Today's episode of Unbiased Science is in partnership with the American Cleaning Institute.

Welcome to Unbiased Science, where we bring scientific method to the madness.

I'm your host, Dr. Jess Steyer, and today I'm here solo, although I have a special guest. Sarah is not

joining me this week. She'll be back next week. But we are going to talk all about microplastics.

In particular, we're going to address the millions of messages that we receive about common household products. Do I need to

toss this? Our laundry pod safe. Our dishwasher pod safe. All the things. So we're going to get

into it today. But let me set the stage here. So microplastics are everywhere right now.

They're in the news. They're in our group chats, in our anxiety spiral,

and some of that concern is warranted, right? The science on conventional microplastics is legitimate

and absolutely worth taking seriously. But the anti-plastic panic has gotten so broad that it's being capitalized on by brands making a fortune,

selling you, quote-unquote, natural and plastic-free alternatives with weaker evidence,

and often their own funding interests buried in the fine print.

The behaviors that people are adopting in the name of

environmental protection are sometimes making things worse. So for example, hand washing dishes

instead of running the dishwasher sounds responsible. But the research is pretty clear that the way

most of us do it, this is how I do it, with the tap running the whole time,

that actually uses more water and generates more emissions than just loading your dishwasher.

So, you know, it seems like we've let that anxiety get the best of us and we're not really

turning so much to the evidence, but today we are turning to the evidence.

So just really quickly, I want to say that just this morning, I was on a group chat where someone

shared an article that's gotten picked up over microplastics.

And the consensus among the scientists on the chat was, yes, of course, you know, we want to reduce

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