alt Hacker NewsPlasticList – Plastic Levels in Foods
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I'm very skeptical of plastics research at this point. Remember the "we have a plastic spoon worth of microplastics in our brains!" hype cycle. Turns out their methods were highly flawed and "not a suitable analysis method for PE and PVC in biological matrices" (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11800385/)
Can anyone comment on the methods used here? Seems they don't have the same issues.
Going by the lower limit of 20,000 ng/kg, a 70kg person has a limit of 1,400,000 ng/day for DEHP and 70MM ng/day DEHT.
So am I reading this right you're probably an order of magnitude below the 'safe' limit even if you subsist solely off of RXBars and Sweetgreen? Which is not so far from me at one point in my 30s...
I didn't expect to open this chart and feel _better_ about my plastic consumption, maybe I'm just misunderstanding the chart. It seems even if the limits are 10x too high, you're still probably fine.
Weird to see how much attention plastics in food are getting despite no(?) evidence of harm vs. something like consuming too much sugar or alcohol, and BPA/BPS in receipt paper (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/well/health-effects-paper...).
It's very hard to maintain a mental ranked list of health things to be worried about when hypothetical concerns get more attention/coverage the confirmed ones.
I used to work for a company that makes equipment for the food processing industry.
Sometimes conveyor belts would be left running for days or even weeks in the test area. After a while, you would start to see very fine dust on and around the conveyor belts. This was finely ground POM plastic. On some occasions, there were actually heaps of that stuff forming beneath the conveyor belts.
In the factories, everything gets washed down with pressure washers at least once per day, so very little of this stuff goes into the food, but it definitely gets washed away out to sea.
I think that there is probably a wide-spread misunderstanding on how the micro-plastics enter the food. It does not seem very likely that it would come from the packaging or your tupperware (unless your tupperware is so old that it has actually started to disintegrate). It seems much likelier that the plastics were in the food before it was packaged.
The most disturbing is "Raw Cow Milk from Farm in Glass". It still is loaded with plastic, even though it is one of the least processed things on the list.
My only question is was the cow milked by hand or by machine? The tubing in a milking machine almost certainly contains plastic.
It's interesting that several products from the 1920s contain measurable quantities of DEHP, which was apparently first synthesized in the 1930s. How did that happen?
For example, the cocoa powder from the 1920s https://www.plasticlist.org/product/990
What is the deal with whole foods grass-fed ribeye?
https://www.plasticlist.org/product/65
What are they grazing on, plastic lawn turf?
While PlasticList has already tested hundreds of products and found plastic chemicals in 86% of them, laboratory.love lets you crowdfund testing for the specific products you actually buy.
Think of it as democratizing PlasticList's methodology: you choose what gets tested, we handle the logistics of sample collection + lab work, and results are published openly to pressure companies toward cleaner supply chains.
There's 10,000s ng of plastic in a Starbuck's Latte ... https://www.plasticlist.org/product/173
Man, remember a few year backs some magic microbes that eat plastic were making the rounds in news? Whatever happened to those, did not work out, are still worked on, lack of funding...?
Super cool project, but I think there's pretty valid nitpick here:
It should clearly state the container (when multiple are possible) as that's likely the origin of 99.9% of the microplastics, as well as temperature. Prime example: "Starbucks Matcha Latte". I bet there are orders of magnitude difference in microplastic content between getting a hot one in a plastic (coated, if not fully) takeaway cup vs an iced one in a mug.
In general, containers and the way they're used generally make the difference, but all the focus here is only on the food item.
What are we complaining about? Is it about the industrialization, economy and jobs that produced plastics? How far do we want to go back? Industries came out of scientific advances and business, which came from social dynamics and foundational academics such as mathematics and logic, which in turn were a result of leisure time due to civilizations, settlements, more food availability, farming, tools etc. All this was inevitable and incremental. Nothing happened overnight. We didn't cause it. And we won't be doing anything to stop it.
There is a story in Hindu mythology about churning of the milk ocean, by gods and demons in cooperation, using a mountain as the churning rod, with an objective of extracting the nectar of immortality. After a great amount of churning, a great poison comes out which must be consumed, otherwise it ends the universe. Lord Shiva consumes it, but keeps it in his throat, to save himself and the universe. When the Nectar finally comes out, somehow gods trick the demons, to keep the nectar to themselves.
Sometimes it occurs to me that this story foretold the extraction of oil from ocean deeps, giving the luxuries to the developed world and pollution to the third world.
Thank you for sharing this data, it is really helpful. Now it feels like microplastics are almost everywhere in life, even breathing and eating are difficult to completely avoid. What we can do is probably to try to understand their sources, and then reduce contact as much as possible, make a little bit of active choices, at least to protect ourselves and our families.
Was wondering how they got hold of "Powdered Milk from 1952 Korean War Rations", but they even answer that!
> COLLECTION LOCATION:
> eBay, sold by littlebitoeverythingjoe
> SHIPPED IN:
> Original packaging inside Ziploc bag
>
> SHIPPING METHOD:
> UPS Overnight
Well, more than food those are food products and other sort of products like toothpaste. Not sure you should consume them in the first place.
Read through their "industry advice" section and thought this interesting:
> If you chop something on a plastic cutting board (because wood cutting boards are outlawed in commercial kitchens, apparently), test before and after chopping.
Who banned wood cutting boards from kitchens and for what purpose? I did some digging and some sources cite that neither FDA nor USDA strictly ban wood cutting boards, but individual state health departments are often strict on commercial kitchens that use wood instruments. I get concerns of wood being porous and all, but with the alternative being I have to ingest shavings from the plastic cutting board with every meal... Maybe it's time for a paradigm shift.
This site has been posted to HN before, but it's definitely interesting to revisit in light of drastic cuts to federal agencies like the FDA, USDA, and CDC.
Independent efforts like PlasticList are probably going to be more and more important as research funding gets slashed and health-related data is suppressed or manipulated.
RIP my RXBARs. I must be full of plastics at this point, they were my go-to snack for years.
I'm making a product to help trap plasticizers in the digestive tract and prevent them from getting into the bloodstream, NeutraOat (NeutraOat.com).
I was originally inspired by PlasticList, and actually made a quiz on my website based off their data for people to assess their plastics exposure (quiz.neutraoat.com)
A friend of mine built an alternative UI for this, that may be more digestible if you’re trying to lookup individual items.
Jesus christ at the numbers on the Rxbars. So much for "4 ingredients with no B.S.". Kind of insane that they could get up to 30,000 ng/serving with such a small serving size consisting of something like 4 blueberries, 4 cashews, and 3 dates.
Also the negligible levels of plastic detected in plastic water bottles is surprising. I was under the impression, based on other reports, that water in plastic bottles is something we should avoid.
Can anyone help test the plastic level of Coke? I wonder whether plastic or sugar would kill me first.
Shocking comparison (search for 'sugar', only 2 results) on:
- Korean War-era sugar ration
Vs.
- store-bought sugar
So, what's the action item for the consumers? How much if this gets outside of our digestion system? What's the impact of that? What are the remedies?
The 1952 Korean war rations are comparable with Whole Foods Boneless Beef Ribeye Steak Grass Fed ?
Some previous discussion late last year:
The amount of different units just stunts me, we are really early.
Oh shit I've been drinking powdered milk from 1952 Korean war rations basically every day.
dont want to use this data for anything solid other than ... i will never visit the bay area
zuck at least got this part right... got his own farm and everything
Uh. Forget plastics, I love the presentation.
Any web dev type can tell me what framework, if any, is that done with?
This list is amazing, but at some point you have to prioritize what you’re paying attention to.
Your most dangerous plastic or microplastic is the PFAS. And the biggest source of PFAS is the water you drink. Does it run through plastic tubing? A pfas filter at any point? Sit in a plastic jug?
The most effective way to deal with this is to distill your water. Distilled water is nearly pfas free, and also removes bpas, lead, mercury, and any bacteria.[1]
https://learn.pfasfreelife.com/research/distillers-remove-pf...
I struggle with taking this too seriously YET, knowing that we ingest all manner of tiny things, and breathe in all kinds of particles and toxins all the time. NOT SAYING this is fine, but rather I haven’t heard anything yet to bump it up higher in the list of concerns.
I mean I already have exposure to lead and asbestos, and the random particulates I breathe in aren’t going away. I feel like this is getting attention because it’s a new issue, not that all other concerns pale in comparison.
Love the UI !
Another we refuse to accept and admit, due to the implications of other things that touch our skins, are the plastics from polyester fabrics that enter our body through our skin stream. The skin is the largest organ and has the largest surface area exposure, and these polyesters are one of the largest polluters of micro and nano plastics into the environment - and effectively, our bodies, the skin being one of the most efficient filters and processors of the plastic poison in them.
Don't research the poison of the plastics that wash out of those volatile fibers whiilst in the laundry machines. Oh, did you think that the only source of the micro-plastics in the water supply was water bottles?
Imagine eating $22 SweetGreen salads each day for good health...and then seeing it on the top-5 list for plastics.
Anyone else notice the samples are stored/delivered in a plastic bag. Like wtf??
The samples are stored/delivered in a plastic bag. LMFAO wtf??
I've taken prenatal vitamins for as long as I can remember because they're FDA regulated to actually contain the nutrients they claim to include. I never would've thought that could be a source for microplastics.
Separately, I always knew there was a reason those RXBars taste like plastic. /s
I know I promised not to, but I am indeed freaking out a little bit.
I will forever remember this list as the one that revealed that Shakeshack burgers have 5x microplastics than your average McD quarter pounder.
I've avoided Shakeshack ever since.
One class of items not listed here, which I'd recently started to think might be less-than-optimal: pepper sold in jars with built-in, plastic, grinders.
I'd long since noted that as the jar emptied the grinders were increasingly ineffective. Thinking on why that might be ... I realised that this was because as you grind the pepper, you're also grinding plastic directly into your food.
There's surprisingly little discussion about this that I can find, though this 5 y.o. Stackexchange question addresses the concern:
<https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/103003/microplas...>
Seems to me that plastic grinders, whether disposable or sold as (apparently) durable products, are a class of products which simply shouldn't exist.
Searching, e.g., Walmart for "plastic grinders" turns up five listings presently, though it's not clear whether it's the body or the grinder itself which is plastic. In several cases it seems to be the latter.
<https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/plastic-grinders>
(Archive of current state: <https://archive.is/yIIX4>