Text is short and clear enough that it warrants a full read, but for those who visit the comments first:
> If you look at a piece of plastic through a powerful microscope, you'll see alternating layers of hard material and soft material. […]
> [The researchers] discovered that the process [of forming microplastics] begins in the soft layers, which grow weaker over time due to environmental degradation and can break off even when the plastic is not under stress. By themselves, these soft pieces break down quickly in the environment. Problems arise when the failure of a soft layer allows hard layers to break off.
I’m eager to see research confirm whether microplastic contamination is harmful for humans. Given that 'These can be smaller than a virus -- just the right size to disrupt cells and even alter DNA.’, I’m not too hopeful that this is harmless.
I too would love to see a follow-up study. Unfortunately the research was done at Columbia University, which has suffered massive arbitrary grant freezes....
Plastic is a fantastical space age material and we never gave it the fear or respect it deserves. Its usage should have been regulated from the beginning.
Disposable plastic shopping bags are kind of insane if you think about it.
If only Columbia was a private university with a 15 billion dollar endowment, then they wouldn't need the government's permission to poke at some plastic.
This is a ridiculous bad faith talking point. That's not how endowments work, nor would it be possible for universities to spend them down for very long. Scientific research is an engine of innovation in the US, and it's penny wise pound foolish to attempt to save money by cutting of NIH and NSF dollars.
They absolutely do have the funds required to sustain research. If they're spending their own money instead of the government's, then maybe they would have to be a bit selective and cut out the crap, but that wouldn't be such a bad thing anyway.
That's not how most basic science works. It's easy with hindsight to identified research that didn't work or seemed dumb at the outset, but some small percentage of exploratory projects turn out to be major advances. Studying algae ion channels was not intended to be applied research but ended up with the discovery of green fluorescent protein, which won a nobel prize and opened the door to immunohistochemistry, optogenetics, and other crucially important biomedical advances. There are countless examples like this. It's trivially easy to find failed research too... but that's the process. It's only expensive if you ignore all of the innovation that comes downstream of the initial grant process.
If I recall correctly from the previous big discussion on the front page about microplastics, the one about a spoonful of the stuff in your brain, the general takeaway was that it's pretty universally agreed upon that it's bad, the medical community is mostly disagreeing over just how bad it is.
Asbestos is chemically inert. Yet it causes lung cancer. Why?
The answer is simply that it continually damages the cells in the lung due to it's needle like structure.
I assume (but critically don't have proof) that if we find a cancer link to plastics it will be due to a similar sort of structural interaction. I don't think the specific type of plastic matters, though I'm sure some will be worse than others.
In this specific case, very unlikely that plastics as a whole cause cancer due to some structural form issue. Saying ‘microplastics’, to compare to asbestos, is similar to saying ‘silicon’. Asbestos is a particular form of crystalline tube shaped silica (aka silicon dioxide).
Many other forms of silicon are both cancer causing, and completely inert.
I suspect plastics will similarly have only small portions that are really nasty. We’re making a huge variety of novel types though every day. Which is part of the concern.
what we call ‘plastic’ has such a huge variety of molecular weights and compositions it’s like trying to find common ground between say nickel, stainless steel, and uranium.
We already know some plastics cause cancer, and some precursors to the same plastics cause cancer.
And a bigger issue IMO is plasticizers which modify the plastics structure to make them more malleable and less brittle.
Even asbestos divides into several families with very different levels of carcinogenicity. Crocidolite "blue asbestos" was first banned long ago due to its severe effects, but chrysotile (white asbestos) is far less dangerous.
There is this interesting study from last year that looks at the health effects of chrysotile, in a population exposed to far more of it than possibly anywhere else on earth: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38247448/
The important point is that this mechanism works only for the so-called semi-crystalline plastics.
Even if they are less frequently encountered, there are also completely amorphous plastics and completely crystalline plastics, and these appear to not be prone to fragmentation into micro-plastics.
The conclusion is that there should be efforts to develop alternative plastics to the more frequently used semi-crystalline plastics, which have this serious disadvantage of generating persistent micro-plastic fragments.
Therefore this article offers a potential solution to the micro-plastic problem, which might work, like when freons have been replaced with less harmful refrigerating agents, even if those may have a slightly less refrigeration efficiency.
Honestly, what struck me most is how passive this whole process is. I always pictured microplastics coming from wear-and-tear or active grinding, but the idea that plastic can just sit there and quietly shed nano-shrapnel over time is pretty unsettling.
If you look at some plastic that has been outside in the sun for a while (a year or five) such as a toy or a plastic bag, it gets very fragile. If it's thin like a plastic bag, just the wind can break it apart. For thicker plastic parts, probably rain is enough to flush off the outer layer or powdered plastic every now and then.
The sooner we stop producing and consuming plastic in all its forms, the better for all life on Earth. There was life before plastic - it used wood, glass, metal, and natural fabric. It was not that long ago, certainly within my life.
I'm inclined to agree, but I grew up during the transitional years where both were available, and remember just so much broken glass everywhere...on the streets, sidewalks, etc. Maybe it was my poor neighborhood, but it was normal to see at least a broken bottle or two on the road each day. I don't see that now.
As I understand it, aluminum cans require a plastic lining. How is that one solved?
Glass bottles are ubiquitous as is Public drinking in Germany. They have a pfand program that gives money for recycling bottles where the bottles are literally cleaned and refilled not melted down.
So either, you return the bottles for some pocket money or you leave the bottle by a trashcan for someone (usually a homeless person) to collect all the bottles and make a few bucks for food and a shower.
It's actually a bit taboo to smash a bottle because of this.
It depends where you live, but a lot of countries make you pay glass bottles now ; a fee that you get back once you take the empty bottle back to the supermarket.
It does not prevent people from throwing them, but since you get money from them, homeless people usually gather them to make some money.
There is a pretty clever solution to that which is called not throwing your trash on the ground. This is a cultural problem, there are plenty of communities where people are poor but still carry their trash home with them, and even if they don't have any sort of trash pickup service they throw their trash into a designated dump instead of the middle of their walking paths.
Broken glass on the street is an aesthetic issue, assuming one has good shoes. In contrast, with gradual plastic accumulation, life on Earth is headed for extinction.
Also, for poor people, they need the money that they money back when they return a glass bottle, so they have an incentive to not trash it, certainly not on the street.
Glass containers don't require any lining. As for aluminum without a lining, it is okay for certain dry foods only, nothing wet.
Bottle and can recycling programs in the US were very successful in states that implemented them.
In NYC all refundable glass bottles and aluminum cans thrown away by those that couldn’t be bothered: They would be picked up by homeless (etc), providing a market-driven solution.
I never understood why it wasn’t expanded to more containers, like cans of beans.
The big problem then was that state-level only made recycling inconsistent.
The big problem today is that plastic bottles took over because of their lightweight; meaning only a government policy could discourage plastic food containers.
Copper is largely unsafe with foods due to copper toxicity due to it leeching into foods. It is not like aluminum in this respect which is a hundred times safer.
Copper compounds, while being generally non-toxic for large mammals, are very toxic for insects and other smaller animals. It’s why they are widely used in everything from marine anti-fouling paint to wood ‘pickling’ treatments.
And copper compounds will form in a wide variety of acidic and anoxic environments.
Normal kidneys excrete aluminum just fine. Lycopene also helps. If aluminum is accumulating in the brain or the blood, there is something that's not washing it out, meaning the waste removal process of the brain or kidneys is compromised.
Plastic isn't just in packaging - it's in clothes, electronics, medicine, insulation, infrastructure. Undoing that won't be as simple as just "going back," but you're right - we do need to seriously rethink what's necessary vs. what's just easy
> There was life before plastic - it used wood, glass, metal, and natural fabric.
Technically speaking, latex and even silk are plastics, as are traditional products made from plant oils, like linoleum. We've been relying on them for millennia.
"Plastics" has taken on a connotation similar to "GMO", intrinsically harmful by implication, in contrast to labels like "natural" or "organic" where the implication is they're harmless or healthy. But it's all just language games. There's often no meaningful distinction that can be made between "synthetic" products and "natural" products, and it's common for "natural" products to have safety profiles no less worrisome, if not more worrisome, then their synthetic counter parts. For example, "natural" neonicotinoid pesticides. There's alot more diversity in synthetic products, of course, though even the term "synthetic" relies on some very fuzzy line drawing.
The substantive aspects of the debate can be reduced to arguments over the pace of progress, risk, etc, which have little to with whether something is "natural" or "synthetic", "organic" or "plastic". These labels are mere rhetorical instruments.
One interesting thing I've noticed in my life is that everyone that I've known personally preferred their early life and thinks the world is getting worse. From my great grandparents to me today. And each have their reasons, which sound valid, but probably have a bit of rose colored glasses and yearning for youth attached.
So is it that people prefer the world they are born into and hate change, or is life for an average person getting worse in some less tangible respects? Is fondly remembering the family bonding over radio broadcasts worth more than being able to afford every member of the family having their own TV, for example? It seems hard to judge.
We often define 'best it's ever been' by the poor being able to afford iPhones and the marginalized having more rights, which are both valid points.
But is it better for the majority common person? Are there people who are constantly in awe of how great things are, or are we doomed to miss what we had as kids and focus on the negative? Because I find myself falling into that trap often.
One thing that sticks in my head is that as a kid, my dad worked for a soda company and my neighbor worked for Lowes. Neither wife worked, both had 3 kids, and could afford a house and 2 cars. That seems like a fairy tale to young people today.
The presentation of reality is always worsening, and now there are more means to present than ever. And people are experiencing reality through screens more than ever.
But if you turn off the screens, the physical reality hasn't really changed that much. There is some horrible architecture inflicted on us, but then parks and streets are nice/cleaner than in my youth.
PS I do agree that the social pressures are worse, with both parents encouraged/needing to work.
> the physical reality hasn't really changed that much
It sure has. We've lost a significant proportion of the other species on earth in the span of a few decades. For just one example of many, "69% decline in vertebrate populations globally since 1970." (WWF Living Planet Report, 2022 [0])
The current extinction rate is 100 to 1,000 times the natural background rate.
Half of all coral reefs have died since 1950, and entire marine food chains are collapsing.
There's been a 75% decline in flying insect biomass in parts of Europe over 30 years
(Krefeld Study, 2017). 1 in 6 bee species have gone regionally extinct.
1.3 million sq km of forest have been destroyed since 1990; the size of South Africa. Now Trump is talking about logging National Parks and cutting down a California sized amount of trees.
96% of all mammal biomass on Earth today is humans and livestock.
There is familiarity aspect for sure but also that living conditions don't change that dramatically over human lifespan. Life two generations ago was different but not so terribly different as to be uncomfortable to a modern human. However getting used to lifestyles of some centuries ago, let alone back to neolithic would be substantial complication.
46% of children didn't see their 5th birthday in the early 1800s. It had gone down by 1890, but still in the mid thirties. Romanticizing those days is extremely silly.
I'm sure there were aspects of life back then that could be said to be better than today. More human contact, more time in nature, less technology, less stress, less pollution and so on.
Those aspects are mostly irrelevant if half of people who are born die before they enjoy them.
More time in nature => this is neutral, not necessarily a positive, depends if you like that.
Less technology => definitely a negative, I know when I'd rather have been born if this is the only change.
Less pollution => Depending on the cutoff, most people today suffer less pollution than then. I'd rather the current global levels of pollution than actually cooking with coal/wood in my kitchen. The latter will probably kill you faster.
False. Polyester fabric has been in widespread use since the 1920s and was first patented in Britain. Methinks you are using a rather “no true Scotsman” definition of plastic .
Polyester use took off in the 1950s and 1960s, but it declined into the 1970s and 1980s. It took off again in the late 1990s. As such, the intervening period that didn't see major use of it was within my lifetime.
No true Scotsman. You said “before plastic” not “during a lull” and in many case there weee many other plastics in widespread use throughout all those decades.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone,
and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, cause that's what it
does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will
recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it's true that plastic is
not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into
a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our
prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth
probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be
the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the
first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make
it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric
philosophical question, "Why are we here?"
I still wonder when we will see the emergence of evolutionary adapted life to this. Bacteria able to diggest plastic.
Mikrobial lifeforms using plastic as a sort of shield from detection ("think of a dissease") using mayflylarva like structures made of microplastics to shield from detection by white blood cells.
I also curious wether misfiring defense detection due to plastic residue is responsible for allergic reaction disease on the rise in recent years. It would start where the plastic arrives- in the colon.
Since hitting the market 75 years ago, plastic has become ubiquitous -- and so, presumably, have nanoplastics
1950? Polyethylene and nylon appeared in the 1930s. Celluloid in the mid-1800s. We have been exposed to "nanoplastics" (including things like petroleum jelly and other hydrocarbon fractions) for more than a century, with very very little evidence it's "dangerous".
It has become vastly more ubiquitous, probably by several orders of magnitude. More of it ends up in the environment than is broken down, so it's still accumulating. It's moving up throughout the food chain.
We've certainly seen evidence of hormone disruption caused by some plastifiers. I suspect many more negative effects will become more apparent as time goes on and "dosage" increases in various organisms.
Full article is paywalled, but the point remains. Point is that scale matters, obviously.
Almonds contain trace amounts of amygdalin, you can eat a handful of almonds every day of your life, but if I asked you to eat a kg in one sitting, you're not gonna have a good time.
Plastics have gone from niche to absolutely ubiqutous worldwide in ~100 years. Even if it turns out to be totally and completely harmless to humans and every other animal, wouldn't you want to know that for sure?
Plastics have gone from niche to absolutely ubiqutous worldwide in ~100 years. Even if it turns out to be totally and completely harmless to humans and every other animal, wouldn't you want to know that for sure?
So have radio waves. There was a lot of paranoia back then, much like with plastics today, and a similar amount of studies showing that exposure to RF radiation causes cancer, but that has mostly died down as people realised the truth.
As time goes on, the harmlessness only proves itself.
>As time goes on, the harmlessness only proves itself.
I cant find any recently published study that /doesnt/ demonstate a link between microplastics exposure and adverse health effects. Please share if you have any
There's already been plenty of articles here about how scientific publishing has gone post-truth. Remember the "black plastic" scare last year? The desire for "engagement" has infected them too; do you think "microplastics are harmless" papers would even be accepted in this current ideology-driven culture? It's all about making sensational headlines and "impactful research", no matter how far from the truth, they'll lie, p-hack, and exaggerate to get there.
It seems kind of crazy to look at history and believe that exogenous matter accumulating in tissues and cells doesn't have a negative effect, but I guess we have to wait to see.
Text is short and clear enough that it warrants a full read, but for those who visit the comments first:
> If you look at a piece of plastic through a powerful microscope, you'll see alternating layers of hard material and soft material. […]
> [The researchers] discovered that the process [of forming microplastics] begins in the soft layers, which grow weaker over time due to environmental degradation and can break off even when the plastic is not under stress. By themselves, these soft pieces break down quickly in the environment. Problems arise when the failure of a soft layer allows hard layers to break off.
I’m eager to see research confirm whether microplastic contamination is harmful for humans. Given that 'These can be smaller than a virus -- just the right size to disrupt cells and even alter DNA.’, I’m not too hopeful that this is harmless.
I too would love to see a follow-up study. Unfortunately the research was done at Columbia University, which has suffered massive arbitrary grant freezes....
It would be a disastrous blow to oil indystry if everyone agreed we have to move away from both plastic and oil.
We produce more and more plastic each year, every new law reducing oil consumption is greated with doubling the amount of plastic we produce.
Microplaatic is in our brain now, causing damage that is irreversable.
Freezing grants is just one of many reasons why we need to put stop to that cancer which is oil industry.
Plastic is a fantastical space age material and we never gave it the fear or respect it deserves. Its usage should have been regulated from the beginning.
Disposable plastic shopping bags are kind of insane if you think about it.
That’s about as likely to happen as everyone deciding to stop doing illegal drugs because they’re bad for us.
Could you send me some links for the irreversible damage that micro plastics cause in the brain.
Yes, I read that 75% of scientists in the U.S. are considering leaving due to grant freezes and politicization.
Arbitrary?
Yes.
If only Columbia was a private university with a 15 billion dollar endowment, then they wouldn't need the government's permission to poke at some plastic.
This is a ridiculous bad faith talking point. That's not how endowments work, nor would it be possible for universities to spend them down for very long. Scientific research is an engine of innovation in the US, and it's penny wise pound foolish to attempt to save money by cutting of NIH and NSF dollars.
Private universities can, in fact, fund their own researchers.
No - these universities do not have the funds required to sustainably conduct research at the scale that it currently does.
They absolutely do have the funds required to sustain research. If they're spending their own money instead of the government's, then maybe they would have to be a bit selective and cut out the crap, but that wouldn't be such a bad thing anyway.
That's not how most basic science works. It's easy with hindsight to identified research that didn't work or seemed dumb at the outset, but some small percentage of exploratory projects turn out to be major advances. Studying algae ion channels was not intended to be applied research but ended up with the discovery of green fluorescent protein, which won a nobel prize and opened the door to immunohistochemistry, optogenetics, and other crucially important biomedical advances. There are countless examples like this. It's trivially easy to find failed research too... but that's the process. It's only expensive if you ignore all of the innovation that comes downstream of the initial grant process.
Why is this getting downvoted ? Past grants for this type of research at URI, for example, are in the $4M - $8M /yr range.
[0] https://rochesterbeacon.com/2024/04/17/new-microplastics-res...
Because my take doesn't conform to the group narrative.
The difficult part is that microplastics are so widespread that it's difficult/impossible to even find a control.
There really isn't an animal alive that doesn't have some degree of microplastics in their body.
We've basically turned microplastics into the new baseline condition of life on Earth
If I recall correctly from the previous big discussion on the front page about microplastics, the one about a spoonful of the stuff in your brain, the general takeaway was that it's pretty universally agreed upon that it's bad, the medical community is mostly disagreeing over just how bad it is.
Also what plastics we even mean, and which ones are bad and which are indifferent.
Using ‘plastic’ as a category is about as precise as ‘metal’.
Asbestos is chemically inert. Yet it causes lung cancer. Why?
The answer is simply that it continually damages the cells in the lung due to it's needle like structure.
I assume (but critically don't have proof) that if we find a cancer link to plastics it will be due to a similar sort of structural interaction. I don't think the specific type of plastic matters, though I'm sure some will be worse than others.
In this specific case, very unlikely that plastics as a whole cause cancer due to some structural form issue. Saying ‘microplastics’, to compare to asbestos, is similar to saying ‘silicon’. Asbestos is a particular form of crystalline tube shaped silica (aka silicon dioxide).
Many other forms of silicon are both cancer causing, and completely inert.
I suspect plastics will similarly have only small portions that are really nasty. We’re making a huge variety of novel types though every day. Which is part of the concern.
what we call ‘plastic’ has such a huge variety of molecular weights and compositions it’s like trying to find common ground between say nickel, stainless steel, and uranium.
We already know some plastics cause cancer, and some precursors to the same plastics cause cancer.
And a bigger issue IMO is plasticizers which modify the plastics structure to make them more malleable and less brittle.
Even asbestos divides into several families with very different levels of carcinogenicity. Crocidolite "blue asbestos" was first banned long ago due to its severe effects, but chrysotile (white asbestos) is far less dangerous.
There is this interesting study from last year that looks at the health effects of chrysotile, in a population exposed to far more of it than possibly anywhere else on earth: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38247448/
We are observing uptick in colon cancers. One of the theories is that microplastics might be contributing to it
The important point is that this mechanism works only for the so-called semi-crystalline plastics.
Even if they are less frequently encountered, there are also completely amorphous plastics and completely crystalline plastics, and these appear to not be prone to fragmentation into micro-plastics.
The conclusion is that there should be efforts to develop alternative plastics to the more frequently used semi-crystalline plastics, which have this serious disadvantage of generating persistent micro-plastic fragments.
Therefore this article offers a potential solution to the micro-plastic problem, which might work, like when freons have been replaced with less harmful refrigerating agents, even if those may have a slightly less refrigeration efficiency.
Honestly, what struck me most is how passive this whole process is. I always pictured microplastics coming from wear-and-tear or active grinding, but the idea that plastic can just sit there and quietly shed nano-shrapnel over time is pretty unsettling.
If you look at some plastic that has been outside in the sun for a while (a year or five) such as a toy or a plastic bag, it gets very fragile. If it's thin like a plastic bag, just the wind can break it apart. For thicker plastic parts, probably rain is enough to flush off the outer layer or powdered plastic every now and then.
Yeah and all the store of plastics in all the landfills and waters everywhere is shedding as we speak. I mean, its bad, but what can you do.
> what can you do.
We could stop the manufacturers from producing more and more of the stuff every year. That would be a pretty important step.
Burn the plastic instead of dumping it
The sooner we stop producing and consuming plastic in all its forms, the better for all life on Earth. There was life before plastic - it used wood, glass, metal, and natural fabric. It was not that long ago, certainly within my life.
I'm inclined to agree, but I grew up during the transitional years where both were available, and remember just so much broken glass everywhere...on the streets, sidewalks, etc. Maybe it was my poor neighborhood, but it was normal to see at least a broken bottle or two on the road each day. I don't see that now.
As I understand it, aluminum cans require a plastic lining. How is that one solved?
Glass bottles are ubiquitous as is Public drinking in Germany. They have a pfand program that gives money for recycling bottles where the bottles are literally cleaned and refilled not melted down.
So either, you return the bottles for some pocket money or you leave the bottle by a trashcan for someone (usually a homeless person) to collect all the bottles and make a few bucks for food and a shower.
It's actually a bit taboo to smash a bottle because of this.
Beautiful cyclical economy.
Saw the same in Russia 10 years ago. Not much broken glass on the streets but lots of empty bottles waiting beside walls and public infrastructures.
> As I understand it, aluminum cans require a plastic lining. How is that one solved?
You use glass.
The plastic is primarily used for acidic foods like tomatoes. Non-acidic goods will do just fine with no liner.
It depends where you live, but a lot of countries make you pay glass bottles now ; a fee that you get back once you take the empty bottle back to the supermarket.
It does not prevent people from throwing them, but since you get money from them, homeless people usually gather them to make some money.
There is a pretty clever solution to that which is called not throwing your trash on the ground. This is a cultural problem, there are plenty of communities where people are poor but still carry their trash home with them, and even if they don't have any sort of trash pickup service they throw their trash into a designated dump instead of the middle of their walking paths.
Broken glass on the street is an aesthetic issue, assuming one has good shoes. In contrast, with gradual plastic accumulation, life on Earth is headed for extinction.
Also, for poor people, they need the money that they money back when they return a glass bottle, so they have an incentive to not trash it, certainly not on the street.
Glass containers don't require any lining. As for aluminum without a lining, it is okay for certain dry foods only, nothing wet.
Not a problem.
Bottle and can recycling programs in the US were very successful in states that implemented them.
In NYC all refundable glass bottles and aluminum cans thrown away by those that couldn’t be bothered: They would be picked up by homeless (etc), providing a market-driven solution.
I never understood why it wasn’t expanded to more containers, like cans of beans.
The big problem then was that state-level only made recycling inconsistent.
The big problem today is that plastic bottles took over because of their lightweight; meaning only a government policy could discourage plastic food containers.
It was not an aesthetic issue alone. People were getting cut and had their shoe soles destroyed fairly routinely.
Not an aesthetic issue for bikes.
Well. Bike tires would also get replaced. So some puncture proof metal option would fix the problem.
I too look forward to my 200lbs puncture proof bike.
> Broken glass on the street is an aesthetic issue
Unless you're walking a dog. Or wearing sandals or flip-flops in the summer. Or are a 2-year old prone to tripping and falling. Or...
You use copper instead
Copper is largely unsafe with foods due to copper toxicity due to it leeching into foods. It is not like aluminum in this respect which is a hundred times safer.
Copper compounds, while being generally non-toxic for large mammals, are very toxic for insects and other smaller animals. It’s why they are widely used in everything from marine anti-fouling paint to wood ‘pickling’ treatments.
And copper compounds will form in a wide variety of acidic and anoxic environments.
Aluminum is not particularly healthy either. I heard it’s implicated in dementia.
Normal kidneys excrete aluminum just fine. Lycopene also helps. If aluminum is accumulating in the brain or the blood, there is something that's not washing it out, meaning the waste removal process of the brain or kidneys is compromised.
Shoes...
Plastic isn't just in packaging - it's in clothes, electronics, medicine, insulation, infrastructure. Undoing that won't be as simple as just "going back," but you're right - we do need to seriously rethink what's necessary vs. what's just easy
Starting with the packaging is the easiest and most effective place to start.
Clothing is an interesting problem; silk and wool can provide superior alternatives but are costly and so it’d be a shift into quality.
That in turn requires a mindset shift away from changing trends every year to something perhaps more generational.
Are the wealthy trend setters willing to do this?
> There was life before plastic - it used wood, glass, metal, and natural fabric.
Technically speaking, latex and even silk are plastics, as are traditional products made from plant oils, like linoleum. We've been relying on them for millennia.
"Plastics" has taken on a connotation similar to "GMO", intrinsically harmful by implication, in contrast to labels like "natural" or "organic" where the implication is they're harmless or healthy. But it's all just language games. There's often no meaningful distinction that can be made between "synthetic" products and "natural" products, and it's common for "natural" products to have safety profiles no less worrisome, if not more worrisome, then their synthetic counter parts. For example, "natural" neonicotinoid pesticides. There's alot more diversity in synthetic products, of course, though even the term "synthetic" relies on some very fuzzy line drawing.
The substantive aspects of the debate can be reduced to arguments over the pace of progress, risk, etc, which have little to with whether something is "natural" or "synthetic", "organic" or "plastic". These labels are mere rhetorical instruments.
Life in 1850 was definitively NOT "better".
One interesting thing I've noticed in my life is that everyone that I've known personally preferred their early life and thinks the world is getting worse. From my great grandparents to me today. And each have their reasons, which sound valid, but probably have a bit of rose colored glasses and yearning for youth attached.
So is it that people prefer the world they are born into and hate change, or is life for an average person getting worse in some less tangible respects? Is fondly remembering the family bonding over radio broadcasts worth more than being able to afford every member of the family having their own TV, for example? It seems hard to judge.
We often define 'best it's ever been' by the poor being able to afford iPhones and the marginalized having more rights, which are both valid points.
But is it better for the majority common person? Are there people who are constantly in awe of how great things are, or are we doomed to miss what we had as kids and focus on the negative? Because I find myself falling into that trap often.
One thing that sticks in my head is that as a kid, my dad worked for a soda company and my neighbor worked for Lowes. Neither wife worked, both had 3 kids, and could afford a house and 2 cars. That seems like a fairy tale to young people today.
The presentation of reality is always worsening, and now there are more means to present than ever. And people are experiencing reality through screens more than ever.
But if you turn off the screens, the physical reality hasn't really changed that much. There is some horrible architecture inflicted on us, but then parks and streets are nice/cleaner than in my youth.
PS I do agree that the social pressures are worse, with both parents encouraged/needing to work.
> the physical reality hasn't really changed that much
It sure has. We've lost a significant proportion of the other species on earth in the span of a few decades. For just one example of many, "69% decline in vertebrate populations globally since 1970." (WWF Living Planet Report, 2022 [0])
The current extinction rate is 100 to 1,000 times the natural background rate.
Half of all coral reefs have died since 1950, and entire marine food chains are collapsing.
There's been a 75% decline in flying insect biomass in parts of Europe over 30 years (Krefeld Study, 2017). 1 in 6 bee species have gone regionally extinct.
1.3 million sq km of forest have been destroyed since 1990; the size of South Africa. Now Trump is talking about logging National Parks and cutting down a California sized amount of trees.
96% of all mammal biomass on Earth today is humans and livestock.
I could go on, but, I think the point is made.
0 - https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/69-average-decl...
There is familiarity aspect for sure but also that living conditions don't change that dramatically over human lifespan. Life two generations ago was different but not so terribly different as to be uncomfortable to a modern human. However getting used to lifestyles of some centuries ago, let alone back to neolithic would be substantial complication.
So you're assuming the person you're replying to is at least 175 years old?
They insisted they had been alive prior to plastic being used. Commercial synthetic plastics have been in use since at least the mid 1850s.
This is a pretty meaningless statement.
Where? To whom? According to what metric?
46% of children didn't see their 5th birthday in the early 1800s. It had gone down by 1890, but still in the mid thirties. Romanticizing those days is extremely silly.
I'm sure there were aspects of life back then that could be said to be better than today. More human contact, more time in nature, less technology, less stress, less pollution and so on.
Those aspects are mostly irrelevant if half of people who are born die before they enjoy them.
More time in nature => this is neutral, not necessarily a positive, depends if you like that.
Less technology => definitely a negative, I know when I'd rather have been born if this is the only change.
Less pollution => Depending on the cutoff, most people today suffer less pollution than then. I'd rather the current global levels of pollution than actually cooking with coal/wood in my kitchen. The latter will probably kill you faster.
It was not that long ago, and I would call "not being headed for extinction" better than the alternative.
In the West, plastic use became widespread in homes and with foods in the 1950s. In most other countries it took until the 1980s.
False. Polyester fabric has been in widespread use since the 1920s and was first patented in Britain. Methinks you are using a rather “no true Scotsman” definition of plastic .
Polyester use took off in the 1950s and 1960s, but it declined into the 1970s and 1980s. It took off again in the late 1990s. As such, the intervening period that didn't see major use of it was within my lifetime.
No true Scotsman. You said “before plastic” not “during a lull” and in many case there weee many other plastics in widespread use throughout all those decades.
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The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?"
Plastic... asshole.
-- George Carlin
I still wonder when we will see the emergence of evolutionary adapted life to this. Bacteria able to diggest plastic. Mikrobial lifeforms using plastic as a sort of shield from detection ("think of a dissease") using mayflylarva like structures made of microplastics to shield from detection by white blood cells. I also curious wether misfiring defense detection due to plastic residue is responsible for allergic reaction disease on the rise in recent years. It would start where the plastic arrives- in the colon.
The actual article is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58233-3
Since hitting the market 75 years ago, plastic has become ubiquitous -- and so, presumably, have nanoplastics
1950? Polyethylene and nylon appeared in the 1930s. Celluloid in the mid-1800s. We have been exposed to "nanoplastics" (including things like petroleum jelly and other hydrocarbon fractions) for more than a century, with very very little evidence it's "dangerous".
It has become vastly more ubiquitous, probably by several orders of magnitude. More of it ends up in the environment than is broken down, so it's still accumulating. It's moving up throughout the food chain.
We've certainly seen evidence of hormone disruption caused by some plastifiers. I suspect many more negative effects will become more apparent as time goes on and "dosage" increases in various organisms.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00405-8#:~:text=O...
Full article is paywalled, but the point remains. Point is that scale matters, obviously.
Almonds contain trace amounts of amygdalin, you can eat a handful of almonds every day of your life, but if I asked you to eat a kg in one sitting, you're not gonna have a good time.
Plastics have gone from niche to absolutely ubiqutous worldwide in ~100 years. Even if it turns out to be totally and completely harmless to humans and every other animal, wouldn't you want to know that for sure?
Plastics have gone from niche to absolutely ubiqutous worldwide in ~100 years. Even if it turns out to be totally and completely harmless to humans and every other animal, wouldn't you want to know that for sure?
So have radio waves. There was a lot of paranoia back then, much like with plastics today, and a similar amount of studies showing that exposure to RF radiation causes cancer, but that has mostly died down as people realised the truth.
As time goes on, the harmlessness only proves itself.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-02968-x#:~:text=I...
>As time goes on, the harmlessness only proves itself.
I cant find any recently published study that /doesnt/ demonstate a link between microplastics exposure and adverse health effects. Please share if you have any
There's already been plenty of articles here about how scientific publishing has gone post-truth. Remember the "black plastic" scare last year? The desire for "engagement" has infected them too; do you think "microplastics are harmless" papers would even be accepted in this current ideology-driven culture? It's all about making sensational headlines and "impactful research", no matter how far from the truth, they'll lie, p-hack, and exaggerate to get there.
> Full article is paywalled
https://archive.ph/XJ7ug
It seems kind of crazy to look at history and believe that exogenous matter accumulating in tissues and cells doesn't have a negative effect, but I guess we have to wait to see.