If we know almost nothing about them, we have no idea if they are worse than microplastics and until we do, such headlines are just scaremongering for clicks.
I don't have to know what kind of dust is leaking out of the Blendtec Blender to remember the classic words "X dust, don't breath this!"
If microplastics are bad, nanoplastics can be reasonably assumed to be worse. The main thing I am thinking about is how a decaying plastic molecule might stay mostly unchanged as a microplastic, but once it becomes a nanoplastic the molecule itself could degrade into more toxic chemicals, perfectly sized to interact with our various receptors in our bodies.
> If microplastics are bad, nanoplastics can be reasonably assumed to be worse
It might be reasonable to assume that for the time being (precautionary principle), but in the end, most plastics are (C2H4)n. The form it can take is limited too, so while it could have effects on endocrine receptors, it would overall be limited.
[edit] I'm dumb sorry, I get it, additives can be more complex and are unknown, I'll read the article next time :/
Still stand by my initial belief, but I shouldn't have been so dismissive.
We have very little idea what they do, but the ideas we do have aren't good. From the article:
> “If you go down to the nanoscale the properties of these materials are very different. They’re much more reactive,” he said.
> A 2023 study showed that nanoplastics attracted clumps of a particular protein, called alpha-synuclein, that has been linked to Parkinson’s disease and dementia. This happens in cells in a dish and lab mice.
> Earlier research in zebrafish found that nanoplastics can be passed from Mom to baby via the placenta and can cross the barrier to get into the brains of mice where they damage brain cells and alter the brain’s activity.
> “I don’t know if I’d make a direct link to disease outcome but I will say that pathogenic bacteria really like plastics and so it kind of concentrates those bacteria that can lead to pathologies,” she said.
I think atomic bombs is a good analogy for why it's alarming, actually. Humanity had a great and brief time putting radium in all sorts of things until they realized that it was doing something that penetrated deeply into and through the body at a micro scale.
Humanity has also had a great time making different kinds of plastics, only to discover that they are also penetrating our body at a microscopic scale.
While we don't have the smoking gun yet (i.e. radium jaw), it's at least scary to me, because platics are so pervasive across the population that if a smoking gun DOES emerge, it might be too late. I think the article itself brings up another good example: asbestos.
I get all the jokes about dihydrogen monoxide killing people who breathe it, i.e. drowning, but this is fundamentally different, because we are discovering a thing that is interacting with our bodies in a way that was not historically present throughout evolution. Presumably if we'd evolved in the mist of nano plastics there wouldn't be much cause for worry, because a priori we'd have survived and thrived in its presence.
Unhealthy stuff like viruses and bacteria and wood smoke are very old.
Even if nano plastics did exist for the last billion years, it wouldn't mean they're safe, just that they don't kill people faster than they can reproduce.
It's amazing how accepting people are of dangerous substances...
Everyone who's ever died has been full of that stuff! And there have been no controlled studies where subjects are isolated from it. Someone should look into that! What is the DHMO lobby hiding from us? ;)
A picoplastic is also known as a carbohydrate, ketone, or whatever basic organic molecular building block. "the typical length of a carbon–carbon single bond is 154 pm" according to wikipedia, so typical plastics are necessarily at the nano-scale or larger, as a plastic is defined as a polymer of organic molecules, I believe.
So one thing we do know: the monomers for every single polymer in wide spread use show estrogenic activity on cellular cultures. And unless they’re kinda exotic the polymers will shed a little in water or ethanol solutions
> the monomers for every single polymer in wide spread use show estrogenic activity
This is at least a bit silly. Ethylene is a gas, and it’s also a widespread, naturally occurring plant hormone. Propylene is also a gas. Lactic acid is a food and a widespread chemical produced by your body.
The article linked by the poster above was less about the monomers, which in many cases are not dangerous as you correctly say, but more about the junk additives that are included in almost any object made of plastic in order to decrease various processing costs.
The fact that the manufacturer declares that some object is made from a supposedly safe polymer like polyethylene or polypropylene is unfortunately not enough, because it may contain large amounts of non-declared additives and fillers that are much more dangerous than the base polymer or monomers.
Many plastics still are bisphenol chemistry based, just not bpa in particular. Turns out that that whole class of compounds is just bad news… but also essential for chemistry reason to make many useful plastics
Yeah. One reason I am trying to stay away from food and especially fluids packaged in anything else than glass. Even aluminium or paper containers are really just plastic where it matters -- the surface in contact with food is all plastic.
Unfortunately, this isn't doing anything to the plastic already present in the environment.
You can search for the full science behind it, but metal cans that have a breaching dent will allow air and bacteria into the can. Plastic liners make it very unlikely for small dents to actually cause a breach, whereas with old “naked” cans that was not the case.
Cans with deep dents are not protected however, and these should always be discarded.
A single hydrogen atom is about 0.1 nanometers in diameter. You can't really have complex molecules that are smaller than nanometer scale.
>And what would single molecule of plastic be called?
A monomer is what the smallest unit of a polymer is called. They're a single molecule, but so is a long polymer chain of a bunch of them bonded together, and the properties of the material often depend heavily on the number of monomers in the average chain in the bulk material. For example, the monomer of polyethylene, one of the most common plastics, is a gas at room temperature/pressure. So it may not really make sense to call a monomer a molecule of plastic.
"Plastic contaminates everything, even your implant.
The plastic breaks but does not degrade.
The microplastic becomes nano plastic, which breaks and becomes picoplastic which breaks and becomes femtoplastic and so on." [1]
No use getting fearful until you see some evidence. There's a lot more to fear right now to your immediate existence, if you want to exercise that nerve.
> The microplastic becomes nano plastic, which breaks and becomes picoplastic which breaks and becomes femtoplastic and so on.
This cannot be true. Atoms are nanometer sized, so breaking down particles into pico- and femto-plastics would involve nuclear reactions that I feel reasonably safe asserting do not occur naturally. If they did they would change the chemical structure of the products into something no longer plastic (and in fact no longer matter of the form we're familiar).
> No use getting fearful until you see some evidence.
TFA is precisely about early evidence that plastics at these small scales are biologically active and might have adverse effects on human health and the environment.
wait, we skipped the part where we found out microplastics were bad for you. concerning, yes, but plastic is relatively inert and there's no actual evidence of harm yet.
Plastic is biologically inert, but the plasticizers added to modify the qualities of plastics may not be. From what I understand, that's one of the major concerns with microplastics.
Plastics are basically all endocrine disrupting chemicals (your body confuses them for hormones, usually estrogen). Even nylon has been shown to be a EDC. BPA was by far the worst of them and wound up diffusing public concern, getting the rest completely off the hook.
That's not the whole story. Plastic is a chemical 'sponge' that soaks up contaminants from the environment (eg heavy metals, brominated flame retardants, pesticides, etc), concentrating them to many times background levels before delivering them into your body. For example household dust (which is >50% microplastics) is the primary route for brominated flame retardants to enter the human body.
And that's not even to mention intentional additives (phthalates, Bisphenol-*, BFRs again), which are far from inert.
And so are rice, broccoli, beer, wine, and brussels sprouts due to their absorption of arsenic from pesticides, mining, and other causes. The Chinese don't seem to be too concerned with it, even though it is well known.
Hey but eat meat and eggs! ALA helps to detoxify it. Not getting into the fear list on meat ;)
Extreme confidence is probably a mistake. Chronic diseases are rampant and we don't have good answers for what the causes are.
Have we been using the same exact compounds and processes and habits for 40 years? Every new advance is a chance for some new fuck up, and it takes time to realize it, if we ever do.
There's a huge range of possibilities between arsenic and "minor harm."
We have decent reason to believe they are active in the endocrine system, and pretty good reason to believe there are population-level endocrine issues (obesity and fertility).
Given that these plastics seem to accrue intergenerationally (i.e. babies are being born "poisoned" by them), an apparently minor, apparently not-very-acute issue could actually end up being a much, much, much bigger problem than any of the examples you listed.
That's incorrect, after invention of a leaded fuel, the first health concerns were raised in 1 or 2 years of production, and major heath investigation happened in 4 years time. We just lobbied (bribed) our way to continue using it regardless for half a century. And even a century later leaded fuel is widely used even in the USA, and probably even worse in other countries.
You're totally right, my choice of language should have been better. Thanks for the correction!
Is the situation all that different for plastics? I'm not sure. We've been running health studies on them for a while and the harmful effects of BPA, Teflon, PFAS, and the androgenic affects of most polymers are pretty well known at this point.
My point is mainly that how long we've been using something is not a great way to determine safety.
Your argument might have made sense if excess consumption of carbohydrate, saturated fat, and other nutrition deficient foods did not skyrocket over the same time frame.
This is a big part of the struggle with in vitro vs in vivo studies. We can have a repeatable result with in vitro effects, but can't confidently say what the macro effect will be. We might be able to say it doesn't "directly" cause none, some, or all of those, but we can't definitively say it doesn't contribute at all.
Personally I'm of the opinion that is evidence large scale studies are needed on live subjects. I'm not educated enough to know if that is feasible or reasonable, but I am confident you can't be "sure" until that is done.
There's effectively no way to test this with fully unadulterated control group. The entire planet more or less is covered in microplastics.
It's not clear how, even theoretically, you get better evidence than "this is what we see in vitro, and the effect seems analogous at population scale."
Sure, maybe there isn't, I can't argue that with my knowledge.
What I am confident on is there won't be significant societal change with that level of evidence. Most of those health issues have "easy" reasons they can be associated with (right or wrong), and it's going to be tough convincing people that in vitro effects are enough reason to significantly curtail (nevermind ban) plastics.
"Significant societal change" doesn't always have to come from getting masses of people onboard. It can also happen, and often does happen, by people entrusted with power to make decisions even in the absence of complete information.
One heuristic such a person might use would be, "gee, are we really going to take the position that if you pollute so quickly and so widespread that it becomes nearly impossible to demonstrate specific harm, that you can just keep on doing that?"
Completely reasonable IMO to expect these to be problematic, right down to the scale of individual molecules. Once these compounds get into your body in such small particle sizes, it's obvious that they are not at all as inert as they appear to be on the "macro" scale.
