xnx parent
If the plastic passes through us without breaking down, how worried should we be?
Yes but the worry is that it a significant amount doesn't pass through us and gets stuck inside our bodies. Not only our bodies, but animals and plants also. Plastics don't occur naturally and thus evolution has not provided life with a way of dealing with it. If you ignore the problem you're just going to end up with more and more microplastics in the environment and we don't know the long term risks, we've only been using plastics at scale for a couple of decades. We used to think asbestos, cigarettes, radium, pfas, leaded gasoline, cfk, etc was all fine and good and only found out about the adverse effects after prolonged exposure.