Environmental Question #44 [Plastic vs. Lead]

Are today's plastics as significant of an issue as lead was in the past?

Courtesy of Reddit user u/Kargaroc

Q: I worry that plastics will be as significant an issue as lead was. It is at least easy to use less plastic as an individual. But it seems hard to avoid PFAS etc if it is ubiquitous in drinking water, or microplastics are found in rain water and the air we breathe.

What is your outlook on the future for this issue? I can’t help but feel things will only continue to get worse in this area, not to mention climate change etc.

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A: That is a very reasonable concern, but microplastics and PFAS will not cause as many significant problems as lead has. Lead, and other heavy metals like it, have been known poisons for nearly a century, because the effects they have on the body are very dramatic. Lead causes significant cognitive problems, particularly in children, so if an entire community has brain problems it doesn't necessarily require high tech scientific tools to figure out that there's something wrong with the water.

PFAS is more subtle in its toxicity than lead. It causes some cancers that show up after many years of high exposure, but the more serious problem it causes is birth defects. Adults bodies are pretty good at filtering out PFAS, but unfortunately for pregnant and nursing mothers the body concentrates much of that filtered out PFAS into the placenta and breast milk. This high concentration of PFAS going into babies whose bodies can't process it can cause many birth and developmental problems. Although this has only been seen in people who are exposed to large amounts of PFAS, like people who live near PFAS factories.

Compared to lead and PFAS, microplastics are fairly different, because scientists aren't really sure what problems they might cause. We know that there are a lot of microplastics in our bodies and environments, but we don't actually know what damage those microplastics may or may not cause once they get there. Microplastics almost certainly aren't good, but whatever problems they do cause are very subtle and not immediately obvious like the cognitive decline from lead or the birth defects from PFAS. This is a good thing in some ways, because the fact that it's hard to determine what effects microplastics have on health means that those effects must be fairly small.

It's important to remember that while it's true that you are being poisoned by your environment, your parents and grandparents were getting poisoned way worse than you are. The poisons we're exposed to in the developed world today are much less toxic than they used to be, and personally I think it's a good thing that people still get freaked out about them anyway. The only way that safety and health can continue to improve is if people push for removing environmental toxins to be a priority. The same is true for climate change. It's a huge problem that our leaders should absolutely be taking more seriously than they currently are, but a huge amount of progress has been made too. Solar energy is the cheapest form of electricity today, and projected global warming by 2100 has gone from +5 degrees Celsius in the 1990s to about +2.5 degrees Celsius today. There is still too much poison in the environment, and there are still too many fossil fuels being used, but it is better than it was 20 years ago. I'm confident that things will continue to get better, just not as fast as they should, and that will mean lots of people will be crushed along the way who wouldn't have if our leaders took these issues more seriously. So make noise to your leaders! We have the tools to solve all these problems, it just takes the will to get it done.