We identified common plastics chemicals, including UV-stabilizers and plasticizers, as well as chemicals that are not used as plastics additives, including pesticides, pharmaceuticals and biocides.

[–] Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works 2 points 21 minutes ago

Water is a chemical. The point was using an arbitrary number and an arbitrary descriptor means absolutely fuck all.

[–] TauZero@mander.xyz 18 points 1 day ago

There are even over 100,000 distinct chemicals in a banana. Probably over 1M. Horrified whenever I see somebody eat one. Only plastic food pellets for me please.

[–] wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (2 children)

That's almost fair. The difference is: a banana is a living organism, and very few synthetic materials are supposed to have 80 differently-identifiable chemicals in them. This melange of death here is shit like dioxins, plasticizers, decomposition products, dyes and other additives, as well as the reaction products of all of THAT shit mixing at high temp in the melted plastic. If you aren't afraid, then I don't know how to help you, child.

Brushing this off with some trite banana comparison is just making a Robert Kehoe out of yourself.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 7 points 18 hours ago

a banana is a living organism

So what? So is poison ivy. I wouldn't recommend eating it.

very few synthetic materials are supposed to have 80 differently-identifiable chemicals in them

I'm sorry but - what the fuck are you talking about? Who is deciding how many different chemicals should be in any given material? What sort of of ridiculousness is this?

This melange of death here is shit like dioxins, plasticizers, decomposition products, dyes and other additives, as well as the reaction products of all of THAT shit mixing at high temp in the melted plastic.

Which is my point - the NUMBER of items in a given material is just scare-mongering BS. The actual ingredients is what matters.

If you aren’t afraid, then I don’t know how to help you, child.

If you don't understand that the count of the number of chemicals in a thing doesn't relate to that thing's toxicity then I can't help you either kid.

[–] notastatist@feddit.org 4 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

I dont know why you got downvoted, you are very right!

"We identified common plastics chemicals, including UV-stabilizers and plasticizers, as well as chemicals that are not used as plastics additives, including pesticides, pharmaceuticals and biocides. These may have contaminated the plastics during their first use phase, prior to becoming waste and being recycled."

[–] wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Just people deciding that divorcing a statement from its context (plastics manufacturing) is sufficient to say that no alarm need be raised. As I said: Robert Kehoe.

[–] notastatist@feddit.org 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I dont understand that, what do you mean?

[–] wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 1 points 45 minutes ago* (last edited 40 minutes ago)

Ah, essentially, the person said "this claim of 80 chemicals is meaningless, and can only be a scaremongering tactic!"

in order for it to be scaremongering, there must be a concerted effort to effect a sense of terror in the reader, and that sense of terror must be unwarranted. There is certainly an effort to terrify, but that is because the story is, objectively, terrifying.
they claim that bananas have more than 80 chemicals, and that the idea of counting distinct chemicals is a bad way to represent danger. As they point out, in biological systems, they would be correct, because biological systems have thousands of unique chemicals within them as a matter of course. However, they are trying to equate that banana to this issue, which is NOT a biological system, but an issue of plastic synthesis. In plastics manufacturing, there is no conceivable reason for you to need more than, to be generous, ten individual chemical constituents to form your polymer product. These might be the original polymer, very small amounts of the unbound monomer, a plasticizer or two, a couple dye compounds, and a couple other things which add properties you want, such as UV resistance, hydrophilia/phobia, or physical/chemical resistance. So, by divorcing this number from its context (plastics manufacturing), this person is trying to make it seem like a ridiculous headline, when in fact there is no conceivable reason to need even a quarter of the various impurities present in these bits of plastic. To give a much closer analogy than a fucking banana, imagine if I gave you a chunk of "steel", and told you that it's good, because it's "recycled", so I made some forks and knives out of it and gave it to you to eat with, but then you found out that it is actually an alloy of iron with a mixture of every other metal, including unsafe amounts of cadmium, mercury and lead. Even if you don't know what metals exactly are in it, it would be concerning if I just said "hey, this steel in your fork contains 50 different metals!", right? That's because that statement alone tells you that something very fishy was going on with the "recycling" process, because the only conceivable reason for there to be 50 different metals in detectable amounts in your steel (which, I remind you, you are eating off of) is if they just melted a bunch of shit together and called it "close enough".
I likened this person's attitude to Robert Kehoe, who was famously bribed by the leaded gas industry to lie to the world about the natural amount of lead in the environment. By claiming that the "normal" amount of lead was the same as the "natural" amount of lead, he cast scientific doubt over the question of leaded gas for many years. It wasn't until Clair Patterson proved that the amount of lead in the atmosphere, water and soil had gone up by tens of thousands of times since the pre-industrial steady-state levels that people finally saw Kehoe for what he was: a corrupt hack.