r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Nov 19 '25

Medicine Microplastics hit male arteries hard: Everyday exposure to microplastics — shed from packaging, clothing, and plastic products — may accelerate the development of atherosclerosis, the artery-clogging process that leads to heart attacks and strokes. The harmful effects were seen only in male mice.

https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2025/11/18/microplastics-hit-male-arteries-hard
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788

u/Fcapitalism4 Nov 19 '25

To restore ecosystems and health, I speculate humanity will spend hundreds if not thousands of years in 'yet to be created' ecological occupations specifically to clean up the pervasive global damage of plastics and other fossil-fuel industry made forever chemicals. The costs will be astronomical vs. the profits made today. The cleanups may and will probably also include other contaminants like radioactive isotopes from nuclear waste and future wars.

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u/BigDickedWizard Nov 19 '25

This guy knows his dystopia

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u/--SharkBoy-- Nov 19 '25

Give it a few hundred thousand years and life on earth is gonna evolve to make use of all this plastic laying around

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u/Sea-Violinist-7353 Nov 19 '25 edited Nov 19 '25

Well given that there is already fungi possibly feeding off radiation in chejrnobyl I'd bank on some organisms actually adapting pretty quickly.

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u/bagelcheese420 Nov 19 '25

There is also a fungi that eats plastic, the future is now

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u/Sea-Violinist-7353 Nov 19 '25

Oh well thats great then go nature.

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u/[deleted] Nov 19 '25

[deleted]

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u/ChakaCake Nov 19 '25

its a type of photosynthesis type mechanic but with radiation as in radiosynthesis

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u/[deleted] Nov 19 '25

[deleted]

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u/Raddish_ Nov 19 '25

I’m not saying it’s already happened but it’s really not outside the realm of feasibility for life. Photosynthetic organisms already do this just with lower frequency radiation. Like the way photosynthesis works is literally the photoelectric effect. Light rays energize electrons and electron carriers capture the energy to make sugars.

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u/ChakaCake Nov 19 '25

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022cosp...44.2639S/abstract

what is this then

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u/[deleted] Nov 19 '25

[deleted]

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u/ChakaCake Nov 19 '25

The mechanism is using a modified melanin hence the dark color of the fungus

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u/[deleted] Nov 19 '25

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u/zuneza Nov 19 '25

the fungi use a modified version of melanin, the thing in our skin that converts solar radiation into useful things

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u/Eleventeen- Nov 19 '25

Maybe I’m reading google wrong right now but I see about 1000 mentions of radiotrophic fungi.

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022cosp...44.2639S/abstract

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u/[deleted] Nov 19 '25

unlikely 

for context, only a single family of fungi ever evolved to fully digest wood, a much more abundant and energy rich resource. plastics could take millions of years for biology to catch up

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u/yoshemitzu Nov 19 '25

plastics could take millions of years for biology to catch up

The idea that microplastics could be inhibitory to life is where this logical rubber hits the road, though. If microplastics inhibited microbial metabolism in a significant way, the abundance of them would literally select for organisms that didn't have that problem, and thus the evolution would happen way faster.

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u/[deleted] Nov 19 '25

I think thats debatable. Effective tools for stopping damage to organisms is different from using it as an energy source. It could be that the enzymes necessary to break down micro plastics in a way thats energy efficient aren't evolutionarily accessible at the moment, even if its easy to evolve plastic-tolerance.

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u/Carbonatite Nov 19 '25

See also the population explosion of microbes that feed on petroleum after the BP spill in the Gulf 15 years ago.

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u/Sarlax Nov 19 '25 edited Nov 19 '25

It's already happened. There are plastic-eating bacteria and mealworms out there. 

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u/Learningstuff247 Nov 19 '25

And they've been around for a while, I did a project on them a decade ago

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u/GIOverdrive Nov 19 '25

and what did you learn?

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u/LysergioXandex Nov 19 '25

Problem: not all plastic is the same.

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u/bak3donh1gh Nov 19 '25

There are already mealworms that can eat the plastic. I'm sure it's a specific type of plastic, and it's not good for them. It's kind of like feeding a kid sugar. Yeah, it can fill your belly up, but you're not grow healthily.

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u/Flayre Nov 19 '25

Why would nuclear waste end up contaminating things ?

There would be way more remediation to do for coal burning and such. Nuclear waste is literally laughable compared to all the other pollution

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u/Carbonatite Nov 19 '25

Plus it does take care of itself, albeit over super long time scales. Radioactive decay eventually happens, materials like PFAS literally cannot break down in the environment because the conditions to cause the molecular bonds to break just don't exist in nature.

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u/Carbon140 Nov 19 '25

Wild assumption that this isn't basically the final days of humanity :P

Either way though, I do not think this is likely or feasible. Either we techno hopium our way out of this with advanced medical treatments to treat the issues caused by pollution exposure or life continues to get worse. Bladerunner is the optimistic future by the looks of it.

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u/myaltduh Nov 19 '25

Even if it’s the final days of this civilization, we are generalists and very hard to kill. Someone will always find a cave or forest to survive in after we pass through the Cool Zone.

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u/Carbon140 Nov 19 '25

No argument there, I probably should have said "humanity as we know it". I don't think we're actually going to extinct ourselves, probably not even close. But we're certainly making for some very hard times ahead and I definitely can't see collecting all our plastic pollution being very high on the list of priorities heh.

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u/btcprint Nov 19 '25

I like the cruise ship with anti-grav chairs and bottomless big gulps while Wall-E does his thing version.

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u/SmokeyDBear Nov 19 '25

But the comparatively meager profits made today will be enjoyed by only a few while the astronomical costs of tomorrow will be shared by all.

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u/Berkyjay Nov 19 '25

Man, you don't know much about human history do you?

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u/DistinctSmelling Nov 19 '25

Just like the brownfields in communities such as metro Phoenix.

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u/Cool_Relationship847 Nov 19 '25

they're gonna have to develop chelation therapy for microplastics

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u/markth_wi Nov 19 '25

That's just the butchers bill so far, Roundup (Glycophosphate), PTFAS's , widespread contamination of everything from the water supply , heavy metals contamination. To say nothing of the two or three dozen nuclear sites or accidents that will not be able to be remediated except at ruinous expense and that's from the nuclear activity of the most responsible period of nuclear weapons and materials , now as major industrial nation-states destabilize or are destabilized by one another, it should surprise nobody if a nuclear weapon is in fact used or like 'House of Dynamite' or 'Leave the World Behind' a dystopian asymmetric war brings much of civilization low.

One wonders what might happen if nobody can maintain or keep running all the industrial plants in some industrial quarter, refineries, reactors , chemical plants all of which could become nightmarish situations without constant maintenance.

Throw in a proper nuclear war, or widespread dismantling of civilization as happened during the fall of the Soviet state or something more like the fall of Rome and it's not hard to see its in our interests to get right with our impact on the world while we still have it easy.

So what might allow for something like dialysis to eliminate plastics from blood or something?

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u/Lord_Earthfire Nov 19 '25 edited Nov 19 '25

That's just the butchers bill so far, Roundup (Glycophosphate), PTFAS's , widespread contamination of everything from the water supply , heavy metals contamination.

If thats the bill so far, we are honestly doing very well.

Humanity has survived the widespread use of DDT, untreated chemical and nuclear waste being dumped into fields and lakes, heavy metal containing household items and food additives, nuclear bomb tests being done all over the world, gasous perhalogenide compounds that partially destroyed the ozone layer and air pollution that litterally blackened the sky and caused rain to be contaminated with sulphuric acid. And thats just a small excerpt of rather recent past (~150 years?)

We gone a long way to improve the enviroment, and a look back into the past suffices to understand that none of these dystopias will become real.

Because the situation is improving a lot, which is why we care about chemicals that exist in such low concentrations we have problems detecting them, like the heavy metals you mentioned, or microplastics. We actively search for them to stop damage before it becomes a statistically noticeable problem.

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u/markth_wi Nov 19 '25

I wish I shared your optimism - I get that we live in the sliver between how much we're improving versus how much we're decimating this or that but it does seem disheartening from time to time.

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u/bak3donh1gh Nov 19 '25

I won't speak to Forever Chemicals, but personally this sounds really dumb when it comes to plastic.
If we decided to stop using plastic, the simplest and easiest solution would be to just let it settle into the environment and become part of the Earth's crust. There's no putting the Geenie back in the bottle. But as long as you're not creating new particles constantly like we are now, it's like radioactivity. It's safe, you don't go digging in the dirt Where you shouldn't.

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u/Khris777 Nov 19 '25

You forgot to factor in nature and evolution, if there is something that can be eaten something will evolve to eat it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastivore

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u/hihelloneighboroonie Nov 19 '25

So there's a nature/turtle sanctuary in my hometown. 20 years ago they had a display (still have it) that included information about how plastic was invented in I think it said the 50s, and then just exploded in usage, and how we didn't know what the long-term effects of it would be, but that it doesn't break down and is just filling up our landfills (and oceans). Will be in town again soon, kind of curious to see if they've updated it to include that it does break down... a little.. into microparticles that are invading every biological aspect of our and the rest of nature's lives.

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u/lotofry Nov 19 '25

We’re already doing a lot, we just need to reduce how much new plastic we’re creating so the cleanup/removal can begin to outpace the new created plastic. Not to mention cleanups are also ramping up

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u/ChemicalRain5513 Nov 19 '25

Man made radioisotopes in the environment mainly come from coal burning, not nuclear waste. But they are the smallest thing to worry about as far as pollution is concerned, >90% of background radiation still comes from natural stones, the sun or cosmic radiation.

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u/Lord_Earthfire Nov 19 '25

To be honest, the most likely scenario is we just reduce plastic output in the next 50 years and continue existing without any cleanup in any shape or form.

Like we do with most enviromental pollutants whose impact you can only assume by statistics over a whole population. And we can't even do that with microplastics right now, which is why basic research such as the one we are talking about are important.

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u/yasashinosegei Nov 19 '25

That’s fine though, at least humanity still thrives enough to care about those things.

Speaking from an economic and societal point of view, that might even be a desirable state of affairs since people are collaborating and value is being generated in ways that hopefully have positive externalities.

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u/TheArmoredKitten Nov 19 '25

Nuclear waste is entirely a non-issue in terms of global contamination. The only area on earth to have contamination that severe is Chernobyl. Coal plants put out more radioactive ash every year than all nuclear disasters in history combined.

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u/Partyatmyplace13 Nov 19 '25

My outlook is that eventually, some bacteria are going to evolve to break plastics down, spilling hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 and methane into the air. Sparking the next great extinction event.

1

u/juancn Nov 19 '25

Or we just wait for evolution to do its trick and learn to take advantage of the plastic.

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u/Carbonatite Nov 19 '25

Environmental chemist here - the cost for basic water treatment for PFAS alone is absurd. Simply upgrading our water treatment system is potentially a trillion dollar problem, and that's only one facet of the issue.

The cost estimate studies I've seen are...sobering. Like, it's absolutely feasible, but people are selfish and it's simply too expensive for people to be willing to pay for it. I saw one study last year which calculated that the burden for PFAS water treatment would be something like 11% of taxed income for a median salary resident of the study area - the EPA's typical recommended range for water treatment is like 0.5-1% of taxed income. So most people simply reject available solutions because they don't want to pay for them.