I’m not talking about plastic with specific issues (i.e. plastics bags look like jellyfish to sea turtles so sea turtles eat them and die).
But the sand on the beach is still going to be sand on the beach in 10,000 years, so what specific issues are going to happen from X amount of sand grains being plastic?
Edit: Based on the first few replies: I’m talking about plastics that are said to still be there, unchanged, millions of years later. Like they’d show up on the geological record. “Forever plastics”
IF they don’t decay what’s the issue? Or is them not decaying and “forever plastics” a misconception?
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Different kinds of plastics have different chemicals. One property of all plastics we have created is that they all leach chemicals when heated or scratched. As the plastic slowly breaks down/leaches, it leaves PFAS and EDC’s. This gets into the ocean where it enters our food chain, but it can also be from plastic food containers and such. While BPA has been marked as bad and there are other plastics to take it place, the newer “non-leaching” plastics still do leach. All of these built up chemicals (some of them lasting longer than human lifetimes) have an affect on the body, while rocks and sand are non-reactive with the human body.
To put it simply, sand has been around for as long as we know it. But plastic is a man made thing that isn’t benign to our bodies. We wouldn’t normally be exposed to these chemicals and our body has no natural way to prevent damage.
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