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Touching Paper Receipts for 10 Seconds Results in Unsafe Exposure to Highly Toxic BPS: Watchdog.
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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Above that it mentions:
Great, so receipts are going to be like our version of the leaded gasoline and mercury of past generations? 🫠
It’s plastics in general, but yeah. It’s already in your brain, and you’re accumulating more every year.
As I understand it, plastics themselves have no known negative impact on human health - it's the additives in the plastics that are a problem. But I don't think the BPA hazards listed above can be fairly generalized to all microplastics.
EDIT:
from the hazards sheet:
So BPA and BPS, and they're talking about thermal paper with those in particular.
I guess this has more details about BPA hazards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_Bisphenol_A
As usual, it's highly contextual when something is a hazard and to what extent it is.
Scientists also used to not think plastics crossed the blood-brain barrier until they started finding it in cadaver brains, you know? The list of things we understand about how plastics react to the body and its chemical processes is probably a much shorter list than the one of things we don’t understand about plastics.
Yup, though this isn't an argument for why plastics are certainly dangerous. It doesn't really matter, there are many reasons plastics are a problem, even if we don't have that smoking gun yet on how actual plastic is hazardous. BPA, BPS, PVC, and other additives are already horrible, the reliance on plastics are part of what is destroying the earth's climate, and these materials are not recyclable or re-usable, it's an environmental disaster on a scale we have never seen, etc.
What are these additive-free plastics you're suggesting exist? Should we make sure the microplastics lodged in our brain are only of the free-range, organic, and crafted with love variety?
There have already been preliminary studies linking higher concentrations of microplastics with poor medical outcomes with more damning reports coming out very frequently. In the meantime, maybe let's not pretend that whatever absence of evidence you perceive is evidence of absence.
Having no known negative impact certainly doesn't mean they have a known positive impact. So it's likely good to try to avoid them as much as you can.
I know it sucks because it's yet another tough to impossible problem to tackle alongside everything else, but that's just a Monday.
yeah, this is probably a bit like when people thought smoking wasn't bad for you.
The higher concentration of microplastics are correlation studies, they don't establish a causal link (which would be huge news and the discovery of a century). For example, the correlation could just be due to the poorer lifestyles of those who consume more microplastics (for example, they're more common in processed and fast foods, which tend to be less healthy, for example and may also just be more common in people with lower economic status who then have less access to healthcare and more likely to die younger for a variety of reasons). The point is that they don't have the smoking gun, yet.
We should just be clear about where we are at with the evidence, I'm not saying we shouldn't be concerned or the lack of evidence is somehow exonerating or that we should be confident this isn't a public health concern - I am very much concerned.
And of course there are lots of other reasons to avoid plastics, including its impact on the ecology and agriculture. It's terrifying that China for example will just till plastic sheeting into the soil rather than bother to pull it up (and perhaps concerning plastic sheeting is used as a mulch in the first place, both in China and other countries like the U.S.).
I don't know what to tell you about additives, they absolutely do make plastics without some of the known-to-be-hazardous additives, though I'm not saying that has in any way been adopted across the board or has solved the problem (I don't know enough about that to be honest, but I'm cynical industrialists are going to give a shit).