Microplastics have been found almost everywhere: in blood, placentas, lungs – even the human brain. One study estimated our cerebral organs alone may contain 5g of the stuff, or roughly a teaspoon. If true, plastic isn’t just wrapped around our food or woven into our clothes: it is lodged deep inside us.
Microplastics are shed from packaging, clothes, paints, cosmetics, car tyres and other items. Some are tiny enough to slip through the linings of our lungs and guts into our blood and internal organs – even into our cells. What happens next is still largely unknown.
"Designing a definitive experiment is hard, because we’re constantly being exposed to these particles,” says Dr Jaime Ross, a neuroscientist at the University of Rhode Island in the US. “But we know microplastics are in almost every tissue that has been looked at, and recent studies suggest we’re accumulating far more plastic now than 20 years ago.”
At the very least, we know that they’re chemically inert, but the current school of thought is that they might cause trouble as a result of that, by physically obstructing things, even if they don’t otherwise cause problems.
Asbestos is chemically inert, as are PFAS, but both are understood to be pretty bad for you
I think you might mean that PTFE/Teflon plastics are inert (at least unless burned).
PFAS chemicals used to emulsify or coat things with it are what gets into the water supply and causes problems.
PTFE and some others are considered chemically inert. Other PFAS are mostly chemically inert.
Carbon-fluorine bonds are extremely strong. If these weren’t mostly chemically inert, they wouldn’t be “forever” chemicals. They would readily degrade and it wouldn’t be an issue.
Phthalates are not chemically inert and they are endocrine disrupters.