wolframhydroxide

We have a term for this. It's called "making stuff up"

It's Greek.

You forgot to defend the conservative ideal of the Roman empire as the supreme fascist state! You need to talk about how the romans allowed the free market (with the guiding hand of daddy imperator) to determine where the money should go! Tell them that the money was used to build roads, not for trade, but to march their very manly soldiers on against the commies and the libs!

I hear there's a well-known company that started taking tourists down to it a few years back! They were all over the press! Sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!

Ah, essentially, the person said "this claim of 80 chemicals is meaningless, and can only be a scaremongering tactic!"

1. in order for it to be scaremongering, there must be a concerted effort to effect a sense of terror in the reader, and that sense of terror must be unwarranted. There is certainly an effort to terrify, but that is because the story is, objectively, terrifying.
2. they claim that bananas have more than 80 chemicals, and that the idea of counting distinct chemicals is a bad way to represent danger. As they point out, in biological systems, they would be correct, because biological systems have thousands of unique chemicals within them as a matter of course. However, they are trying to equate that banana to this issue, which is NOT a biological system, but an issue of plastic synthesis. In plastics manufacturing, there is no conceivable reason for you to need more than, to be generous, ten individual chemical constituents to form your polymer product. These might be the original polymer, very small amounts of the unbound monomer, a plasticizer or two, a couple dye compounds, and a couple other things which add properties you want, such as UV resistance, hydrophilia/phobia, or physical/chemical resistance. So, by divorcing this number from its context (plastics manufacturing), this person is trying to make it seem like a ridiculous headline, when in fact there is no conceivable reason to need even a quarter of the various impurities present in these bits of plastic. To give a much closer analogy than a fucking banana, imagine if I gave you a chunk of "steel", and told you that it's good, because it's "recycled", so I made some forks and knives out of it and gave it to you to eat with, but then you found out that it is actually an alloy of iron with a mixture of every other metal, including unsafe amounts of cadmium, mercury and lead. Even if you don't know what metals exactly are in it, it would be concerning if I just said "hey, this steel in your fork contains 50 different metals!", right? That's because that statement alone tells you that something very fishy was going on with the "recycling" process, because the only conceivable reason for there to be 50 different metals in detectable amounts in your steel (which, I remind you, you are eating off of) is if they just melted a bunch of shit together and called it "close enough".
3. I likened this person's attitude to Robert Kehoe, who was famously bribed by the leaded gas industry to lie to the world about the natural amount of lead in the environment. By claiming that the "normal" amount of lead was the same as the "natural" amount of lead, he cast scientific doubt over the question of leaded gas for many years. It wasn't until Clair Patterson proved that the amount of lead in the atmosphere, water and soil had gone up by tens of thousands of times since the pre-industrial steady-state levels that people finally saw Kehoe for what he was: a corrupt hack.

"Three days after signing, notarizing and registering all required documents necessary to collectively devote their entire fortunes, stocks and options to an irrevocable trust in support of renewable energy implementation, social welfare systems, sustainable development in the global south, returning resources leased to foreign companies to local citizens, and solving wealth inequality (with trustees selected from currently-living Nobel laureates in chemistry, medicine and economics, the IPCC, and the WHO), Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, <list all current members of the boards of Nestlé, Google, Apple, Sinclair Broadcasting, United Health, and other insurance conglomerates by name here> all make the collective mistake of riding cybertrucks to the second trust meeting and perish in the resulting inferno, which miraculously leaves no lasting damage on infrastructure, nor causes collateral injuries."

Be the change you don't want to see in the world: sell him some "new clothes".

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You're doing God's work in an abandoned universe. Also, I've never heard the check one. I'll be stealing that one.

Just people deciding that divorcing a statement from its context (plastics manufacturing) is sufficient to say that no alarm need be raised. As I said: Robert Kehoe.

After it's been exposed to use and light for who knows how long, and after being melted together at high temperatures, inevitably higher than the decomposition temperatures of at least a few of the dyes and additives in there, because precisely zero effort has been put in to purify it before being slagged? Yes I will turn my nose up, and you should too. No self-respecting chemist sniffs chemical cocktails of unknown provenance.

ETA: Also, your clothing note is a completely false equivalence, because the chemical at issue here is polyethylene, which has a far greater range and prevalence of additives than those polymers you named for use in clothing.