH is another low-cost item but not much higher viscosity than the butanols.
Esterifying to combine with the phthalic and you get the compound DOP, the syrupy liquid used as a plasticizer that doesn't dry up much faster than the plastic solids themselves, and imparts the increased flexibility desired by the processor.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are some minor impurities in the DOP that trace back to the 2-EH raw material, which could be much more potent endocrine disruptors than the known plasticizer chemical itself. The statistical possibility is based on the number and variety of unidentified minor constituents, the way that very small amounts of hormones have very outsized effects, and the correlations that have been seen which incriminate the plasticizer and seem to show some connection.
Plus, after a few short years being a leading analyst of 2-EH and DOP, one day some highly purified 2-EH became available in "research grade", purchased it to serve as reference material, and it turned out to be relatively odor-free ! It was the 2-ethylhexyl aldehyde content that made it smell so bold. So I have known something was up for a very long time but still don't have all the details I would want.
Now if there is some minor component other than the known plasticizer bulk chemical itself which is causing disruption, and in-vivo work is being done on the highly purified reference material in order to evaluate the target plasticizer itself in the absence of as many unknowns as possible I'm not so sure the findings would apply as much in the real would as I would like.
At the beginning, phthalates were not optimized to serve as plasticizers.
They just happened to not fail at the task.
Got more popular, and non-surplus alternative sources of raw materials for plasticizing will break ground to meet the demand once the more-attractively-priced "chemical waste" has all been spoken for.
Something like a playbook that predates the plastic age.
CR showing how much of it is in our food. What’s crazy is how unpredictable it is, some have little, and other very similar products have 100x the amount. As a consumer I have little ability to control this.
"The study also showed that C. elegans metabolizes BBP in the same way as mammals, and is impacted at similar BBP levels that occur in humans, suggesting that C. elegans is an effective model for studying the impacts on people."
Said it before here and I’ll say it again. Now your #1 exposure is “luxury vinyl flooring” every hotel room is going to this as well as a ton of homes
Their magic number is 1:3 polymers to stone for that product to work
You’re absorbing it through your feet, luckily most people in the US wear shoes and slippers in the home. But it still releases up to 3% of its polymer volume into your home air within the first year.
In the south where it’s hotter, the process accelerates proportional to heat.
There aren't any in polypropylene plastic, polyethylene plastic or polycarbonates.
I'm sympathetic, less plastic is probably good - it does have to be a well thought through change. If the change reduces safety, or if it gets manufacturers to switch to a worse risk profile product, we could be net worse off.
Sadly it's not only about (intentional) additives.
Plastics — including those listed — act as chemical sponges, soaking up and concentrating toxins present in the ambient environment. For example in a household the airborne dust absorbs brominated fire retardants and formaldehydes. The total quantity of toxins in these tiny particles can exceed the gaseous concentration in the air by thousands of times, so microplastics act like a billion tiny Trojan horses for toxins to enter the body.
So when modelling these risks, it could be less about the equilibrium amount of microplastics in the body at any one time (the stock), so much as the constant re-introduction of new microplastics into the body (the flow).
Sadly I found a study at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3222987/ saying that many polypropylene polyethylene products release estrogenic chemicals (IDK if it's the same as phthalate) likely from additives, including when bent/deformed. And polycarbonates are infamously made of polymerized BPA and similar chemicals (usually endocrine disruptors).
Thanks for sharing the study. I will say the made-from argument is less compelling since table salt is made from sodium (explosive) and chlorine (chemical warfare agent) and yet it's pretty yummy. So long as it doesn't degrade, that's not super problematic. However the study I will read.
Just following up! Yeah that's really interesting, I read both of your links. Again thank you for sharing. To be clear my reaction was just to the "made of scary components" thing, I was not dismissing your suggestion that harmful chemicals may leach from the final product.
This is the most relevant one IMO. You can buy glass cups and jars, it doesn't matter if the water you put into them comes through PVC pipes! Even if you buy BPA-free phthalate-free bottled water, I think it's safe to assume that at one point that water went through several meters of PVC pipes to get to that bottle!
PVC water pipes must be ubiquitous nowadays, and are certainly better than the older copper alternative, which in turn is better than the older lead alternative!
Maybe the next step is special PVC for water piping. Until then I guess we're better than we have ever been, water piping-wise.
Yeah as long as you're not chewing or extension cords you should be good.
The most common water pipe in new construction is cross linked polyethylene. XLPE. It is stable, inert, and contains no plasticizers. PVC is often used for sewage drain pipes. Like the parent said it is the rigid crystalline kind typically containing minimal plasticizers tightly bound within the crystal matrix.
It depends. Leaching from cold water passing through a pipe for a few seconds is a lot different from a water bottle that might be in a backpack or warm car most of a day.
Just about any kind of flexible or soft-ish plastic you encounter as a consumer that is not PET (soda bottles, plastic bags, polyester) is going to have phthalates in it.
You mean like perfume and cosmetics? Sturdy glass with carpets near the bathroom sink and the shower will do the trick. I'll take a few cuts through my life over cancer and chronic diseases.
I mean, you could make a simple and cheap bottle out of aluminum probably?
We had shampoo before the widespread usage of plastic bottles, though you are right that they used to come in glass. Perhaps we could use that fancy unbreakable soviet glass.
Sounds like a good business idea actually..
Edit: Actually thinking about it, that really is a good business idea. If anyone wants to build that business with me, email me at the address in my bio.
You just have to convince the vast majority of people that the extra expense of the container is worth it to them.
I have taken a very unscientific poll, and a very few number of people would want glass containers. You have to realize that people commenting on HN are not the mass public. The polls I've done were just asking during specific skincare product related conversations. The vast majority were onboard for paraben/phthalate free products made from plant based ingredients, but the no plastic issue was not something people felt strongly about at all.
People also survived without antibiotics and electricity in past. Electricity generation is a far bigger environmental load than plastic. By your logic we should revert to burning candles. Even windmills and solar panels are made from toxic chemicals. Everything in life has its tradeoffs. It is not responsible to use a one sided mass hysteria to impose a lower standard of living on people when it is not clear what the quantifiable harm the technological innovation that is plastics is to justify doing so. Many things are toxic in the right dose but the dose makes the poison. Making policy without considering tradeoffs is the road to Idiocracy and watering plants with Brawndo.
Electricity generation if it is from right sources is not killing me or us. Plastic is and we have it everywhere around, or inside, even in our brains.. So, what has bigger priority?
see "Green Chemistry" in the USA about 20 years ago.. science was well-developed.. also "Body Burden" search term.. largely stone-walled at the politics level.
"Product liability is a third-rail in American politics" yes
We should also ban plants while we are at it, since there are only a few letters of difference.
In other words: Banning certain types of plastics makes sense and we do that all the time. Banning "plastics" is about as sensible as banning dihydrogenmonoxide.
I try to avoid reheating things in plastic containers. It's about the only thing I can think of I can do as a consumer to reduce the risk of chemicals leeching into the food.
> would drive prices of basic household goods up 400%
Glass is nominally more expensive and works. Our go-to food storage is mason jars. $12/dozen, probably cheaper by volume than the plastic crap on the shelves at Target or Walmart.
A bottle of wine by mass is ballpark 50% glass and 50% wine. A one liter glass jar of olives around 300 grams of glass.
So it's not merely packaging cost but also about convenience of shipping it around.
That said we still manage to ship both of those all over the world despite the unfavorable mass and relative sensitivity of their packaging.
The jar of olives however have plastic liner in the jar lid, so you're not escaping plastics anyway. The solution as I see it is to use the right plastics in the right way and ensure proper disposal of the waste.
Maybe go for the low-hanging fruit first, so to speak. When I was a free range kid back in the late 70’s, long before CA Redemption Value was conceived, all soft drinks were in deposit bottles. Thick, heavy reusable bottles. You’d pay a dime for the bottle and yeah you brought it back. The truck would go back to the warehouse with a load of empties. The retailer sorted them by brand and flavor. The bottling plant washed them and refilled them. Way more ecological than our current “pretend to recycle” regime we have in the U.S.
Wine and olives also cost more than milk and eggs. You can package milk in glass bottle 5 percent of the weight of the product made at thousands of degrees from burning fossil fuels or you can package it in an inert HDPE container, that is processed at several hundred degrees and weighs say 0.5% of the product contained within. lighter packaging means less fuel burned to ship it. Lower processing temperatures means less fuel burned to make it. Ethylene polymerized into plastic for milk jugs doesn't end up in the air as CO2. Plastic feed stocks directly compete with fuel feed stocks. The less fuel we need to burn to ship things the more carbon is kept out of the atmosphere and the more carbon made into plastic that is stable when buried for thousands of years the less ends up in the air. You can make a lighter foam egg carton for less cost, that better protects the eggs than a paper one. Paper is no more a natural material than plastic. The manufacturing process releases hydrogen sulfide, contaminates water and when the paper rots the toxic dyes in ink printed on it is unbound and free to leach into the environment. Paper cups are coated with persistent waxed and plastics that migrate once the cup that supported them is gone. White paper products are bleached and brown paper is produced with harmful chemicals including even flame retardants at times. What is cheapest, lightest and most stable is usually also the most environmentally friendly thing.
I think furniture and carpet would get it worse than most stuff. The alternatives to plastic (largely glass) in other cases are more like 20-50% more expensive, but furniture? Carpet? Solid wood and wool, leather—god, I dunno what you’d even use for cushion fill that’d last anywhere near as long. Those are closer to 400% the price of synthetic stuff. Or more.
> I'm all for pushing back on chemicals wherever possible, especially in food packaging, but let's be real.
The devil is that food that comes pre-packed under vacuum or inert atmosphere in plastics lasts much, much longer than food that gets stored in anything else - including tin cans by the way, they're all lined with plastics because acidic food would otherwise literally eat away the can.
There are "bulk" stores that have no packaging and you fill up what you need into reusable containers that you either buy or bring yourself. They generally have common bulk items like flour but also lots of options for typical grocery store fare. The prices at those stores generally aren't 400% of what they are at a regular grocery store, and if they are higher I'm sure a large part is that this is a niche kind of store rather than how everyone gets their groceries.
That's obviously not the whole supply chain, and I'm sure many goods still arrive at that kind of store in plastic, but these tend to be run by the types that avoid plastic anyway so whatever they can get in reusable packaging I'm sure they are getting wrapped in something other than plastic. Anyway, if plastic is going to be used, the exposure from a single 100lbs bag of something that you refill into a container is probably vastly lower than from 100 individually wrapped 1lbs bags
That kind of thing only works in a high trust society. Given the choice, I'm not going to buy food from bulk bins where some stranger could have contaminated them, whether by malice or incompetence.
There is already a mountain of research showing that phthalates are endocrine disruptors and cause developmental defects. The FDA knows this and is doing nothing.
It seems generally impossible to do much to avoid ingesting plastic. It's literally everywhere. The personal choices you make as a consumer are a drop in the bucket.
This is misleading. "at levels similar to those detected in humans, [...] egg cells with the wrong number of chromosomes."
So where are all these people with the wrong number of chromosomes? They should be everywhere. Maybe all this damage ends up leading to no human growing from the egg, so they're never born but again where are all the infertile women? It should be nearly everyone! It's either written to deceive or it's obviously wrong.
No one cares. The people profit from this don't care. Virtually everyone who buys these products doesn't care either. If you care and you want to do something about it get on the next spaceship, leave the earth and abandon this unintelligent human species.
Of course i'm not referring to toys made from glass or metal.
> Prior material analyses of sex toys like those characterized here revealed phthalate concentrations in most tested products at concentrations ranging from 24–60% by weight [11, 14, 15]. In addition, there is growing concern over human exposure to micro-and nano-plastics. The translocation and biouptake of nano-sized particles is now well established [16]. Human exposure to nanoplastics and the potential for enhanced release of plastic additives are of potential concern.
The blind irrational hatred of "plastics" is bordering on a religion or mass hysteria.
HN is supposed to be a forum of educated, rational people capable of critical thought. Here are some basic facts.
1. Plastic is often presented in the media as some kind of monolithic hazardous compound where it is not. There are different kinds of plastic. Alternatives are usually economically and environmentally inferior.
2. The most common types of plastic for consumer applications are polyethylene and polypropylene, followed by polyvinyl chloride and polystyrene. PE and PP are biologically and chemically inert. The same reason why they don't break down is the reason why they are harmless. Polystyrene derived from a naturally occuring compound styrene found in some plants and can and does breakdown under attack of UV light, acids, microorganisms. All three PE, PP, and PS are most commonly manufactured without harmful additives. Only PVC uses significant quantities of plasticizers some of which are harmful. Unless you are chewing on your shower curtain you have little to worry about.
3. At least several hundred billion tons of commodity plastics have been mass produced over the last 70 years with little to no quantified, attributable environmental damage from these plastics. Most microplastic is essentially inert dust that is no different from other organic or inorganic dust such as pollen or clay. Plastics are not allergens because they are non reactive and do not stimulate an immune response. It is very likely that blood of animals contains plastic molecules along with thousands of other molecules in trace quantities doing no more harm than natural silt in a river system.
4.The fact that commodity plastics do not readily rot or degrade is a good thing. Petroleum carbon made into stable plastic and buried in a landfill is kept out of the atmosphere.
5. Plastic items are less energy demanding to recycle and produce in the first place because of lower thermal processing requirements than glass, metal or wood.
6. Lignin in wood is a natural plastic.
7. Most of the macro plastics in the ocean comes from Asia and the fishing industry. In the west it is buried in a landfill where it helpfully sequesters carbon.
8. Plastic items are often lighter to ship also consuming less energy that way versus alternatives.
9. Most microplastics in the ocean are from synthetic fibers and tire abrasion. I have yet to see a non handwaving study that these actually result in significant environmental harm. Maybe we should research more durable tire materials. Perversely electric vehicles wear tires quicker than ICE vehicles due to a more aggressive torque curve. Cotton has to be planted (diesel tractor), sprayed with fertilizers and pesticides, picked (diesel), spun, woven, etc. just because it's natural doesn't mean it's better for the environment at mass scale. This true of other things too like glass, metal, paper, etc.
10. People should stop irresponsibly hating on plastics when the alternatives are worse.
This neo Luddite Puritanism is just dumb and unscientific.
I challenge anyone to rebut my assertions with hard facts that quantify to supposed damage plastic does versus what alternatives would do.
We're all responding to an article about how plasticizers used in certain plastics to make them all more flexible can damage DNA in some organisms. Why do you consider that empirical study to be new Luddite Puritanism? And if the plasticizer can leach out of plastics, which has been shown in numerous studies over the years, why do you consider them inert?
It's not enough to assert, loudly, that you are right and we are all wrong and everything is fine let's all go back inside and let the chemists keep doing what they're doing. You have to explain also why PE and PP never under any circumstances ever contain any plasticizers.
Regarding plastics and microplastics in the oceans, I've seen tons of pictures of dead birds that after autopsy have filled their crops with broken plastic pieces instead of food. This is not good, and having all of our sea birds die is not an insignificant environmental harm.
So hand-waiving that away doesn't change the fact that introducing plastics have caused new and exciting forms of harm in our biosphere.
1. I was interacting with the general theme of the comments on the article, which is the zeitgeist plastic bad.
2. I believe you should consider logical fallacies and questions of scale and trade offs.
Specifically people arguing against "plastics" in general seem to depend on hearsay, strawmen, all or nothing fallacy, appeal to authority, etc. it is black and white thinking against the nuance of the real world. In recent times on many issues it seems that black and white thinking is presented as something that is a rational way to approach things. It is not. The real world is complicated and full of nuance anf tradeoffs. Just because you can show some plastics may have some harmful effects does not mean that the miracle of plastic materials is a net bad for humanity
or the environment unless you can show the harm EXCEEDS that of scalable alternatives. The burden of proof is on those who are against plastics to show that the net harm caused by specific compounds is worse than the net benefit of using them. We will never be able to prove that all plastics are harmless in every possible context. Nor should we. In life we have to make decisions based on the best available information we have. So it makes more sense to ask after 70 years what significant harms have been caused by plastics that would be made less than alternatives. Even a thousand pictures of dead birds does not make a compelling case unless it is weighed against the costs of harvesting forests for paper and burning fossil fuels to make glass and metal to make inferior packaging that costs more and takes more fuel to transport.
All else held equal light weight non biodegrade materials made from cheap highly productive chemical feed stocks are better for the environment than alternatives.
A series of anecdotes and one sided analyses does not make a compelling case.
When you put it that way it actually makes a lot more sense to me. But I think if that's your position, then you should present alternative harms that plastics use have prevented. I'm aware of some harms that would have happened in the medical field where disposable medical devices have likely reduced the burden of sterilization after procedures. Imagine having to clean your hypodermic after every use.
3. At least several hundred billion tons of commodity plastics have been mass produced over the last 70 years with little to no quantified, attributable environmental damage from these plastics. Most microplastic is essentially inert dust that is no different from other organic or inorganic dust such as pollen or clay. Plastics are not allergens because they are non reactive and do not stimulate an immune response. It is very likely that blood of animals contains plastic molecules along with thousands of other molecules in trace quantities doing no more harm than natural silt in a river system.
You're missing a couple points yourself. For example, the article is talking about phthalates. These are additives added to plastics. These leech from microplastics. So your rant about how plastics are inert shows you didnt even understand the article yourself tbh.
There is plenty of evidence that these compounds are harmful and affect the biology. See the section on wikipedia on phthalates. What there isnt is much evidence and experimentation showing theyre NOT harmful.
Electric vehicles have extremely precise traction control due to the nature of their motors so even with higher torque they keep traction much better than their ICE counterparts.
EVs are also heavy and might wear tires quicker in braking situations though.
You are right about all of this. It is also true that phthalates and BPA-like chemicals pose considerable harm to people today.
You clearly know this, and much more.
Why not go one step beyond “hey anti all plastic people, not all plastics are bad” and help them get educated on, avoid and solve the harms that do exist?
Lack of nuance, on either side of the debate, mostly comes across as propaganda (to me)
Apart from food packaging, one great way to easily ingest plastic is to use synthetic clothing. Just a basic rubbing of a synthetic sleeve on your nose causes thousands of polyester particles to release in thin air, readily breathable.
Not just clothing, but also bedding is a huge issue. With pillows, mattresses and towels mostly made of synthetic fibers.
My usual instinct is: try rubbing the synthetic material; if it releases thousands of particles in thin air, stay away from it
Clothing industry has somehow gotten by unscathed during all the environmental awareness that has spread in the past 20 years. I am pretty sure clothes are the #1 cause of the microplastics that have inundated the ocean and our water supply.
We have been heavily pushed to drive less, recycle more, and use less water, but I have not seen messaging about not buying new clothes you don't need.
> Clothing industry has somehow gotten by unscathed during all the environmental awareness that has spread in the past 20 years. I am pretty sure clothes are the #1 cause of the microplastics that have inundated the ocean and our water supply.
Surprise surprise, it has actually been studied. One recent review article of the field:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl2746
From figure 2b) we can see that while microplastics from synthetic fibres are certainly an issue, they are far from #1. Dwarfed by tires, paint, and macroplastics (large plastic pieces thrown away slowly grinding down into microplastics e.g. by wave action).
Pretty sure PP was referring to mainstream criticism and concerns which tend to be about plastics in foods, etc. but less acknowledgement of the problem of fast fashion switching from cotton to plastic based textiles.
France passed a law back in 2020 to require new washing machines to have a microplastics filter by 2025:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2020-00137...
It has also begun to subsidize the clothing repair industry:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/13/business/france-shoe-clothing...
Maybe we should subsidize plastic-free fibers instead. Cotton, hemp, wool...
Or perhaps we could all agree to stop wearing so much clothing in warm climates? I have a hard time believing that out of all mammals that ever came to be on this planet, we just so happened to be the only ones with this unique need that our biology failed to provide us with.
Though I wouldn't expect the average consumer to take a full course in organic chemistry, perhaps we can train the public to see benzene rings.
Counting electron delocalization density and reactivity can be a rule of thumb for DNA mutation.
Basically a, "Does your chemical look like this? Maybe consume less of it." infographic.
> perhaps we can train the public to see benzene rings But benzene rings are everywhere, from deadly poison to essential nutrients.
And in fact, some chemicals that behave very differently may look extremely similar on paper. Especially when it comes to biology.
Linen; linen is made from the Flax plant.
Natural fibers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_fiber
Green textiles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_textile
There are newer more sustainable production processes for various natural fibers.
TIL that there are special laundry detergents for synthetic fabrics like most activewear like jerseys; and that fabric softener attracts mosquitos and adheres to synthetic fibers causing stank.
You still have massive downsides to new cotton or wool clothes. There's just less of the micro plastic downside. Clothing is just a place where we take a massive hit on everything from carbon output to micro plastics.
Another issue is clothing repair. I think the clothing repair thing is kind of brilliant. But for clothing repair to work you would need to disincentivize buying new clothes. Which subsidizing clothing would work against.
> for clothing repair to work you would need to disincentivize buying new clothes
Why? I repair clothes. I also like buying new ones. In between I ruin and lose items, or find that I no longer wish to wear them for purely stylistic reasons.
Higher quality clothes like in the past might be nice. Stuff seems to fall apart so quickly these days.
Older clothes weren't just made better, people also took care of them better. Partly because of cost, but also culture -- fewer changes in fashion trends with slower and more local communication, cheap labor to launder your clothes by hand (which puts much less wear on the garment). Also a culture of repairing and mending (also easier to do this when you have fewer things to occupy your free time).
Yes. But really, it was much worse in many ways. A 100 years ago, say, the people doing clothes repair for a living were desperately poor, and often being single women they often had to resort to prostitution to feed themselves as the income from repairing clothes simply wasn't enough.
I do think that from an environmental standpoint we should repair and recycle clothes a lot more than we do, but lets not romanticize the past. The small clothes repair businesses disappeared for a reason as living standards improved. Furthermore, today factory production of clothes is incredibly efficient and tends to be done in low-income countries, further making it even harder to restart some kind of clothes repair industry in high-income countries.
sad truth: dryers absolutely destroy clothes.
The problem isn't really "buying new clothes," since most of the microplastics are released in the laundry. Sewage treatment plants aren't designed to remove them, so they get released with the discharge water. It can also clog up septic leachfields.
They do make purpose-built products to filter microplastic lint from laundry[1][2], but a more hacker approach is to just search for "pool filter."
I wish they made comparable products for the dryer.
[1] https://www.filtrol.net/
[2] https://planetcare.org/
> I wish they made comparable products for the dryer.
Isn't that just the lint filter? Every dryer I've seen has one.
Those are probably not fine enough (in terms of filtration) and retrofit may be difficult if it restricts airflow.
There's an entire big and celebrated business sector that spends every working hour taking intact plastic products and grinds then into fine shreds, a process likely to contribute more than a fair share to microplastic dissemination. Maybe worth investigating, a good candidate for more microplastic release than the clothing industry.
Name of that business sector? Plastics recycling.
Plastics recycling also kinda barely exists. Only 5% of plastic in the US is recycled, the whole thing was a greenwashing operation by oil companies to encourage additional consumption. Realistically putting the plastic deep underground back from whence the hydrocarbons came is not a bad sequestration strategy.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
The way we used to "recycle" plastic was to put it on a container ship along with glass and aluminum and send it to China. Once it arrived, they would recycle the glass and aluminum and bury or burn the plastic. We reduced the quantity of (valuable) aluminum and glass over time until China got mad and told us to stop shipping them just the garbage (plastic). That was largely the end of the show.
The US is at the back of the pack though, in Europe some countries recycle more than half of plastic.
Do they recycle or just burn it for energy?
Countries like Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland incinerated 50-80% of their plastic waste. Germany incinerated around 50%. Countries in Eastern and Southern Europe generally had lower incineration rates and higher landfill rates. Approximately 42% of plastic waste in Europe was being incinerated in waste-to-energy facilities.
Recycling is not burning.
Same for aluminum, which is highly recyclable. A ridiculous amount of it ends up in landfills for no reason other than people can't be fucked.
Plastic recycling is just another American "we tried nothing and are out of ideas." Much of the lack of recycling for plastics, when it comes to bottles, isn't some grand conspiracy so much as people just throwing bottles in the trash or on the side of the road, because:
* There aren't omnipresent recycling bins to go alongside trash cans.
* There aren't local programs for recycling pick up.
* Some people can't be bothered and the government isn't punching them in the face, as it should.
Only a half dozen states have a can/bottle deposit, even. Each state should be required to have deposits and municipal recycling pickup in any city of appreciable size, and heavy penalties for littering, or all sorts of federal funding should be withheld.
> Plastic recycling is just another American "we tried nothing and are out of ideas."
not sure where this comes from -- this statement is definitely not accurate. Is recycling of plastics "going well" ? no. Please note that USA is composed of States, and then Counties. In the USA law system, counties have the most jurisdiction over most waste laws. Some State laws override those, including toxics handling; then Federal laws including interstate commerce (transportation) and many more toxics regulations.
Counties do vary dramatically. In fact most counties in the whole USA are different in important respects. There is no single USA this way. Overall, recycling is very dependent on economics. It costs money to recycle, and sometimes you get some of it back on materials markets. The costs to the environment are not accurate with respect to markets.
The comment then proceeds to dictate advice to "each state" and that is never going to happen, by definition, for legal matters under the jurisdiction of states, in simple terms.
> We have been heavily pushed to drive less, recycle more, and use less water, but I have not seen messaging about not buying new clothes you don't need.
It's there if you follow the right people on social media.
Campaigns that center around personal responsibility, however, aren't ever going to work, and there's obvious reasons why people are willing to pay to push this narrative but not the buying fewer clothes one (at least here in the US).
It hardly moves the needle - apart from often needing huge amounts of awareness education that busy people hardly have time to think about, there usually aren’t enough affordable alternative options for ‘personal responsibility’ to work, but when you regulate to reduce the sale of the bad stuff it just forces it to happen.
Often regulation forces better alternatives to reach the scale where economy of scale can make it affordable, whereas with the ‘personal responsibility’ model the alternatives will often just stay the far more expensive, premium option.
Vintage clothing stores are a great resource to combat this. It's sad how expensive many are, but you can also try thrift stores for clothes.
Oh no, I love my lululemon clothes. New fear unlocked. It makes sense though, these clothes still generate lint and it can only be thousands of synthetic particles and dirt.
>not buying new clothes you don't need
Pretty sure I don't need the ones made of microplastics!
With luck, maybe some new nudity tolerance movements can be fomented. :^D
Hum, almost all of my t-shirts are 100% cotton, or at least that's what the label says. I use mostly the same clothes from 15 years ago so maybe synthetic is more common nowadays? I think the only t-shirts I own that are not 100% cotton are those I've got for free on things like marathons and hackathons. Does it contain phthalate? I have no idea, there is no label saying what they are made of. Probably polyester. Does it have phthalates in any meaningful concentration? This review says basically that "it varies a lot" and "needs further study". https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138266892...
Interestingly Table 4 in that link shows "Plain weave cotton" and "polyster" having similar levels of phthalates.
I don't think phtalates are needed as plasticizers in polyster, so I guess they are coming from the dyes or something else used to treat the fabrics, meaning that the choice of cotton or polyster may not matter for phthalates specifically?
100% cotton is usually treated with plasticizers, even without dyes
I wear mostly the same clothes too from 15 years ago I'd agree synthetic is more common nowadays? Shirts, underwear, hoodies, jackets, relzed fit stretchy pants/trousers all seem to be something just not cotton anyway.
I recall the cotton tees of my youth being stiff and terrible-feeling.
Did your mother (or whomever did the laundry) dry them on a clothesline? Air-dried clothes will be a bit more stiff than tumble-dried.
When I was younger, it was common to add starch to make the cotton easier to iron etc - that would definitely make it stiff. Thankfully we don't do that anymore. Comfortwise, Cotton beats practically any other fabric + it gets softer the longer you use it so in a way it actually incentivizes reuse.
100% cotton can be waaay comfier than poly blends. Just depends on the weave/wash
I hate how normalized this is. Breathing in a difficult to break down plastic dust is not something that seems healthy.
Nitpick:
All else being equal you're generally safer being exposed to stable things that don't break down than unstable things that happily react with all sorts of things (and tend to meddle with the chemical processes required for life).
If you get to choose between breathing tires and milk jugs pick the milk jugs every time.
> All else being equal you're generally safer being exposed to stable things that don't break down than unstable things that happily react with all sorts of things
There's a similar paradox in nuclear radiation. (Sometimes expressed with a puzzle about differently radioactive cookies and what to do with each.)
Gamma rays are scary because it takes a lot of lead shielding to even slow them down... but that also means that they aren't stopping to interact with things--like yourself--as they travel.
Alpha particles seem relatively safe because they don't travel far and are blocked by your skin... But that means they're doing something to that skin, and luckily for you any damage is being dealt to already-dead cells on the outside.
But if you had to put one of them inside your body, it's quite possible the gamma ray emitter would be the safer option, simply because more of its energy would escape harmlessly.
> But if you had to put one of them inside your body, it's quite possible the gamma ray emitter would be the safer option, simply because more of its energy would escape harmlessly.
That's definitely the case with Polonium-210. Even though it emits alpha particles, it's very dangerous to ingest.
> All else being equal you're generally safer being exposed to stable things that don't break down than unstable things that happily react with all sorts of things
Unless the other thing is asbestos or generally any kind of mineral/anorganic material - pneumoconiosis [1] is nasty in all its variants. There is no mechanism at all for your body to break down or expel anorganic contaminants in your lungs.
> If you get to choose between breathing tires and milk jugs pick the milk jugs every time.
Well, plastic, glass or metal, no matter what the jugs are made of, they'll hurt your lungs just like the tire dust will.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumoconiosis
> There is no mechanism at all
I think that's somewhat misleading, the lung has a mucus layer and cilia to move particles caught in the mucus up and out. But I'll agree that it's not a completely robust system. Anything that gets past or can't be moved by the mucus layer is going to be a problem, especially particles that can't be broken down by the macrophages.
>Unless the other thing is asbestos or generally any kind of mineral/anorganic material - pneumoconiosis [1] is nasty in all its variants. There is no mechanism at all for your body to break down or expel anorganic contaminants in your lungs.
Yup. I was thinking of heading off comments like yours by mentioning silicosis or lead poisoning but didn't want to clutter up a simple clarification.
Anyway, still mostly safer than "happy to react with things" compounds which is why people like you get to make comments about it here and now vs it simply being a thing everyone has accepted is not good to breath for hundreds of years (like certain wood dusts)
I doubt this. Sure, reactants aren't good, but impossible to biologically break down neither. Causing havoc and bioacumulating seem to be two ends of a spectrum, where you want to be in the middle. Stuff that safely and easily broken down.
Aren't they both plastic?
There are plastics in the tire, but the exterior bulk of the tire is rubber, which is not plastic.
Bulk no. Tyres are apparently only 19% natural rubber. Slightly more is synthetic, and the rest… well none of it is good ground up on roads then breathed in. I lived for a while next to a moderately busy road. Feck it was filthy even with windows never open.
Even my mountain bike tyres now contain graphene which doesn't sound like a good idea for the sake of an unnoticeable improvement, and prob only as a racer. Seems a case of new jargon selling more. So they keep adding new compounds.
Yep, rubbers are generally the class of elastomers.
Natural rubber is poly-cis-isoprene, synthetic rubbers are a mix of petroleum-derived polymers.
> All else being equal
This premise only exists in a synthetic hypothetical universe.
Would it be too snarky for HN to reply "Yes, that is indeed how hypothethicals work"?
That would totally be on brand.
What is important is to take start with a very real problem that should be resolved in this universe, then project the discussion into a very close but different one and argue there.
Now it doesn't matter if you win or lose in that universe because it doesn't matter. It isn't our reality.
Hypothetically speaking.
Well the purpose of such hypotheticals is to isolate a smaller part of the problem and examine it more closely outside of the larger context, to decompose the matter at hand in order to more easily get a grasp. I think there's value to that, of course as you pointed out only as an aside to the larger discussion, not as a replacement.
The person you originally quoted did mark their post as a nitpick.
Nobody is going around purposely breathing in plastic dust, there's been dust everywhere forever, and breathing in dust is a natural and unavoidable part of life.
What, exactly, do you think is normalized here? That people wear clothing? That people didn't throw out every polyester fiber the moment somebody said plastic can break down into small pieces? That people aren't freaking out over a danger that we know roughly nothing about so far?
People really need to stop finding excuses to freak out over things.
I think about this every time I clean out the dryer lint filter and a plume of lint dust comes off of it. I try to avoid breathing it in but it’s likely some is making it into my airways.
Try shaking out a piece of clothing in full sunlight. It helps you see the millions of future dust particles that will come off your clothing.
Over the years I found that of all the dust in my home the vast majority comes from my clothing. I deduced that because the collected dust looks the same as what I find in the dryer, and it feels like cotton too (my by far most warn kind of fiber).
That means rooms are full of tiny particles from your clothes, if I assume that my home is not an anomaly (and why should it be).
Direct sunlight really helps to see how much dust there is all around us, and how with every little movement we create more. That does not even show the particles too small to be seen. The difference is gigantic - without that sunlight you don't see any dust and think the air is clean.
I'm not too concerned, since humanity must have dealt with this for a long time. Particles from fire especially, and there are lots coming from even the tiniest flame. My main worry would be chemicals we add to clothes, but given that by now we ingest plastic pretty much all the time, with every meal, with every breath, we just have to wait and see. I don't see a way to end this long-running experiment.
Besides containing microplastics, the dryer lint is also radioactive
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35990858
Since getting used to them during Covid, I've continued wearing masks for situations just like this.
I manage that by using a vacuum to clean my lint filter but folding seems to release a lot of dust so I do that next to an air filter.
lol I’m sure those masks aren’t full of microplastics themselves. People were wearing them entire shifts and worse we jammed them on kids.
I’m sure those cheap shitty masks were absolutely full of wholesome healthy microplastic.
The lint is also the residue from your clothes being worn away. If you can, consider not using the dryer at all, especially for synthetic clothing which air dry quickly compared to cotton.
Get a high-end vacuum with a hepa filter (such as the 0.3 micro rated S-24035 by DeWalt) and turn it on and hold it near the lint trap panel as you open the panel up.
> Not just clothing, but also bedding is a huge issue. With pillows, mattresses and towels mostly made of synthetic fibers.
Preach. I vacuum my bedsheets every day because my cats are insane shedders and I'd otherwise get breaded with cat fur, but the vacuum is full with so much what is clearly not cat fur...
I often wonder about carpet or seats and couches. Also made of all manner of synthetic fabrics. Even besides the effects of living in the same space flame retardants slowly gas off over the decades, we rarely deep clean any of this, so when we sit down a cloud of craps wafts up into our lungs.
I prefer noncarpets, but hard seating of course not.
Some of my polyester t-shirts have lasted more than 10 years without any loss in colour or quality, it's a damn shame they cause microplastics since it's probably better that people don't buy clothing every month if clothes lasted longer.
> a basic rubbing of a synthetic sleeve on your nose causes thousands of polyester particles to release in thin air, readily breathable
Source?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200309221340.h...
My mattress cover is like that, as it's made from polyester. When I pull it from the dryer it produces an invisible, but irritating cloud of particles.
All that while most of the shavings accumulate in the lint collector, so it could have been even worse.
For at least 10 years now, I only by 100% cotton or cotton-linen blend, or 100% wool - nothing else! Yet, there's so many sources of microplastics that can't be eliminated, unfortunately!
> My usual instinct is: try rubbing the synthetic material; if it releases thousands of particles in thin air, stay away from it
How thin should the air be and how do you measure the particles?
Are there phthalates in polyester clothing?
Just look at the lint filter of a dryer after just one load.
Those fleece blankets and jackets too, they are made from recycled soda bottles.
And plastic shower liners.
It’s frustrating how hard it is now to buy pure cotton or <gasp> wool, from a store. Even if it’s 3% synthetic it’s still not what I’m looking for.
Yep. Specifically, why are 100% cotton socks so ridiculously hard to find now?
It used to be that they were a little more expensive - now you need to go online to find them.
'Fun' fact - the average brain has about 7 grams of microplastic [0] in it now, up 50% from 2016. At that rate...
SEVEN FUCKING GRAMS. Guys this is beyond stupid.
Even if plastic were totally inert, as I've heard people insist with certainty (where are they getting these ideas!), 7 grams of plastic in your brain is terrifying.
0 - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/23/health/plastics-in-brain-...
I wonder if anyone's done a study for similar-but-natural compounds... Does lignin accumulate? Could we find a whole bunch of it in the brains of carpenters?
>Specifically, why are 100% cotton socks so ridiculously hard to find now?
My theory is that it's because of Amazon reviews. For most socks on Amazon, there will be at least one reviewer posting pictures of how their socks got holes after a few days of wearing. These reviewers are ridiculous and seem to have sandpaper for flooring, sweat corrosive acid, or deliberately wear down these socks just to post the review. I've bought many different socks from Amazon and none of them get holes even after years of wearing them.
Anyway, I think that seems to have spooked socks manufacturers.
> Even if plastic were totally inert […], 7 grams of plastic in your brain is terrifying.
Why do you find that terrifying, if it’s inert?
To the downvoters: This is a genuine question.
Also, don't worry, there's not actually 7 grams. The study that suggested that was ridiculously bad.
When you extrapolate 100,000-fold from uncalibrated micro-scale experiments, you get insane results, but the typical internet reader doesn't get past the abstract of the paper and instantly activates panic mode, instead of questioning the insanity.
"Don't panic, it might only be 3 and a half grams of plastic in your brain."
The correct amount of brain plastic is 0 grams. Zero. This is a problem and it's very clearly getting worse.
Why would I have to explain that to someone with a PHD in biology? So weird.
Let's assume you're right, and there's 3.5 grams of plastic in your brain (there isn't, but let's run with it).
You've been secretly living with this horrible condition for long enough for it to happen -- remember, this is happening a nanogram at a time, for years and years! This is not a fast process!
Are you dead? No? Hm.
Perhaps you ought to rethink your priors. I'm not saying you're absolutely wrong -- maybe the right answer really is that "0 is the right number". But maybe the answer is that it doesn't matter that much, and you're exaggerating the impact. More to the point, when you simply leap to the most exaggerated conclusion from a bad paper with sketchy methodology, you're not doing science, or being data-driven -- you're just panicking.
Panic, no. Take seriously, yes! There are at least a dozen common health problems that we still can't explain.
> Let's assume you're right
Why assume? There's multiple studies showing microplastics in human brains. Are they all "sketchy" too?
What organ in the body hasn't been shown to be contaminated? Significant and increasing levels have been found in lungs, livers, kidneys, spleens, intestines, hearts, placentas, blood, fat tissue, lymph nodes... All sketchy studies in your view? No? Then why the exception for brains?
Microplastics have been found from the top of Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. They're in 60-80% of all wild species examined. Sketchy? Exaggerated? Bring the data if you have it. It would want to be very strong stuff..
To loudly cast doubt on a study like this, and claim you know the weight of microplastic in people's brains is under 3.5g, you'd want to bring some substance... You haven't brought any; none at all.
> Are you dead? No? Hm.
Do I really need to explain that health is a spectrum - that 'alive' is not equivalent to healthy? That "not immediately sick" isn't the same as thriving? Binary thinking isn't very helpful on issues like this, and it's hard to believe you're arguing in good faith when you say things like this as if you've made a substantive point.
> Perhaps you ought to rethink your priors.
Which priors are those - that I don't want foreign substances accumulating in my brain, much less most brains on the planet?
Why would I? This is a plausibly catastrophic scenario, and you've brought absolutely no evidence that it isn't. None. At all.
> maybe the answer is that it doesn't matter that much, and you're exaggerating the impact.
I don't want to roll the dice on this one, and I think that's the only sensible approach. We have all sorts of alternatives; they're just not quite as 'cheap'.
People have posted elsewhere in the thread about a growing body of scientific links between nasty health outcomes and higher levels of microplastic in people's fleshy bits. You ignored that though... Why? ... Do you have a vested interest? Are you scared that this could actually be an issue, and you don't want to face it? What are your priors - that if you haven't keeled over yet then you're healthy?
> maybe the right answer really is that "0 is the right number"
It is. There's no conceivable advantage from having more than that.
> maybe the answer is that it doesn't matter that much, and you're exaggerating the impact
It's baffling to me that anyone would assume that it's fine and dandy that we're finding increasing amounts of plastic in human brains, or even deny it. To me, that's a ludicrous leap of faith; requiring an utterly unhinged level of naivety or optimism.
> maybe ... you're just panicking.
... You remind me of that old cartoon about climate change - "What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"
Hopefully it's not a result of the cerebral plastics..?
Because chemical effects are not the only undesirable effects something can have. E.g., mechanical, electrical.
In any case, in one study [0], "researchers looked at 12 brain samples from people who had died with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. These brains contained up to 10 times more plastic by weight than healthy samples." Another [1] found "nanoplastics accelerate the aggregation of β-amyloid peptides" and that they exacerbate "the neurotoxicity induced by low-concentration peptides".
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/21/...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
Even if they're _chemically_ inert, physical accumulation of particles of foreign matter in your brain might be causing problems. When it gets inside of cells, is it in the way of any processes? When it's between cells, does it trigger scarring? Do the particles clog capillaries? And because the study referenced was only able to find these particles via autopsies, if microplastics in your brain were causing health issues for you, you probably would never find out or be able to mitigate.
The simple answer is that it isn't supposed be there. The more interesting one is: how much would you say is too much? Would a kilo of microplastics towards the end of your life do it?
When it has adverse effects (and no benefits), then of course it’s too much. But GP seemed to be saying they find it terrifying even assuming no adverse effects, which I found curious.
A huge number of people have implements in their bodies (in their teeth, most often), and much more than seven grams of “foreign stuff” in their stomach and intestines all the time, so that by itself doesn’t seem anything to be terrified of.
> In Italy, researchers followed 312 patients who had fatty deposits, or plaques, removed from their carotid artery. Almost six in 10 had microplastics, and these people fared worse than those who did not: Over the next 34 months, they were 2.1 times as likely to experience a heart attack or stroke, or die.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/21/...
Implements that you put there are different from those you don't put there.
That doesn't seem very complicated, does it?
> But GP seemed to be saying they find it terrifying even assuming no adverse effects, which I found curious.
It being in my brain is an adverse effect. Inert material in the brain is a problem itself.
Do you want inert rocks in your car engine? Taking up space, interfering with natural processes, etc?
The brain is incredibly complex; far, far, far beyond our current understanding. You don't want anything in there that isn't supposed to be, and plastic isn't fucking supposed to be there.
And, did you miss the part where this is up 50% from only 8 years ago?
... Tbh I'm aghast that anyone needs this explained to them.
it’s more the unknown effects. It’s not clear this stuff is actually inert.
Would you be so blase if it were 7 grams of diesel exhaust or coal particulates instead?
Even things that are chemically inert can cause problems in our bodies. Silica is similarly chemically inert, but silicosis is a devastating disease.
The story of phthalates really highlights the drinking from the fume hood aspects of our commercial norms. Phthalates are designed to squeeze between hydrophobic polymers such that their bulk mechanical properties are changed, while remaining chemically inert and not subject to breakdown. The question of what this would do in the human body, which is full of polymers with very sensitively evolved mechanical properties, was obvious - yet it was not asked in a funded capacity until we had been letting it accumulate in our kids for decades. The position of our institutions on this is a clear case of preferring not to know.
This whole thread is a great example of an interesting phenomenon... whenever people talk about this people come out of the woodwork to nitpick the details of whoever is criticizing the wonton use of likely poisonous compounds. Theyll argue things like this about the details of the exact likely bioactivity of the compound, or go on about how its impossible to have modern society without poisoning everything in a huge perfect enemy of the good argument.
Like, go drink from a cup of pthalates if youre so ok with it being in your brain, balls, ovaries, etc. No ones arguing we need to ban plastics, but maybe coating the world in single use water bottles without considering the effects is suboptimal. Shouldnt the onus be on proving its safe before spreading it everywhere, rather than proving its dangerous?
https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/06/wor...
Theyll call me extreme/ignorant/naive, but maybe a society where we have to poison ourselves to sustain "growth" isnt worth sustaining.
Not to mention the constant alarm bells about rising GI cancers in younger people. "OH BuT YOU HAVNEnT staTIstiCALLY prOved A cAusAL AssOCiaTION".
I'm not nitpicking the parent. The parent comment is just wrong, full stop. You should not listen to them.
They have an incorrect notion of what a phthalate is (usually a slightly greasy ester or an alcohol), how polar/hydrophopic they are (mixed; generally ampiphilic), and whether or not they tend to bioaccumulate (in general, they do not).
Your broader point is well-taken, however, but not in the way you intended: chemistry does not reward a shallow understanding. The details matter a lot.
You're arguing as if you understand all the side effects of the biochemistry on the biology. None of us do. Theyre correct about one thing: its probably not good for you.
But sure, you might be more right on the basics of the biochemistry.
I guess I'm just frustrated about the state of the world - im not a degrowth person I just want a better balance.
There seems to be plenty of evidence for, for example, their role in endocrine disruption.
At no point did I claim they were "good for you". I'm just saying that the OP is not making a valid argument.
Sure, but I didnt claim he made a valid argument either. What I am claiming is when someone says things like
"The question of what this would do in the human body, which is full of polymers with very sensitively evolved mechanical properties, was obvious - yet it was not asked in a funded capacity until we had been letting it accumulate in our kids for decades"
which the article I linked supports, people come out of the woodwork to argue we need "more evidence/an exact biochemical pathway" when we dont have the understanding/technology to actually do that.
You're assuming we're all being poisoned. We might not be, and clearly if we are, it's not a huge effect because we're still not obviously more diseasous than before. It could even be that the benefits of these chemicals on civilization outweigh the health costs so we're better off using them.
You're assuming were not all being poisoned, lol. Did you even read what I wrote.
There's plenty of evidence we're increasingly fucking with our bodies, again see the rising rates of cancer in youth. Yes, there are likely many causes for that. You'd have to be criminally negligent to argue a class of chemicals like phthalates is in the clear. Yes, the details are complicated. Yes, the dose makes the poison. Yes.
I believe we're smart enough to find a way to have/eat out cake, but smart people are arguing in this classic way about details that miss the main point people should care about, downplaying the issue in a way that laypeople cant understand the nuance of. So we keep following the $$$ and likely poisoning ourselves.
You can't just say "squeeze between hydrophobic polymers", as if that's a single thing, and therefore any such "hydrophobic polymer" will be vulnerable to a phthalate.
In particular, DNA is not hydrophobic -- it's an extremely polar environment. The known DNA/RNA intercalating chemicals are also very polar (at least, in critical selected locations). For example, Ethidium Bromide:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethidium_bromide
Point being: assuming that the paper in the headline is true (which I do not assume, but I digress), your theory of the mechanism is probably wrong, and therefore misleading.
Edit: having now looked at the paper, they're discussing one specific chemical (bezyl butyl phthalate) which is actually quite polar. It's also an ester, and trivially broken down by common enzymes into a number of different child compounds, any of which could be individually responsible for the claimed effects. Biochemistry is complex.
It gets into hydrophobic binding sites, and accumulates in lipids.
> Aromatic compounds, aliphatic hydrocarbons, and halogens are the hydrophobic parts of ligand PAEs. Hydrophobic contact is caused by the spatial proximity of the non-polar amino acid side chains and the hydrophobic substituents on the ligand PAE molecules. Water molecules are released from the hydrophobic region upon hydrophobic contact, and the unconstrained water molecules released can participate in the energy-favorable hydrogen bonding interactions, which enhance the overall binding affinity of the ligand [37,38,39]. Therefore, the hydrophobic interactions between ligands and receptors affect the ability of PAEs to bind to hormone proteins and influence the ability of PAEs to bind to DNA response elements.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10488033/
The paper is about DNA mutation. DNA is not a hydrophobic binding site. It doesn't interact with hydrophobic binding sites. Moreover, the chemical studied in this particular paper is not particularly hydrophobic.
Your theory is wrong, at least in this case. Also, this paper says the opposite of what you think it says:
> based on the three-dimensional potential energy surface information, it was discovered that the hydrophobic, steric, and electrostatic fields of PAEs significantly influence their endocrine disruption effects on humans.
They're saying that hydrophobic effects matter, but non-hydrophobic effects also matter. So everything matters.
FWIW, the paper is not particularly worth citing. Someone made an ML model that said what any competent chemist could tell you by looking at a phthalate.
Who said DNA was hydrophobic? I'm sorry, but we're not disagreeing. Phtalates are very lithophilic and that's a major mechanism of their accumulation in the body.
If phtalates were highly polar, they wouldn't be soluble in plastic. That means they're going to bind to fat tissue and non-polar receptors.
>the chemical studied in this particular paper [...]
Also, the paper didn't study "a chemical," it covered about 30.
I'm telling you that you're overgeneralizing based on incorrect information. The paper being discussed here directly refutes your hypothesis of action, because it's about a particular chemical that is known to be metabolized, causing downstream effects in an extremely polar molecule (DNA).
Generally, "pthalates" are not a thing, but rather a whole bunch of different things (some are hydrophobic, some are not), and many of them are metabolized by the human body, so they don't actually accumulate. You have to be more specific.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17604388/
> If phtalates were highly polar, they wouldn't be soluble in plastic.
Setting aside "highly polar", which is not specific, you are wrong. Many/most pthalates are far from what chemists consider "hydrophobic", and are in fact esters, alcolhols and acids.
> Also, the paper didn't study "a chemical," it covered about 30.
The paper in the OP was about one molecule: BBP.
>Generally, "pthalates" are not a thing, but rather a whole bunch of different things (some are hydrophobic, some are not), and many of them are metabolized by the human body, so they don't actually accumulate. You have to be more specific.
I am being specific enough to be talking about the hydrophobic pthalates that do accumulate in the human body. If I was talking about the other ones that claim would be trivially wrong... when the popular media says cyanide is dangerous, they're talking about the dangerous molecules with R-CN, not the safe ones.
> I am being specific enough to be talking about the hydrophobic pthalates that do accumulate in the human body.
They're all amphiphilic, to some degree. That's how they work. It's also common to the chemical group that they break down quickly, because they tend to be esters and alcohols. Any phthalates that bioaccumulate would be the exception, not the rule.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14384....
>preferring not to know.
I think this does have some ongoing influence on why more detailed analysis of common chemicals is not required.
From what I can tell, it looks like phthalates started with excess coal tar which contained tonnes of a solid waxy aromatic hydrocarbon called naphthalene that nobody probably had much of a way to monetize for quite some time.
Plenty of money was surely being made in other ways so regardless of the accounting methods, the surplus ends up being a no-cost item. When there are tonnes of an unutilized resource like this the full-scale effort would turn every tonne into something useful, and all it has to do is be the least bit useful and the least bit worth money for it look pretty good on paper. Plus the longer it builds up without having a good way to get rid of it can make a difference. Especially if one of the physical properties of the asset has something to do with combustibility and/or toxicity.
This gives extreme financial leverage compared to comparable chemical processes where a major raw material has a nominal cost, or even an attractive cost.
Anyway, naphthalene was an early source of cheap phthalic acids & anhydrides.
Also some oil fields have enough naphthalene content for it to be accumulated in the bigger refineries along with other waxy hydrocarbons which are processed in abundance.
Plus to meet increasing demand phthalic anhydride can also be made from ortho-xylene which many more refineries are commonly processing a stream of. This may not be zero-cost raw material, but it is still a hydrocarbon which is in bulk and easy to add value to if you're going to do something other than burn it for fuel.
In the 1980's the phthalate I would see the most of was "di-octyl phthalate", known as DOP. It was mostly di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate since the "octanol" that formed the diester was usually 2-ethylhexanol, not much n-octanol involved.
The 2-EH itself was some nasty-smelling stuff, one drop on your foot and you would have to leave your shoes outside when you got home. It was a byproduct of butanol & isobutanol manufacture, which themselves are relatively clean solvents. The 2-EH was clarified but it is a low-volatility solvent that doesn't dry up very fast, and stinks so bad it is not an ideal paint ingredient. There was no published laboratory testing procedure but I did do some pioneering chromatography anyway and there was a rich array of minor byproducts which are still most likely not fully identified chemically yet.
So 2-EH is another low-cost item but not much higher viscosity than the butanols.
Esterifying to combine with the phthalic and you get the compound DOP, the syrupy liquid used as a plasticizer that doesn't dry up much faster than the plastic solids themselves, and imparts the increased flexibility desired by the processor.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are some minor impurities in the DOP that trace back to the 2-EH raw material, which could be much more potent endocrine disruptors than the known plasticizer chemical itself. The statistical possibility is based on the number and variety of unidentified minor constituents, the way that very small amounts of hormones have very outsized effects, and the correlations that have been seen which incriminate the plasticizer and seem to show some connection.
Plus, after a few short years being a leading analyst of 2-EH and DOP, one day some highly purified 2-EH became available in "research grade", purchased it to serve as reference material, and it turned out to be relatively odor-free ! It was the 2-ethylhexyl aldehyde content that made it smell so bold. So I have known something was up for a very long time but still don't have all the details I would want.
Now if there is some minor component other than the known plasticizer bulk chemical itself which is causing disruption, and in-vivo work is being done on the highly purified reference material in order to evaluate the target plasticizer itself in the absence of as many unknowns as possible I'm not so sure the findings would apply as much in the real would as I would like.
At the beginning, phthalates were not optimized to serve as plasticizers.
They just happened to not fail at the task.
Got more popular, and non-surplus alternative sources of raw materials for plasticizing will break ground to meet the demand once the more-attractively-priced "chemical waste" has all been spoken for.
Something like a playbook that predates the plastic age.
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/the...
CR showing how much of it is in our food. What’s crazy is how unpredictable it is, some have little, and other very similar products have 100x the amount. As a consumer I have little ability to control this.
I hate to be the one to say this (especially as phthalates are horrible) but it needs a suffix:
"......in worms."
"The study also showed that C. elegans metabolizes BBP in the same way as mammals, and is impacted at similar BBP levels that occur in humans, suggesting that C. elegans is an effective model for studying the impacts on people."
Said it before here and I’ll say it again. Now your #1 exposure is “luxury vinyl flooring” every hotel room is going to this as well as a ton of homes Their magic number is 1:3 polymers to stone for that product to work You’re absorbing it through your feet, luckily most people in the US wear shoes and slippers in the home. But it still releases up to 3% of its polymer volume into your home air within the first year.
In the south where it’s hotter, the process accelerates proportional to heat.
Why are we not considering banning plastics in most household items?
Only certain plastics contain phthalates.
There aren't any in polypropylene plastic, polyethylene plastic or polycarbonates.
I'm sympathetic, less plastic is probably good - it does have to be a well thought through change. If the change reduces safety, or if it gets manufacturers to switch to a worse risk profile product, we could be net worse off.
Sadly it's not only about (intentional) additives.
Plastics — including those listed — act as chemical sponges, soaking up and concentrating toxins present in the ambient environment. For example in a household the airborne dust absorbs brominated fire retardants and formaldehydes. The total quantity of toxins in these tiny particles can exceed the gaseous concentration in the air by thousands of times, so microplastics act like a billion tiny Trojan horses for toxins to enter the body.
So when modelling these risks, it could be less about the equilibrium amount of microplastics in the body at any one time (the stock), so much as the constant re-introduction of new microplastics into the body (the flow).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02697...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/plastics-and-ch...
Sadly I found a study at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3222987/ saying that many polypropylene polyethylene products release estrogenic chemicals (IDK if it's the same as phthalate) likely from additives, including when bent/deformed. And polycarbonates are infamously made of polymerized BPA and similar chemicals (usually endocrine disruptors).
Thanks for sharing the study. I will say the made-from argument is less compelling since table salt is made from sodium (explosive) and chlorine (chemical warfare agent) and yet it's pretty yummy. So long as it doesn't degrade, that's not super problematic. However the study I will read.
Polycarbonates have been known to leach from BPA (https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/bpa-chemica...), I don't know if they've tightened up manufacturing or switched to non-estrogenic or non-bioactive chemicals since then.
Just following up! Yeah that's really interesting, I read both of your links. Again thank you for sharing. To be clear my reaction was just to the "made of scary components" thing, I was not dismissing your suggestion that harmful chemicals may leach from the final product.
"They [phthalates] are used primarily to soften polyvinyl chloride (PVC). " [1]
PVC is used in water pipes, bottles, packaging films, blister packs, cling wraps, and seals on metal lids.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phthalates [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_chloride#Application...
>PVC water pipes
This is the most relevant one IMO. You can buy glass cups and jars, it doesn't matter if the water you put into them comes through PVC pipes! Even if you buy BPA-free phthalate-free bottled water, I think it's safe to assume that at one point that water went through several meters of PVC pipes to get to that bottle!
PVC water pipes must be ubiquitous nowadays, and are certainly better than the older copper alternative, which in turn is better than the older lead alternative!
Maybe the next step is special PVC for water piping. Until then I guess we're better than we have ever been, water piping-wise.
Water pipes are made from rigid, unplasticized PVC. It's only flexible PVC (e.g. cable insulation) that contains plasticizers.
Well, great, then!
Yeah as long as you're not chewing or extension cords you should be good.
The most common water pipe in new construction is cross linked polyethylene. XLPE. It is stable, inert, and contains no plasticizers. PVC is often used for sewage drain pipes. Like the parent said it is the rigid crystalline kind typically containing minimal plasticizers tightly bound within the crystal matrix.
It depends. Leaching from cold water passing through a pipe for a few seconds is a lot different from a water bottle that might be in a backpack or warm car most of a day.
Also quite commonly used as a fragrance enhancer.
That’s horrifying. But thanks for pointing that out, now I’ve got a real reason to dislike artificial odors (“air fresheners”)
PVC is also commonly used in 3D printing, with very pungent fumes.
Professional 3D printing, perhaps. I imagine it's a common engineering plastic.
Home 3D printing fortunately uses mostly PLA, which is biodegradable. Though I'm unsure how degradable it'd be inside your lungs.
Just about any kind of flexible or soft-ish plastic you encounter as a consumer that is not PET (soda bottles, plastic bags, polyester) is going to have phthalates in it.
Because they are very useful. And in general have great properties. You known weight, resiliency, price and so on.
Look at all of the bottles/containers in your bath/shower. Would you really want glass in a wet slippery area? Metal containers?
bar soaps and shampoos exist. They just aren’t popular. They also weigh MUCH less when transported than a plastic bottle full of liquid.
plastic containers for perfume and cosmetics don’t bother me. beauty products tend to last much longer than soap anyway.
You mean like perfume and cosmetics? Sturdy glass with carpets near the bathroom sink and the shower will do the trick. I'll take a few cuts through my life over cancer and chronic diseases.
>carpets near the bathroom sink and the shower
Now every spillage is a potential mold growth problem, which is also bad to inhale.
I mean, you could make a simple and cheap bottle out of aluminum probably? We had shampoo before the widespread usage of plastic bottles, though you are right that they used to come in glass. Perhaps we could use that fancy unbreakable soviet glass.
Sounds like a good business idea actually..
Edit: Actually thinking about it, that really is a good business idea. If anyone wants to build that business with me, email me at the address in my bio.
You just have to convince the vast majority of people that the extra expense of the container is worth it to them.
I have taken a very unscientific poll, and a very few number of people would want glass containers. You have to realize that people commenting on HN are not the mass public. The polls I've done were just asking during specific skincare product related conversations. The vast majority were onboard for paraben/phthalate free products made from plant based ingredients, but the no plastic issue was not something people felt strongly about at all.
These exist for cosmetics[1], though the pump is still plastic. Would work fine for other shower products too.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Calvin-Klein-one-Skin-Moisturizer/dp/...
yes, I would. thick glass is great and cant break easily if it is smaller container. there is also stainless steel and other materials.
plastic was invented 100 years ago. people did just fine in the house without it.
People also survived without antibiotics and electricity in past. Electricity generation is a far bigger environmental load than plastic. By your logic we should revert to burning candles. Even windmills and solar panels are made from toxic chemicals. Everything in life has its tradeoffs. It is not responsible to use a one sided mass hysteria to impose a lower standard of living on people when it is not clear what the quantifiable harm the technological innovation that is plastics is to justify doing so. Many things are toxic in the right dose but the dose makes the poison. Making policy without considering tradeoffs is the road to Idiocracy and watering plants with Brawndo.
Electricity generation if it is from right sources is not killing me or us. Plastic is and we have it everywhere around, or inside, even in our brains.. So, what has bigger priority?
I use bar soaps for everything. Ethique is an amazing brand. https://ethique.com/
see "Green Chemistry" in the USA about 20 years ago.. science was well-developed.. also "Body Burden" search term.. largely stone-walled at the politics level.
"Product liability is a third-rail in American politics" yes
We should also ban plants while we are at it, since there are only a few letters of difference.
In other words: Banning certain types of plastics makes sense and we do that all the time. Banning "plastics" is about as sensible as banning dihydrogenmonoxide.
Because it would drive prices of basic household goods up 400% and make low and middle income families vastly poorer.
I'm all for pushing back on chemicals wherever possible, especially in food packaging, but let's be real.
I try to avoid reheating things in plastic containers. It's about the only thing I can think of I can do as a consumer to reduce the risk of chemicals leeching into the food.
> would drive prices of basic household goods up 400%
Glass is nominally more expensive and works. Our go-to food storage is mason jars. $12/dozen, probably cheaper by volume than the plastic crap on the shelves at Target or Walmart.
A bottle of wine by mass is ballpark 50% glass and 50% wine. A one liter glass jar of olives around 300 grams of glass.
So it's not merely packaging cost but also about convenience of shipping it around.
That said we still manage to ship both of those all over the world despite the unfavorable mass and relative sensitivity of their packaging.
The jar of olives however have plastic liner in the jar lid, so you're not escaping plastics anyway. The solution as I see it is to use the right plastics in the right way and ensure proper disposal of the waste.
Maybe go for the low-hanging fruit first, so to speak. When I was a free range kid back in the late 70’s, long before CA Redemption Value was conceived, all soft drinks were in deposit bottles. Thick, heavy reusable bottles. You’d pay a dime for the bottle and yeah you brought it back. The truck would go back to the warehouse with a load of empties. The retailer sorted them by brand and flavor. The bottling plant washed them and refilled them. Way more ecological than our current “pretend to recycle” regime we have in the U.S.
Wine and olives also cost more than milk and eggs. You can package milk in glass bottle 5 percent of the weight of the product made at thousands of degrees from burning fossil fuels or you can package it in an inert HDPE container, that is processed at several hundred degrees and weighs say 0.5% of the product contained within. lighter packaging means less fuel burned to ship it. Lower processing temperatures means less fuel burned to make it. Ethylene polymerized into plastic for milk jugs doesn't end up in the air as CO2. Plastic feed stocks directly compete with fuel feed stocks. The less fuel we need to burn to ship things the more carbon is kept out of the atmosphere and the more carbon made into plastic that is stable when buried for thousands of years the less ends up in the air. You can make a lighter foam egg carton for less cost, that better protects the eggs than a paper one. Paper is no more a natural material than plastic. The manufacturing process releases hydrogen sulfide, contaminates water and when the paper rots the toxic dyes in ink printed on it is unbound and free to leach into the environment. Paper cups are coated with persistent waxed and plastics that migrate once the cup that supported them is gone. White paper products are bleached and brown paper is produced with harmful chemicals including even flame retardants at times. What is cheapest, lightest and most stable is usually also the most environmentally friendly thing.
I think furniture and carpet would get it worse than most stuff. The alternatives to plastic (largely glass) in other cases are more like 20-50% more expensive, but furniture? Carpet? Solid wood and wool, leather—god, I dunno what you’d even use for cushion fill that’d last anywhere near as long. Those are closer to 400% the price of synthetic stuff. Or more.
> I dunno what you’d even use for cushion fill that’d last anywhere near as long. Those are closer to 400% the price of synthetic stuff. Or more.
AFAIU natural latex is an alternative to the ubiquitous polyurethane foam, and lasts longer. Quite pricey though.
Pine. Oak. Jute. Bamboo.
FYI, bamboo is usually actually:
1. Some actual bamboo that has been processed to remove starches and sugars
2. Mixed with incredible amounts of chemical glues (some of which include BPA)
Most bamboo products are at least as suspicious to me as plastic.
All the bamboo flooring products are engineered (in other words). Oak is great for flooring, but it's impractically heavy for the furniture.
> I'm all for pushing back on chemicals wherever possible, especially in food packaging, but let's be real.
The devil is that food that comes pre-packed under vacuum or inert atmosphere in plastics lasts much, much longer than food that gets stored in anything else - including tin cans by the way, they're all lined with plastics because acidic food would otherwise literally eat away the can.
There are "bulk" stores that have no packaging and you fill up what you need into reusable containers that you either buy or bring yourself. They generally have common bulk items like flour but also lots of options for typical grocery store fare. The prices at those stores generally aren't 400% of what they are at a regular grocery store, and if they are higher I'm sure a large part is that this is a niche kind of store rather than how everyone gets their groceries.
That's obviously not the whole supply chain, and I'm sure many goods still arrive at that kind of store in plastic, but these tend to be run by the types that avoid plastic anyway so whatever they can get in reusable packaging I'm sure they are getting wrapped in something other than plastic. Anyway, if plastic is going to be used, the exposure from a single 100lbs bag of something that you refill into a container is probably vastly lower than from 100 individually wrapped 1lbs bags
That kind of thing only works in a high trust society. Given the choice, I'm not going to buy food from bulk bins where some stranger could have contaminated them, whether by malice or incompetence.
Jars can be refilled. I think things would actually get cheaper.
Reminder that the FDA denied a petition last year to ban these chemicals in food packaging.
https://www.fda.gov/food/hfp-constituent-updates/fda-respond...
There is already a mountain of research showing that phthalates are endocrine disruptors and cause developmental defects. The FDA knows this and is doing nothing.
It seems generally impossible to do much to avoid ingesting plastic. It's literally everywhere. The personal choices you make as a consumer are a drop in the bucket.
This is misleading. "at levels similar to those detected in humans, [...] egg cells with the wrong number of chromosomes."
So where are all these people with the wrong number of chromosomes? They should be everywhere. Maybe all this damage ends up leading to no human growing from the egg, so they're never born but again where are all the infertile women? It should be nearly everyone! It's either written to deceive or it's obviously wrong.
No one cares. The people profit from this don't care. Virtually everyone who buys these products doesn't care either. If you care and you want to do something about it get on the next spaceship, leave the earth and abandon this unintelligent human species.
That spaceship‘s interior, functional space outfit, and most equipment will of course also consist of various plastics.
Also used in sex toys
These are mostly made of silicon based plastics, glass or metal and by definition don't have that much exposure time to the user's body.
Of course i'm not referring to toys made from glass or metal.
> Prior material analyses of sex toys like those characterized here revealed phthalate concentrations in most tested products at concentrations ranging from 24–60% by weight [11, 14, 15]. In addition, there is growing concern over human exposure to micro-and nano-plastics. The translocation and biouptake of nano-sized particles is now well established [16]. Human exposure to nanoplastics and the potential for enhanced release of plastic additives are of potential concern.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10034881/#:~:text=P....
The blind irrational hatred of "plastics" is bordering on a religion or mass hysteria.
HN is supposed to be a forum of educated, rational people capable of critical thought. Here are some basic facts.
1. Plastic is often presented in the media as some kind of monolithic hazardous compound where it is not. There are different kinds of plastic. Alternatives are usually economically and environmentally inferior.
2. The most common types of plastic for consumer applications are polyethylene and polypropylene, followed by polyvinyl chloride and polystyrene. PE and PP are biologically and chemically inert. The same reason why they don't break down is the reason why they are harmless. Polystyrene derived from a naturally occuring compound styrene found in some plants and can and does breakdown under attack of UV light, acids, microorganisms. All three PE, PP, and PS are most commonly manufactured without harmful additives. Only PVC uses significant quantities of plasticizers some of which are harmful. Unless you are chewing on your shower curtain you have little to worry about.
3. At least several hundred billion tons of commodity plastics have been mass produced over the last 70 years with little to no quantified, attributable environmental damage from these plastics. Most microplastic is essentially inert dust that is no different from other organic or inorganic dust such as pollen or clay. Plastics are not allergens because they are non reactive and do not stimulate an immune response. It is very likely that blood of animals contains plastic molecules along with thousands of other molecules in trace quantities doing no more harm than natural silt in a river system.
4.The fact that commodity plastics do not readily rot or degrade is a good thing. Petroleum carbon made into stable plastic and buried in a landfill is kept out of the atmosphere.
5. Plastic items are less energy demanding to recycle and produce in the first place because of lower thermal processing requirements than glass, metal or wood.
6. Lignin in wood is a natural plastic.
7. Most of the macro plastics in the ocean comes from Asia and the fishing industry. In the west it is buried in a landfill where it helpfully sequesters carbon.
8. Plastic items are often lighter to ship also consuming less energy that way versus alternatives.
9. Most microplastics in the ocean are from synthetic fibers and tire abrasion. I have yet to see a non handwaving study that these actually result in significant environmental harm. Maybe we should research more durable tire materials. Perversely electric vehicles wear tires quicker than ICE vehicles due to a more aggressive torque curve. Cotton has to be planted (diesel tractor), sprayed with fertilizers and pesticides, picked (diesel), spun, woven, etc. just because it's natural doesn't mean it's better for the environment at mass scale. This true of other things too like glass, metal, paper, etc.
10. People should stop irresponsibly hating on plastics when the alternatives are worse.
This neo Luddite Puritanism is just dumb and unscientific.
I challenge anyone to rebut my assertions with hard facts that quantify to supposed damage plastic does versus what alternatives would do.
We're all responding to an article about how plasticizers used in certain plastics to make them all more flexible can damage DNA in some organisms. Why do you consider that empirical study to be new Luddite Puritanism? And if the plasticizer can leach out of plastics, which has been shown in numerous studies over the years, why do you consider them inert?
It's not enough to assert, loudly, that you are right and we are all wrong and everything is fine let's all go back inside and let the chemists keep doing what they're doing. You have to explain also why PE and PP never under any circumstances ever contain any plasticizers.
Regarding plastics and microplastics in the oceans, I've seen tons of pictures of dead birds that after autopsy have filled their crops with broken plastic pieces instead of food. This is not good, and having all of our sea birds die is not an insignificant environmental harm.
So hand-waiving that away doesn't change the fact that introducing plastics have caused new and exciting forms of harm in our biosphere.
1. I was interacting with the general theme of the comments on the article, which is the zeitgeist plastic bad.
2. I believe you should consider logical fallacies and questions of scale and trade offs.
Specifically people arguing against "plastics" in general seem to depend on hearsay, strawmen, all or nothing fallacy, appeal to authority, etc. it is black and white thinking against the nuance of the real world. In recent times on many issues it seems that black and white thinking is presented as something that is a rational way to approach things. It is not. The real world is complicated and full of nuance anf tradeoffs. Just because you can show some plastics may have some harmful effects does not mean that the miracle of plastic materials is a net bad for humanity or the environment unless you can show the harm EXCEEDS that of scalable alternatives. The burden of proof is on those who are against plastics to show that the net harm caused by specific compounds is worse than the net benefit of using them. We will never be able to prove that all plastics are harmless in every possible context. Nor should we. In life we have to make decisions based on the best available information we have. So it makes more sense to ask after 70 years what significant harms have been caused by plastics that would be made less than alternatives. Even a thousand pictures of dead birds does not make a compelling case unless it is weighed against the costs of harvesting forests for paper and burning fossil fuels to make glass and metal to make inferior packaging that costs more and takes more fuel to transport.
All else held equal light weight non biodegrade materials made from cheap highly productive chemical feed stocks are better for the environment than alternatives.
A series of anecdotes and one sided analyses does not make a compelling case.
When you put it that way it actually makes a lot more sense to me. But I think if that's your position, then you should present alternative harms that plastics use have prevented. I'm aware of some harms that would have happened in the medical field where disposable medical devices have likely reduced the burden of sterilization after procedures. Imagine having to clean your hypodermic after every use.
3. At least several hundred billion tons of commodity plastics have been mass produced over the last 70 years with little to no quantified, attributable environmental damage from these plastics. Most microplastic is essentially inert dust that is no different from other organic or inorganic dust such as pollen or clay. Plastics are not allergens because they are non reactive and do not stimulate an immune response. It is very likely that blood of animals contains plastic molecules along with thousands of other molecules in trace quantities doing no more harm than natural silt in a river system.
You're missing a couple points yourself. For example, the article is talking about phthalates. These are additives added to plastics. These leech from microplastics. So your rant about how plastics are inert shows you didnt even understand the article yourself tbh.
There is plenty of evidence that these compounds are harmful and affect the biology. See the section on wikipedia on phthalates. What there isnt is much evidence and experimentation showing theyre NOT harmful.
Electric vehicles have extremely precise traction control due to the nature of their motors so even with higher torque they keep traction much better than their ICE counterparts.
EVs are also heavy and might wear tires quicker in braking situations though.
You are right about all of this. It is also true that phthalates and BPA-like chemicals pose considerable harm to people today.
You clearly know this, and much more.
Why not go one step beyond “hey anti all plastic people, not all plastics are bad” and help them get educated on, avoid and solve the harms that do exist?
Lack of nuance, on either side of the debate, mostly comes across as propaganda (to me)
I agree with many of the points, but how do they relate with the article at hand?