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by DangerousPie 1063 days ago
Actual paper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c01942

The real question is whether the exposure you'd receive from occasional microwaving would be enough to ever cause any meaningful health problems. Unfortunately papers like these always like to talk about dramatic metrics like 'billions of nanoplastics' without putting that into any meaningful context.

1 comments

I guess that's because we don't know, yet. But the question is why let all those plastic particles into your baby if you could avoid it until we know better? A newborn today will likely live to know the result of some future research.

If in doubt shouldn't that be enough for at least a warning label?

Because every decision in life is about trade-offs. Sure you could completely stop using plastics in the microwave, but that means buying new items that are potentially more expensive and may have other disadvantages. And for some plastic items there may not even be a viable replacement - for example I'm not sure how you would replace flexible pouches.

So to make any sort of sensible decision you need to know how bad these plastic particles really are, to weigh that against the cost of avoiding them.