Don’t Bother Avoiding Microplastics
16th March 2024
They’re everywhere, it seems: in the oceans, the fish, the soil, our drinking water, our vegetables, our grains and cereals, our meat — even in us. Microplastics and smaller nanoplastics are tiny particles of plastic flubbage measuring less than a tenth of an inch that result from the degradation of plastic refuse, and according to recent news coverage the world is simply crawling with the stuff.
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But before you start feverishly ridding yourself of ice cube trays and rubber spatulas, some nuance: nobody actually knows if they make you sick. A major 2016 study about microplastics poisoning fish — which made some people stop eating seafood — turned out to be fraudulent. Belgian scientists announced in 2017 that shellfish lovers could be consuming up to 11,000 plastic particles per year — but it turns out most people take in far more than that just by inhaling or swallowing tiny fibers in the air. Lab experiments have shown plastic particles can damage and even kill an individual cell, but less sensationalist reports admit the difficulty of determining whether they harm people any more than the billions of other particles in our food and air: dust, pollen and so on.
“If it bleeds, it leads” has been replaced by “Get more clicks from sicks”.