Microplastics: the Invisible Pollutant
In a world already reeling from climate change and the biodiversity crisis, the last thing we need is another environmental issue. But we’ve got one, a big one, in microplastics, a term introduced only 20 years ago to describe the tiny particles of plastics that are found literally everywhere, across the planet-- and inside us.
The more you dive into the numbers, the more surreal they become. The UN estimates some 51 trillion pieces of microplastic litter the ocean, 500 times more than the number of stars in the Milky Way. By 2050, oceanic plastics will outweigh fish, and the material has invaded the tissues of everything from the smallest krill to the largest whales.
Scientists have discovered it from the top of the world on Mt. Everest to its very bottom in the Mariana Trench. One study looked at 11 massive protected areas out West-- Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree, Bryce Canyon-- and found that 1,000 metric tons of airborne microplastics fell from the sky annually, some 120 million plastic water bottles raining down on only 6% of the West. Wired magazine headlined their story, “Plastic Rain is the New Acid Rain.”
They're found of course in the East too: microplastics float both in the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers.
Most microplastics-- technically five millimeters long or smaller, about the size of a grain of rice-- enter the environment from the breakdown of the many plastics each of us uses daily. Simply washing synthetic fabrics, for example, rinses millions of particles out to rivers. Cars and their tires launch plastics into the air, as do incinerators that burn our plastic-filled trash.
Because they are in both water and air, microplastics have invaded the food supply. Given the wide use of plastics in farming, fruits and vegetables like carrots, apples, lettuce, and broccoli all contain microplastics, and they’ve been measured in pork and beef. It turns out that each of us ingests a credit card’s worth of plastic weekly-- bon appetit!-- and microplastics float in tap and bottled water, beer, milk, and soda.
Worse, microplastics break down into even smaller nanoplastics, some only the size of viruses, that flow through our bloodstream to take up residence in tissues from brain to kidney to lung to heart, even traveling across the placenta into developing fetuses. While the health effects are still poorly studied, microplastics are increasingly linked to cardiovascular disease, asthma, autism, ADHD, male and female reproductive ills, lower IQ, lower birth rate in newborns, and much more. It’s scary.
The emerging science of microplastics puts a fierce urgency behind the issue, and many organizations have responded by launching ambitious campaigns to kill single-use plastics, clean the oceans, and more. Banning those accursed shopping bags is great, but so much more is needed, and happily there are technological solutions coming, like bioplastics based on mushroom fibers and using bacteria to decompose plastic waste.
While we just haven’t risen to the twin challenges of climate and biodiversity, we can’t ignore this one either, as we are literally and figuratively drowning in an ocean of plastic. Given they last virtually forever, here is yet another legacy I, for one, refuse to pass along to our kids.
Bonus: I’ll be presenting one-hour lectures with Q-and-A sessions on microplastics at Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve in New Hope on Thursday, May 2 as part of their Thursday Night Nature series. And I’ll be at Main Line Shift in Narberth on Wednesday, May 22 at 7:00 p.m.