Microplastics shed by food packaging are contaminating our food, study finds

An interesting exercise is to view https://www.plasticlist.org/ and sort the items from highest to lowest.

Whatever your gut tells you about what has the most or least plastic in the food you're eating is probably incorrect.

War rations from the 1950s had the most, along with fast food cheeseburgers and Whole Foods grass fed steak.

Kraft Mac and cheese was low, especially after microwaving.

Is this going to be one of those things where in a 100 years people laugh at us for putting everything in plastic like we look back at romans etc using lead and mercury for stuff

This has to be judged against the alternative, which is… I’m not sure in many cases. As just one example, think about how much more of a pain it is to package/ store/ transport/ consume milk in bottles compared to plastic. Of course there’s also paperboard — I think (I Am Not A Packaging Expert) milk is actually easier to handle with noon-plastic than many other foods. Consider what it would mean to avoid plastic for selling meat I think that means going back to individually prepared paper packages, which would be much more expensive.

This is not to say it might not be worth it in some cases, just that it is a trade-off, and plastic is remarkably good at what it does.

I hate to doubt studies, but with advice like: "Invest in a zippered fabric bag and ask the dry cleaner to return your clothes in that instead of those thin sheets of plastic." I am doubtful. I assert that the number one source of microplastics in a house will be clothing. Your "lint trap" in a dryer? Largely microplastics.

Dust in your house? Again, largely made up of fabric fibers. Which are increasingly plastics. Especially so if you have a carpeted house.

I'm not fully against some of these ideas and studies. And I am all for reducing our exposure to microplastics, where we can. But folks largely ignore the microplastic lining in cans, thinking they are avoiding that plastic bottle. We seem to have done a great job of avoiding large plastics in the fear of microplastics. Meanwhile, folks have very little intuition on where the microplastics come from.

we probably just need to train soil bugs to treat plastic like dead leaves. researchers like rillig(germany) and Ting Xu(berkeley) already did something there in this direction. next move maybe just making sure these bugs don’t mess with roots and stay alive in real farm dirt. if that clicks, soil fixes itself while we sleep literally

It looks like the URL to the study is not valid https://doi.org/10.1038/s41538-025-00470-3, or maybe they did some change

Yes! As an agriculturist I've been TRYING TO sound the alarm that every single food supply chain is contaminated with plastics.

EVERY SINGLE soil sample we've been testing has some amount of plastics.

Farmers are feeding plastic to our pigs, then spreading the waste as fertilizer. Imagine our farm fields being covered with a thin layer of partially digested micro plastics, neurotoxins and Roundup-like herbicides.

There is no longer any industrial food stream not heavily contaminated with plastics, the weird thing is no one seems to care at all!

Of course, in a world where we support corrupt legal concepts such as 'limited liability', this kind of thing was bound to happen and guaranteed to get worse.

I propose a new model; 'total liability'.

Every time something bad happens, you identify every person who contributed to the harm, calculate each person's liability and they have to pay. If some of the culprits cannot be identified, then the remaining culprits who can be identified have to absorb the unallocated liability... Not allocating full liability to people who do harm is akin to allocating it to everyone, including those who played no part in the harm. This is immoral and creates perverse incentives for continued harm.

For example, someone discards an empty plastic Coca Cola bottle on the ground in a public park, the person is fined maybe 95% but 5% of the fine is directed to the Coca Cola company for having made the decision to make the bottle out of plastic instead of tin or glass; thus being complicit in the harm. The money for any harm done, by any entity should go directly towards UBI and be paid out equally to all citizens.

The government could also use statistics to fine companies based on reasonable estimates of current harmful practices. For example, how much damage is microplastics causing in terms of medical costs globally? Make a list of all companies responsible, fine each one proportionally to their contribution to the harm.

People should be paid for identifying, reporting and successfully proving harmful practices (they deserve a commission, like a lawyer).

Identifying and reporting problems adds value to society and should be rewarded.

The majority of the proceeds should go to UBI. Why UBI? Because diffuse harms require diffuse remedies. It's not possible to award damages for widespread harm in a fair, non-corrupt way, so distributing to all citizens equally is the best approach. It's not perfect, but people know how to count and it's easier to identify and prove fraud if the rule is simple like 'each person gets the same amount of UBI'.

If you want a good explanation of PFAs, Veritasium did a video on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY

The safe allowable ppm counts are insanely low for this shit.

Before food was packaged in plastic, what did people put it in? Metal?

I have adopted for the last 5 years glassware and stainless kitchen items to avoid plastic as much as I possibly can. But then I read something in the last week or so that said recently made glassware has more plastic leeching than some plastic containers...FFS....

Also: plastics protect food from contamination and infection with biological agents that would cause sickness and death. The benefits far, far, far outweighs the slight downside that might exist.

This article seems a bit breathless. I wonder if the author realises that plants grow in the dirt and risk having insects crawling all over them. And the sheer number of lifestyle diseases people have. It'll take more than plastic having negative health outcomes for it to be a problem; it'd need to be some pretty substantial problems to outweigh the use people get from plastics.

> One of the studies included in the new review found 1 liter of water — the equivalent of two standard-size bottled waters bought at the store — contained an average of 240,000 plastic particles from seven types of plastics

How many non-plastic particles? I've heard it said there's enough uranium in seawater that we can theoretically use it to generate power.