alt Hacker NewsIs the plastic you ingest this way significant though? I don't remember the details, but the Veritasium video on this subject suggested that the scraped teflon you ingest from pans is less significant than the plastic that leeches into food in products like microwave popcorn. I assume this has to do with the reaction between the substance being contained (popcorn oil, in this case) and the item containing it (plastic-lined paper).
If the plastic particles are large enough, I assume we pass them.
Replies
filcuk • yesterday at 8:41 PM
Teflon is typically not the issue, it's very non-reactive and non-sticky (duh), meaning it just passes through. Attaching such material to metal takes some serious chemistry, though.
> Is the plastic you ingest this way significant though?
The follow-up question you might want to ask though is: How often do you want to ask that question?
Yes, every tiny little bit is insignificant. That is true for most things, including actual direct poisons.
A better way to look at such discussions is not to assume that this very specific thing you are currently looking at is the one, only complete problem. Remember instead, in these posts we are looking at lots and lots and lots of tiny details, only a tiny part of the whole problem space.
Do you repeat that relevancy question for every single part? The answer, when you split the problem enough, is always "relevance is near zero".
That is the problem of our tiny brains not being able to comprehend the whole, requiring us to look at tiny parts one at a time. When you create the sum, or the integral, of a huge number of rounded-down zeroes you get zero, and now you have the wrong answer for the whole of the problem.
Even big problems consist of a huge number of tiny parts. Asking the summary question on each tiny part is not a good method.
Every tiny bit of plastic we find is exactly just that - one tiny piece of the big picture. By itself and alone it would be inconsequential. If it was just that one single source of plastic particles, we would not have this discussion. We are here, performing such research, having such discussions, because we have a very large number of such tiny pieces. The question of relevancy is for the whole. Whether this one particular piece of microplastic you ate today, which came from your plastic pepper mill, is the tipping point is not a useful or answerable question, it's all of them combined over time.