this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
719 points (97.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43812 readers
1020 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This may be true but I hate the practice of referring to "plastic" as if it's a single substance. It's a bunch of different materials that don't really have that much in common with each other, especially from a health/toxicity standpoint.
For example, people treat it as common sense that "you shouldn't burn plastic" because the smoke is "toxic". For PVC this is totally true, it makes very nasty stuff like dioxin that will poison you. But on the other hand you can burn polyethylene (think milk jug) and it's no more toxic than burning a candle. Definitely way healthier to breath than wood campfire smoke, for example.
There's also such a silly pattern where people learn some chemical might have some effect on the body and suddenly everyone is up in arms about it. For example Bisphenol A in many applications was replaced by the very similar Bisphenol S just so things could be labeled "BPA Free". BPS probably has similar estrogenic effects to BPA.
I'd say the moral of the story is be wary of received wisdom about chemical toxicity from people who aren't chemists.
Have you heard of Dihydrogen monoxide? It literally kills hundreds of thousands of people every single year all over the world, including young children.
You don't hear about it in the news though do you....
I'm confused about how it kills hundreds of thousands of people per year. How, by drowning?
What I think it is, is that every single person who ever consumes it, will eventually die. We are also literally dependant on it. If you stop ingesting it for too long, it can also cause you to die... That's how it went around here, at least.
That’s my understanding as well, it was a joke about correlation != causation.