Eli5:why our body can’t just flush away all the plastic in our bodies?
In: Biology
One of the things that we like about plastic, which makes it useful, is that it tends not to be very reactive to anything. You can put all sorts of things in plastic without it falling apart. Air doesn’t do anything to it, water doesn’t do anything to it, even sunlight doesn’t do a *lot* very quickly.
The benefit is that plastic lasts forever. The downside is that plastic lasts forever. It also means that your body has few, if any tools that can do much to plastic. Your cells don’t have tiny fingers, they only have molecular tools that “grab” stuff using chemical reactions. Since plastic barely reacts to anything, your body has a lot of trouble grabbing it and manipulating it.
Without being able to use those molecular tools, your body really can’t make the plastic go anywhere or do anything beyond floating around in your blood.
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