> but far less strong evidence about its actual effects.

Yeah, but we shouldn't take absence of evidence as evidence of absence. The fact is that it's just really really hard to establish a causal relationship, even if it's there, because of all the cofounders. Heck even if you constructed a study with a known poison, like lead, and you might not see the results in a single study. You could give 50 participants water with flint levels of lead in it for a month, and you might not get scientifically significant result just due to the wide variance in a population.

Or another example is just thinking how hard it would be construct a study with a control, when every single construction material has plastics in it and they are floating in the air around us all the time (as mentioned in the article). Could it affect mental or reproductive wellbeing? Certainly. Can we construct a study to establish either way? Not easily.

And one of the plasticizers they talk about, pthalates, are known to be endocrine disruptors (i.e. mess with hormones).