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For all the panicky people:
Microplastics are bad, but they're not remotely close to asbestos bad. Nobody is dying horribly from emphysema because they accidentally contacted microplastics two decades ago. The effects absolutely exist, but they're quite subtle and do not involve suffocating while you cough your lungs out in small pieces.
Gylphosate is bad, but it's mostly bad for the people working directly with it and ignoring every safety precaution (the Venn diagram of those two groups is pretty much a circle). Eating food that was once treated with gylphosate will not be remotely bad for you on any measurable scale.
Source: am chemist, work as a safety professional (independent, no large company is paying me for anything but an occasional audit that is mostly unrelated to chemistry)
But, I'll happily add something that's bad, but not on the level of asbestos. Indoor cooking on fire and/or with poor ventilation. It creates combustion products, releases particulate and smoke and many complex volatiles that are just drifting around in your house for pretty much the entire evening.
Edit: and growing your own food on local soil in a city. That dirt has been collecting pollution for a century, and the odds are pretty decent that it might actually qualify for remediation if you live near anywhere industrial or a big road that's been there for a while. Get your soil tested, or use raised beds if you're growing food.
Microplastics get smaller and likely more dangerous every year. We don't know how much present day cancer can be attributed to microplastics, there is no control group.
Aren't the vast majority of people suffering cancer from asbestos exposure the people that worked with asbestos for years? From what I understand, you're very unlikely to suffer from a single exposure.
That being said, asbestos is fucking everywhere. Veritasium recently did a video on it, and a lot of the soil around Las Vegas just naturally contains it, and gets kicked up by vehicles, construction, wind, etc.
Sorta kinda. It was much easier to get prolonged asbestos exposure than repeated glyphosate exposure. We used it in everything, including carpets and roofs. The asbestos fibers in those roofs are fine, but the glue holding them together isn't. It's been falling on the ground since forever, but it's accelerating more and more.
Meanwhile, the only people working unsafely with glyphosate are basically a subset of farmers. Now, I've basically NEVER seen a farmer handle chemicals according to the instructions, so within that group unsafe exposure is basically 100%, but it's a much smaller fraction of the population.
the natural stuff is in clumps that your not able to breathe, and yeah asbestos is natural and almost everywhere there's rocks. it's usually in long fiber like strings. even when it's broken up, it's not particle size and airborne. it's usually bonded together.
it's that stuff that was industrialized and refined. that stuff that can become airborne and inhaled. One particle that gets absorbed might stay with you forever but it's usually the build up of many exposures that causes the problem.
so many older houses have it in the attic and siding. it's not going anywhere
Obviously microplastics wont be as bad as asbestos. But since we have kept making our world "safer" with these things, horrible stuff like asbestos wont really be a problem. The consequences will not be as bad, like you said. But I don't think the point was "what will be as bad as asbestos" but more like "what will be something that we will find out is worse than we first thought" or what will be something that has unintended/unforseen consequences.
I'm not panicking, I just had my daily inhaled dose of asbestos dust today, doing a front end alignment. What do you think most brake pads are made with?
Source: Am mechanic, and know what the smell of freshly wet road consists of, which is all sorts of toxic substances, including asbestos dust. And we've all smelled freshly wet pavement before...
Today I learned the US allowed asbestos brakepads till mid 2024. Jesus fucking christ people.
Yup, sad world we live in.
But I have no lung problems.. cough cough...
43 and already got toes in the grave...