Unclear doesn't mean safe, it just means hard to quantify. Your child could be in a car accident and their survival odds could be unclear, scientifically speaking. Doesn't mean "totally safe."
This is the wrong analogy because the article states that there's only theoretical harm. It could mean that one has to drink from 100 tea bags a day to get any adverse effects.
It’s reasonable for people to take either approach: are microplastics more like asbestos or are they more like cellulose in terms of harm?
The answer being unclear means it makes sense to treat them, from a regulatory standpoint, closer to asbestos. It also makes sense to treat them as an unknowable and not regulate, because any alternative might be worse.
But it does point to there being a dearth in research and answers, and we should solve that as quickly as possible and maybe limit our exposure when viable, known to be non-toxic alternatives exist.
>The answer being unclear means it makes sense to treat them, from a regulatory standpoint, closer to asbestos.
I'm not sure the follows logically, it ignores a bunch of known facts about biology to imagine that there is a pathway for these to cause major issues.
Damage that is bad enough becomes easy to quantify, so no, "unclear" actually does put a bound on it.
Survival odds in car crashes demonstrate this nicely: count the outcomes and divide. If "the survival odds were unclear, scientifically speaking" then car accidents would have to be orders of magnitude more rare and less lethal than they are.
Sudden damage that is bad enough is easy to quantify. You should take a look at the decades long struggle to prove that cigarettes are harmful to see what it is like when the harm is chronic.
