We’re all plastic now

#36—Will this turn out to be the dumbest thing humanity has ever done?

Welcome to Mind Flexing, your weekly thought expedition to everywhere and anywhere. Strap on your boots (or put your feet up), take a deep breath, and let’s get flexing.

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Surely, at the end, when humanity can look back upon its time on this planet with some clarity and perhaps lament the time it spent squabbling or destroying natural habitats or working in a relentless pursuit of wealth, surely those last humans will look at the period of time you and I inhabit now and shake their heads at our ignorance. No doubt there’ll be some stiff competition for the dumbest thing humanity has ever done, but I hazard a guess that among the contenders will be the time we thought it would be a good idea to concoct 16,000 chemicals into various synthetic materials and wrap them around our food, our drinks, weave them into our clothing, and integrate them into almost every aspect of our lives, like electronic devices and water pipes. How naïve we have been, and what a pickle we’ve got ourselves into.

I was a little shocked to read this week that of the brain mass inside our skulls, only 99.5% is brain—the remaining 0.5% is plastic! Nanoplastic to be precise—minuscule plastic particles even smaller than microplastic.

I knew that microplastics are now found on every surface of the earth, from the bottom of the ocean to the top of Mount Everest, and even at the wildest ends of the North and South Poles. From the islands of plastic rubbish floating in our seas and the plastics camouflaged as sand on our beaches, to the countless microfibers rinsed out in every load of washing, or kicked up from the soles of our shoes and our car tyres, plastic is unavoidable. It’s in the air we breath, in the fish we eat, in our unborn babies, and in the rain that falls from the sky.

Plastic is so unavoidable that our bodies are riddled with it—it’s in our lungs and kidneys, liver, stomach, heart and blood. I knew all this, so it shouldn’t have shocked me to read that plastic has also invaded our brains. It did, however, because of what’s called the blood-brain barrier—the supposedly impenetrable layer of cells designed to defend our brains from harmful germs and substances. Plastic shouldn’t be able to get through it, and yet it can.

Like Microplastics Through The Hourglass, These Are The Days Of Our Lives, water colour sketch by Alia Parker.

The news that plastic can infiltrate our brains isn’t actually new (I must have missed the first memo). What is new, however, is the amount of plastic being found there (or at least in the heads of people in Albuquerque where the samples are from). It’s 50% more than in a study from 2016, and about 30% more than what’s in other organs.

It’s not yet known if the brain is able to flush out any of the nanoplastics that make their way there or if they accumulate, with possible toxicological consequences. Quite naturally, the researchers are now interested in exploring whether there is any link between plastic and brain related diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia.

So little is known about the health impacts of plastic in our bodies—scientists are only starting to scrape the surface. What can be said is that there is a correlation between high levels of bodily plastic and certain health complications, such as heart failure. Whether or not the plastic is the direct cause or merely a side effect of the actual cause, such as pollution, is still to be determined.

There are clues, however. A report by The Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health published in the Annals of Global Health, 21 March 2023, said:

“Plastic production workers are at increased risk of leukemia, lymphoma, hepatic angiosarcoma, brain cancer, breast cancer, mesothelioma, neurotoxic injury, and decreased fertility. Workers producing plastic textiles die of bladder cancer, lung cancer, mesothelioma, and interstitial lung disease at increased rates. Plastic recycling workers have increased rates of cardiovascular disease, toxic metal poisoning, neuropathy, and lung cancer. Residents of “fenceline” communities adjacent to plastic production and waste disposal sites experience increased risks of premature birth, low birth weight, asthma, childhood leukemia, cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lung cancer.”

The report authors recommend urgent action to cap plastic production and curb its use.

Meanwhile, the world continues to pump out plastic at ever increasing rates. The report says that plastic production increased to 460 megatonnes in 2019 from 2 megatonnes in 1950, and half of all plastic ever produced has been made since 2002. Less than 10% is ever recycled, leaving about 6 gigatonnes of plastic waste lying about the environment. I can’t even fathom how much that is. Can you? And production isn’t slowing down.

Though I try, as a consumer it’s impossible to escape plastic. Since it was introduced at the turn of last century and with its proliferation in the past 50 years, plastic has changed the way we live. The keyboard I’m typing on is plastic, the mouse, plastic, my phone, plastic. My children’s Lego on the shelf behind me is plastic. The waterpipes in our house, as with all modern houses, are plastic. The knitted jumper I’m wearing has Nylon stitched through its wool. When I go to the pantry, procrastinating between sentences and looking for snacks, so much of what’s in it is packaged in plastic. My coffee grinds are in plastic, the milk, in plastic—and the most disturbing part of all this is that I’m someone who actively tries to avoid unnecessary plastic. But it’s hard—consumers aren’t given much choice.

My local supermarket recently stopped stocking plastic-free shampoo bars, presumably because they didn’t sell as well as bottled shampoo (the bars last longer, so those who use them need less). Still, it’s an interesting move given the scrutiny the large supermarkets are under when it comes to the amount of plastic that goes out their doors. Ever since the REDcycle debacle of 2022—in which 11,000 tonnes of soft plastic was secretly stockpiled in 44 locations around Australia because it was unable to be recycled as intended—it has been increasingly apparent that recycling programs are not effective solutions to plastic waste. Pressure to reduce unnecessary plastic packaging has been on the rise, but in the absence of legislation, movement is slow.

Some businesses have made positive changes: a few tissue manufacturers recently replaced the small bit of soft plastic that surrounded the dispenser with paper alternatives; a toilet paper made from recycled paper and marketed as environmentally responsible has finally done away with its soft plastic packaging in favour of paper wrapping; a pasta brand has removed the clear plastic window on its boxes, and; a powdered laundry detergent maker has realised it’s not necessary to put a new plastic scoop in every single box they produce. These are all positive steps by individual companies, but they are the exception.

More often than not, it takes government regulation to make a wide-scale difference on environmental issues, and governments are slow to ban certain plastics because of the impact on businesses—changing product and transport packaging takes a bit of effort and therefore, there’s some degree of industry backlash. Nevertheless, in most States, recent bans on some single-use plastics, like straws, cutlery, plates and bowls, have been quite seamless with environmentally friendly options filling the void.

Such changes are inevitable. Of the 16,000 or so chemicals now leeching into our bodies, the odds of them all being benign are against us. In much the same way bans were placed on plastic drink bottles containing the chemical BPA, I have no doubt further bans will follow once scientists begin to prove that certain chemicals in plastics have a negative impact on human health. Just how negative remains to be seen.

Sadly, much of the damage is irreversible. It is remarkable, really, to think that humans have been capable of contaminating the entire world with these chemicals in such a short time. Those plastics will remain for thousands of years. They are quite literally everywhere—even in our brains.

We’re all plastic now. We can’t escape it.

But we can stop making the problem worse.

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Three things I enjoyed on Substack this week:

• The Mysterious Turkish Map of America—by

  M. E. Rothwell

  A beautiful map with an even more interesting story.

• Why Pre-order “Campaigns” Rarely Work—by

  Kathleen Schmidt

  An interesting insight into book publishing from someone who knows.

• 'Tis the season for—by

  Gillian & Li'l Bean

  Imagine if our lives were like seasons.

  

Etymology Monday

For those who missed it, this week’s word is:

silly

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