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by mekoka 2365 days ago
So we eat tons of the stuff every year. Now what? Try searching for "what happens to ingested microplastic". To kill the suspense, most everyone looking to scare you with huge numbers also seem to avoid answering that more interesting question. But from the small amount of information that I could gather, I suspect that the answer is too big of a let down (figuratively and literally) to make interesting news. Happy trails to all looking for answers.
2 comments

Everything I've heard is microplastics can cause infertility.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/06/can-plastics-cause-i...

https://environmentjournal.online/articles/microplastic-poll...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/24/toxic-americ...

None of this is conclusive, but there's more and more evidence that microplastics might be causing serious reproductive issues in humans.

The fact that we don't yet know the ramifications, if any, doesn't mean that it isn't a potential problem. This is true for the complex chemical soup that is our bloodstream these days, making any sort of inferences to specific isolates exceedingly difficult and even off the mark.