It feels like every few weeks i see an article about microplastics being in the human body. As i understand plastics are inert so why do we expect them to be any more harmful than normal dust?
In: Biology
History has taught us the small things we don’t fully understand can prove very dangerous when we get them in our bodies. When radioactivity was first discovered it was cool. We put radioactive materials in kids chemistry sets, made radioactive trinkets to wear. When lead was found to be a convenient metal, we put it in our water pipes, the paint on our walls and our kids toys. We lined our houses with asbestos because it was a good insulator. The issues took years to develop, and the. Years more to figure out the cause was these convenient little molecules that we had *for years* been putting everywhere. And today we are still cleaning up lead and asbestos – even though we have been doing so my whole life, we aren’t done yet. Because we didn’t pause to find out what it would do. Micro plastics are far more invasive than any of the above, and so we don’t want to repeat the past with something *much more difficult* to clean up.
Microplastics are in our water, our food, the ocean, *everywhere*. If we find out in two or three decades that it’s a major health problem, we are just going to be fucked because it’s too late. And there is already some correlative evidence that shows it probably isn’t great. So we want to slow down or stop the spread until we are sure about the cost.
Because the media tells them to be. We don’t even know yet if they cause any problems. It’s a substance that is getting into places it isn’t supposed to be, which *may* be a cause for concern, but the media is in business to rile people up, so they do.
The thing about it is that they’re already *everywhere* so if there ends up being cause for concern, there’s not much we can do about it, so worrying doesn’t help anyone but the advertisers that sponsor the news media.
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