As an engineer that relies on plastics in my product design, I’ve been wondering more and more if we’re creating the next global environmental disaster after climate change with our use of plastics.
I recently saw a video of someone restoring a 100 year old vegetable shredder, and with some rust removal and fresh paint the thing was good as new. Of course it was all metal. Then I looked at Amazon for vegetable shredders and they’re almost all plastic.
We could make our products out of more metal or all metal. Even so-called exotic metals like titanium are relatively abundant, and new manufacturing processes are lowering the cost of those parts.
But we use so many plastic films that get used once and can’t be recycled, as have so many plastic products that fall apart and get sent to landfills because recycling is kind of a lie anyway. If you go to a big box store like Target, right at the entrance you see shelves of cheap plastic junk meant as some sort of novelty to be used once or twice and then forgotten and thrown out. Companies like Shien sell the cheapes polyester clothing possible which falls apart in to pieces which quickly become microplastics. EVs are supposed to save us from climate change but in doing so they’re delivering us faster wearing tires releasing more microparticles in to our environment.
And I suspect that if we look at production, it’s accelerating.
So just like when atmospheric carbon passed 300ppm and we said “what happens at 400ppm and higher”, what happens when ambient microplastics double, triple, or quadruple current levels?
What would it look like to cut plastic production today? How could we even prepare to do that?
> We could make our products out of more metal or all metal.
What's interesting is that a large part of this was the move to "ergonomic" kitchen tools, which the kitchenware brand OXO has been a big part of.
Because you're right -- kitchen tools used to be made out of metal and wood. Metal could be bent back into place and resharpened. Pieces of wood could easily be replaced.
Then OXO decided that small metal handles like the one on the all-metal classic vegetable peeler you or I might have grown up with [1] weren't usable by people with hand grip/coordination issues, decided to use a bicycle handlebar grip as a model, and invented their now-famous OXO vegetable peeler [2] with a big rubber grip. And then slowly everything started to follow that aesthetic -- most kitchen tools are made out of plastic, rubber, silicone, and nylon, with "bulbous" handles. The rise of nonstick cookware is partly responsible for the trend as well, necessitating plastic/nylon/silicone turners, spoons, etc.
I'm not sure what I think about it. On the one hand, my kitchen almost feels like it's made for children, with all these big grippy things. I worked in a kitchen in Spain once where all the tools were probably 50 or 100 years old, and thought -- oh this is a kitchen for adults!
On the other hand, modern kitchen tools seem to be much safer, and usable by a larger proportion of the population -- especially the elderly. So I can't really see that as a bad thing.
It’s definitely an interesting notion. I would also say that there must have been some correlation between wider availability of plastics and brands like OXO using them for production. They might say it’s a nicer tool to hold, and maybe it is, but plastics are also much, much cheaper to manufacture and need to be replaced more often, so they’re great for corporate profits.
Well maybe but obviously that subreddit is going to be biased towards stories of collapse, rather than telling the whole story. Those stories are terrifying and I’m also of the opinion that things are worse than we realize, but I also think that despite the many human and environmental catastrophes that climate change will continue to cause, society will persist.
I think you're looking too hard for a material issue. Plastic kitchen utensils can last just long as metal. Really. I have several plastic strainers from the 80s that are still in use, and several plastic handled knives from 2000s that feel great in my hand. I've also thrown away metal ice cream scoops (yes from Amazon) months after purchase because they became pitted with rust. (And nobody want's rusty ice cream!) The hidden problem is our throw-away economy. Things are just designed to fail now, because everyone want us to simply keep buying.
Is that the issue? It seems more like plastics wearing away from use not to the point of it losing functionality but being constantly exposed to plastics in your food because all the implements are plasticd
Plastics will get more expensive as we use less and less oil.
Plastics are basically a waste byproduct from the energy industry. As we use less oil, there will be less plastic trying to find a use and flooding the supply of plastics.
When prices rise, a lot of single use plastics, like water bottles, will be uneconomical.
Nearly all metals are toxic to some extent if ingested. Lead and mercury are famously toxic. But chromium (a component of stainless steel) is rather toxic too, and even copper (used widely in piping and wiring) isn't all that good for you.
Nearly all metals will dissolve slightly into food or water they come into contact with.
It really isn't clear that metals pose less health risks than plastics.
Well, lead and mercury aren’t typical engineering metals. Iron seems fine and actually good for you as long as the dose isn’t too high. Good point on stainless - would be interesting to see what is worse for us in practice based on dosage - chromium from stainless (probably minute quantities) or microplastic. Then there’s aluminum, which seems to be safe but I think science is continuing to develop on that. Then there’s titanium which is still too expensive for normal consumer goods but I think there’s room for that to go down with investment. For example Apple now uses titanium in the iPhone.
I think engineering metals have much less influence on the environment than plastics do, but I’m very in favor of more study. My point is that I think this is something we really need to be thinking about. Right now engineering as a field doesn’t spend much time thinking about environmental harms from plastic in normal goods, and we might want to spend more time on that.
Well the first link is a massive chemical spill which is usually bad, but doesn’t say much about the effects of aluminum in everyday objects.
The latter I’m aware of as we have Alzheimer’s in my family and I work in the machine shop with aluminum quite often. I do wear eye and respiratory protection but I also recently researched it and it seems the link between Alzheimer’s and aluminum is still quite unclear and not firmly established.
But as I’ve said in a few replies now I’m all for study of what the systemic harms of each are. If plastics cause harm and metals cause harm then the real question is what is the nature and magnitude of those harms. I think this requires more careful study. My point is that it may be time to look at plastic pollution the way we look at CO2 pollution.
There was an old result that claimed aluminum was found in Alzheimer's diseased brains, but I understand this was later shown to be a laboratory artifact.
That's a great point. Japan black is another metal finish which is often petroleum based. There are non-paint metal finishing techniques like anodizing, shellac, enamel, plating with metals or alloys less prone to oxidization, etc.
I think this is the first clear correlation I’ve seen between microplastics and any health issues. I’ve seen lots of guesses and assumptions about how they must be bad for us, but I’ve not seen anything like this. And of course, this is just a correlation so far. Causation hasn’t been proved.
To be fair, if you poke a cell with sugars, amino acids, vitamin C, and all sorts of other essential nutrients you'll also see signs of oxidative stress, neurotoxicity, reproductive toxicity, carcinogenicity, and altered metabolism. In some ways it's the counterpart of "bullets cure cancer in a petri dish."
Plastics are still probably bad (with a prior that most synthetic chemicals we're exposed to are known to be toxic and not "proven" to be so and actually banned for 20-100 years), but a cellular study showing that plastics damage those cells isn't very convincing on its own.
Your linked study is a little broader, but it mostly summarizes studies with grandiose ideas or those summarizing those sorts of "poke a cell and find it doesn't like being poked" experiments I initially derided.
They probably did think of that, and they did it too: Science as it is practiced in the real world. This sort of stuff is related to our whining about replication crises, careerism, etc.
But it can have its utility too, it's just more "defense from morons" instead "advancing the field". Or more neutrally filling in very predictable gaps in knowledge, like if you got something really unexpected but this stuff is all bog standard unhappy cells
It's worse than lead. Our planet has irreversiblely been polluted at so many levels of the food chain that it will be a wonder how future humans will figure out how to clean it all up. I'm convinced that at this point we have signed every lifeform up for an evolutionary pressure, and future generations will likely be selected for their resistance to whatever collection of illnesses are ultimately linked to microplastics.
All my food interacts with plastic. I can go to Rainbow Grocery, and they are just doing me the favor of disposing of the plastic packaging somewhere else in the supply chain.
Much plastic dust in my environment is from car tires.
Both my neighbors solve problems with their roofs with disintegrating, $50 plastic tarps from Home Depot, filling my back yard with plastic. Multi million dollar homes in San Francisco!
What am I really supposed to do? Speaking of lead, it's not like the city has forced anyone to replace the exterior lead paint or lead pipes.
You are right, but if it's lead, it's bad news. The problem isn't that pollution is unknown, the problem is that the middle-aged members of my community, maybe every community, fucking suck as soon as something costs them a fucking dime.
Cheap and cutting corners might be better described as externalizing costs. As we know increasing shareholer value trumps all. That being said our civilization would have to roll back to something like the 1800s level of technology. I'm not advocating for this, medicine and transportation can not exist without plastic, but our clothing furniture and rugs and other items don't have to be. And plastic recycling doesn't have to be a joke. But we can't expect shareholders to interalize those costs and not get as rich as fast as possible, can we? After all it will be someone else who will be affected by the wanton distraction of the environment.
Have you talked to your neighbors and offered to cover the cost of replacing their roofs, so they no longer need to use those tarps that are causing you problems? It shouldn't be that much of a financial burden on you if it'd only cost a "dime" or two to fix the problem properly.
Two months ago: An analysis of artery-clogging plaques in 257 patients found that the presence of these microplastics was associated with a roughly quadrupled risk of heart attack, stroke or death, researchers report March 7 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
- Many plastics contain known endocrine disrupters like BPA that have been shown to get into people's bodies and correlate with negative health impacts such as certain cancers, sex organ abnormalities and infertility
- Microplastics can damage cardiovascular tissue and correlate with heart attack, stroke and premature death.
- Microplastics correlate with infertility in men.
- Microplastics absorb heavy metals in the environment and can then transport them into the food chain. Heavy metals of course having many established negative health impacts.
These are just some examples, a quick search should get you many more (along with the sources on the above).
Hannah Ritchie, of OurWorldinData, has a new book and looks at various problems from a data/science perspective.
Her take on microplastics was that there wasn't currently enough science on this to state there was a problem big enough to outweigh the benefits of plastics, but that we should probably be doing that science so we can be sure either way.
I saw different guys die from a piano falling on their head a couple of times, and there are some studies guessing or hinting at the 500kg piano affecting their health, but I'm not sure the piano falling on them caused their death. Could just be a correlation, which as we all know is not causation, maybe it was what they ate that die or something. Piano falling sounds benign after all, so unless we have 100% settled science on the matter, let's not jump into worrying!
Fortunately, microplastics seem to be more like dihydrogen monoxide. Great many studies show how DHMO is toxic and dangerous at both cellular and macro levels. This is a problem, because DHMO is even more ubiquitous in the environment than microplastics. There's kilograms of it in you and me right now!
Yeah, microplastics, an industrial byproduct, are totally like dihydrogen monoxide, something essential for life, which we and all other species, evolved for billions of years to need for basic functioning.
I mean, this kind of thoughtless rooting for any tech and tech byproductto the level of this comparison, similar to the chavinistic "my country, right or wrong" , is like those who were consuming radioactive stuff in the early 20th century to prove "it's completely safe".
and "any tech is always good" is about as much scientific as flat-earth.
So healthy people had 28 particles per gram and unhealthy people 42 particles per gram? Where is the statistical analysis? This is usually in the abstract.
Looking at how they controlled for confounding factors I see one question on diet “Do you usually cook at home or eat take away?”.
I think I’m going to put this in the “low quality” research bucket.
One problem I see is the way the choice of takeaway food vs home cooking is framed. Think popcorn. You can buy a bag of pre-popped popcorn - I guess that is take away. You can make popcorn at home putting a package in the microwave. Or you can put some popcorn kernels in a pot with oil and heat it. My guess is the microplastics from the microwave popcorn would be as high or higher than the bag or pre-popped popcorn. And I would guess that pop-it-yourself would expose you to much less.
But the "home cooked" vs take away doesn't really work? Is that right?
When they were old enough (like 6yo) I taught my kids to pop their own popcorn over the oven. 1 bag of kernels (dozens of servings) = the cost of a 6-pack of microwave popcorn, and the time it takes to pop isn't that much more.
Plus you can salt/flavor them how you like - our house favorite is curry powder/garlic powder/olive oil.
I think there are special cases here like popcorn, but for the vast majority of food, home cooked likely means less exposure to plastics (packaging), additives, excessive oil, less healthy oils, etc.
Restaurant food tends to evolve to taste especially good or last a couple of days longer than usual or compete with other restaurant food etc., all of which is not desirable at home (or even worth optimizing for).
It's tires. Millions of cars and their tire wear for literally the last hundred years. How can it not be in our bodies and causing issues at this point.
That’s a factor for sure, especially with the finding (that was posted last week on HN) that there are tire compounds in leafy greens. But it’s almost certainly also due to the use of various plastics in everything; even if you’re drinking from a glass bottle it most likely passed through plastic at some point.
I also entertain the idea that the “feminization” that appears to have occurred since the 50’s is due to (micro)plastics and PFAS being literal ligands of the estrogen receptor, and their well documented endocrine disrupting effects. I recall some study found that 100% of males tested had microplastics in their testes.
That’s essentially the problem. Everything is plastic because plastic is cheap and versatile, but surprise, it’s also bad for you! Maybe in a century after a bunch of bickering on whether or not it’s really bad, if it’s worth solving, and lobbying by every industry against any potential hit to revenue, it’ll finally get solved, and then we get to find out all the problems with the solution, rinse and repeat.
I wonder how hemp would work out as a replacement, it seems pretty promising - stable, biodegradable, likely inert, and versatile (it can be used for containers, textiles, paper, and a lot more). For degradation, (GMed) fungi or bacteria seem like a potential avenue, surely nothing could go wrong with that.
People use synthetic fabric sheets, pillow cases, not to mention mattresses. Most pillows are filled with plastic. We cover our bodies in plastic, then wash our clothes and microplastics enter the wastewater system.
Rubber tires aren't new, they've been around for 120 years. If there has been an uptick in IBD in the past few decades that didn't exist for the first 80 years of the 20th century, you'd have to suspect a number of different things before tires.
Tires have been around for a while, but the average weight of a personal car greatly increased after the 80's. Sure there were some heavy land-boats in the 50's and 60's, but it seems now everyone is driving something 3.5k lbs or higher.
Also consider the expansion of the US highway system (starting in '56), increased freight trucking, popularity of tuning / high performance cars etc. I'd imagine more tires are getting shredded into the environment than at any point before the 80's, even with improvements in tire compounds.
Cars were even heavier in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. They had steel bodies, chrome bumpers, massive trunks, V8 engines too. It wasn't until the oil crisis in the late 70s and the introduction of Japanese brands that cars got small.
Take a look at a 1950s Coup de Ville, Buick Roadmaster or any other famous models from that era. All pushing 4K, sometimes 5K pounds.
Synthetic plastics, synthetic pipes, Tetrapak packaging, BPA can linings, BPA receipt paper… we’ve had a Cambrian explosion of plastics in the past several decades
Wouldn't that be ironic, if after years of doubting and mocking the proliferation of food sensitivities it turned out it was because there was literal plastic in us.
The correlation does not mean the microplastics are the thing causing IBD. It probably means they are exasperating it for various reasons. Goddamit.
Incidentally so do things like poppy seeds.
I got hit with this at 10 years old. Suspiciously to me after returning from a year in the US, before that there was no sign of any problems. IBD presents all over the world and I'm guessing predates the microplastics phenomena.
The other interesting correlation I know of is a lack of exposure to dirty things as a toddler. I've sort of given up any hope that it will be figured out in my lifetime despite occasional wiggles of hope from articles like this.
Generally in the community people theorize all kinds of things about diet and some are lucky to reach and stay in remission by eating a narrow diet that agrees with them - but what exactly that is varies wildly across individuals. I've never found a common thread.
> The correlation does not mean the microplastics are the thing causing IBD. It probably means they are exasperating it for various reasons.
It doesn't even necessarily mean that microplastics are contributing to the harm. It could be that existing disease impairs the body's ability to eliminate microplastics.
Regardless, following the precautionary principle, we should treat them as a foreign toxin until the evidence suggests otherwise.
For those of you who have decided to down vote, the person I'm replying to edited their post silently. It previously did not contain the acronym "IBD" but rather "IBS"
This is absolutely true I was throttled and some stalkers flag and hide my posts replying to you trying to confirm this which is unbelievably gross. :/
I hope you see this I'm sorry if it bummed you out. My apologies.
100% agree. I've found no theory as to what correlates with my particular issues: hives and elevated heart rate when consuming processed food/gluten/I don't know what over a long period and also difficulty sleeping. If I go pure low-carb, I'm fine, even if I consume large amounts of sugar. However, stress can also induce it even if I am eating properly. Additionally, evaporation of sweat also causes it in certain cases.
Nobody seems to have any idea what the issue is, but I've learned to manage it by controlling diet and stress basically. I'm still not 100% why/how it happens.
I've learned that these sorts of issues may be something science will never figure out for me since they focus on populations rather than the individual. I expect in 10 years some studies at some point will start isolating some
of these triggers as they become more prevalent. I've talked with a few people who've had similar issues.
> Generally in the community people theorize all kinds of things about diet and some are lucky to reach and stay in remission by eating a narrow diet that agrees with them - but what exactly that is varies wildly across individuals. I've never found a common thread.
It also really looks like a methodology problem on the medical science side to me, statistics easily nullify important data when variables are difficult to control.
> IBD presents all over the world and I'm guessing predates the microplastics phenomena.
IBD occurs in many parts of the world, but it is a disease of modernity. It is highly correlated with GDP. In particular, Chron’s and UC are basically absent among hunter gatherers and in very poor countries. (And researchers have good reasons to think this is not a measurement error.)
I would imagine the prevalence of microplastics in developing countries is just as high (or higher) though. So the GDP argument isn’t particularly supportive of a microplastics explanation.
Personally I doubt think it's just as high. But in any case, I'm not arguing for microplastics in particular as an explanation, just against the suggestion that IBD is some timeless human invariant that couldn't be attributed to peculiarities of the modern environment. (I find the hygiene-hypothesis-like explanations a little more compelling, although I don't have strong beliefs.) If the commenter wants to argue against microplastics as a cause, he needs to make claims like the one you made.
That is a thing. I met a mother-daughter duo, they'd travel with a little bag and disappear to do that and it wasn't a big deal and they claimed results.
Really no idea, there are quite of few of these potential treatments, people actively try and hack it. It depends on the specific situation what is appropriate to try.
I'm in full remission for a very long time already against all odds. It completely ruined my childhood and I'm thankful for everyday and live with it as a sword of Damocles like so many others.
There are many on-going studies but so far none have found a protocol that clearly and reliably improves IBD. Many people find fecal transplants compelling because they seem safe and have a plausible (albeit vague) mechanism of action, a gastroenterologist emphasized to me: at least one (elderly) person has died from a fecal transplant and another got dangerously sick; they are not without risk.
I'm expecting that we will be hearing a lot of correlations about microplastics in the coming years. I am not necessarily expecting that they will hold up under scrutiny. I don't think present day academia is incentivized to be accurate, representative of the truth, or helpful in any way to the public, and the fact that this study is paywalled is reinforcing that belief.
Why would anyone with a viewpoint of the last 75 years expect anything other than microplastics are harmful?
Lead? Great material, tastes good in wine! Stops knocks in gasoline! Kills our children.
Asbestos? Wonderful insulator! Great cheap material for keeping buildings warm during the winter. Causes cancer.
Margarine? Lower calories than butter, almost tastes just like it! Causes heart disease.
Teflon? Awesome for non-stick pans! Non-stick all the things! Causes cancer.
Benadryl? Great anti-allergy med, dries you up and helps you sleep during hay-fever season! Causes dementia with extended use.
BPA? Great cheap material for making water bottles and food containers... Causes cancer.
Peppermint flavored Tums... The binding agent for the peppermint was a possible carcinogen. They pulled mint-flavored Tums off the market for a while until they could figure out a new way to make it.
We already see microplastics causing mutation and other issues in sea life. Why would we expect this to go any differently than what we've been learning about all these other modern conveniences?
You specify present-day academia. Do you feel as though there was a point in the past where this wasn't true? If so, when, and why do you think it's changed?
Nothing, it's a reference to the period not the event itself. Something went wrong in Academia sometime between the 60's and 80s, to the point where papers today routinely get both peer-approved and simultaneously can't be reproduced. Something is very wrong with our ethics.
But there are errors in the other direction too. How many deleterious effects will never be proven scientifically because it's incredibly exhausting to get thousands of participants and quantify their subjective wellbeing in a controlled way?
I recently saw a video of someone restoring a 100 year old vegetable shredder, and with some rust removal and fresh paint the thing was good as new. Of course it was all metal. Then I looked at Amazon for vegetable shredders and they’re almost all plastic.
We could make our products out of more metal or all metal. Even so-called exotic metals like titanium are relatively abundant, and new manufacturing processes are lowering the cost of those parts.
But we use so many plastic films that get used once and can’t be recycled, as have so many plastic products that fall apart and get sent to landfills because recycling is kind of a lie anyway. If you go to a big box store like Target, right at the entrance you see shelves of cheap plastic junk meant as some sort of novelty to be used once or twice and then forgotten and thrown out. Companies like Shien sell the cheapes polyester clothing possible which falls apart in to pieces which quickly become microplastics. EVs are supposed to save us from climate change but in doing so they’re delivering us faster wearing tires releasing more microparticles in to our environment.
And I suspect that if we look at production, it’s accelerating.
So just like when atmospheric carbon passed 300ppm and we said “what happens at 400ppm and higher”, what happens when ambient microplastics double, triple, or quadruple current levels?
What would it look like to cut plastic production today? How could we even prepare to do that?