In the anthropocene era, sometimes we should err on the side of caution. If our human activities can reshape the Earth significantly and such changes can last for very long periods of time, we likely shouldn't proceed gung-ho on those fronts but do so slowly gathering as much knowledge as we can.
We used to pump lead into all sorts of things and throw CFCs into the environment but we realized later these are bad for most us Earth dewllers. At the time, we didn't have abundant evidence of the negative effects and that got us into trouble.
Maybe microplastics are harmless but it may be a wise assumption to assume they are and proceed slowly and cautiously. Turning these things backwards may be incredibly difficult to nearly impossible (e.g. Chernobyl).
Scale is very important for experimenting if something is harmful or not. Its better to experiment with these things at small scale before rolling processes out globally. Some effects are only clear at full scale though, unfortunately.
We used to pump lead into all sorts of things and throw CFCs into the environment but we realized later these are bad for most us Earth dewllers. At the time, we didn't have abundant evidence of the negative effects and that got us into trouble.
Maybe microplastics are harmless but it may be a wise assumption to assume they are and proceed slowly and cautiously. Turning these things backwards may be incredibly difficult to nearly impossible (e.g. Chernobyl).
Scale is very important for experimenting if something is harmful or not. Its better to experiment with these things at small scale before rolling processes out globally. Some effects are only clear at full scale though, unfortunately.