We keep hearing the word “microplastic” in our foods, seas, and ground, but if they do not react with most chemicals, why are they a problem in our bodies? Wouldn’t they just ignore them?
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Micro plastics are less dangerous than a lot of people believe due to their inert nature as you have mentioned. The danger stems from all the additives in plastics. As plastic breaks down it releases harmful plasticizers, flame retardants, and other additives which are often times not inert and harm life.
In addition: plastics are non-polar, meaning thee molecules in them have no partial charge. This is in contrast to water, which is a polar molecule. Loads of pollutants like PCB’s and pesticides are also non-polar. When (micro)plastics get in the water collum, tis has the effect of making them act like magnets to these pollutants: every molecule of PCB’s and pesticides that floats by is going to stick to the surface of the plastic. This way every piece of plastic is going to become more and more toxic as it gathers pollutants on itself. Unfortunately these microplastics then get eaten by fish, mistaking them for plankton. The pollutants get concentrated even more in these plankton-eaters. The next step up in the foodchain is often bigger predatory fish (another concentration-step), like Tuna…which is what we humans like to eat. By this time the pollutants might have increased more than 1000-fold in concentration, compared to the levels in the water. This is called bio-accumulation.
Asbestos is inert, too. It still causes intense cellular and genetic damage because the nano particles it breaks into are small and sharp enough to literally impale through living cells and entangle itself in DNA. Microplastics may cause analogous mechanical cellular damage. No the particles arent extremely thin pointy crystals like asbestos; but they are still small enough to get caught in the machinery among or inside cells and damage us at the microscopic level.
the way you phrase:
>we keep hearing the word “microplastic”
implies that you think it’s bullshit, and I very much assure you it is not. microplastics fuck shit up in a very bad way.
Another ELI5? How come plastics are artificial and hard to break down, since it’s made from oil (iirc) which is made from old organic material. I always wondered that.
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