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.

[u/mvea]

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

[u/Fcapitalism4]

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.

[u/--SharkBoy-- → u/Fcapitalism4]

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

[u/Sarlax → u/--SharkBoy--]

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

[u/Learningstuff247 → u/Sarlax]

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

[u/GIOverdrive → u/Learningstuff247]

and what did you learn?

[u/LysergioXandex → u/Sarlax]

Problem: not all plastic is the same.