It’s been more than five decades since Dustin Hoffman’s character in “The Graduate” was offered a kernel of wisdom about the path to prosperity.
“Plastics,” Mr. told him McGuire, the starched corporate executive offering advice. “There is a bright future in plastics.”
Plastics have truly been a game changer for humanity, and the enormous range of cheap, durable plastic products, from food containers and PVC pipes to polyester clothing and single-use medical products, has undeniably improved life.
The problem, as almost everyone knows, is that plastics are forever and very little it has been recycled. The UN estimates that most of the 400 million metric tons annually – a doubling of production since 2000 – will remain on Earth in some form as they are broken up into tiny specks by sunlight, wind and sea.
About 20 years ago, Richard Thompson, a marine biologist, first discovered an alarming accumulation of tiny plastic particles in ocean habitats and coined the term “microplastics.” Since then, scientists have found these fragments everywhere, from remote mountain peaks and the Arctic to the bottom of the sea.
In the following decade, scientists began to discover microplastics embedded in a wide range of living creature, including the seafood we eat. Recently, microplastics have been found inside the human body: in our lungs, our blood, our feces and in mother’s milk.
In 2021, Italian researchers for the first time identified microplastics in the human placenta.
The question, scientists are asking with increasing urgency, is whether man-made, foreign bodies pose a threat to human health.
“We know that microplastics are everywhere, we know that they harm marine life and our fisheries, but part of the research on how it affects people is still catching up,” said Imari Walker-Franklinan environmental engineer and chemistry researcher at RTI International who studies microplastics.
“Plastic people,” a new documentary directed by Ben Addelman and Ziya Tong, surveys the emerging science on microplastics and reaches a troubling conclusion: The potential health risks associated with plastic pollution are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
The film, which debuts Saturday at SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, is following the work of microplastic researchers in half a dozen countries, including a pair of Turkish scientists who say they recently discovered microplastics inside the human brain. Some of the particles have been found within the tissue of cancerous brain tumors.
“The revelation that the human body is full of microplastics is a recent one and I think the implications will be one of the most dominant health and environmental stories of our time,” said Rick Smith, president of Canadian Climate Institute and one of the film’s executive producers. “It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, don’t shelter yourself from this kind of new pollution.”
Microplastics, fragments of less than five millimeters in size that can usually be seen by the eye, should not be confused with nanoplastics, which are smaller than a particle of dust and are often the unintended byproduct of plastic production. Research into the potential health effects of nanoplastics is still in its infancy, compared to studies on microplastics, a field that has been expanding rapidly over the past few years.
Scientific evidence of the effects of microplastics on humans is limited, at least in the peer-reviewed literature. A study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology in 2022 found that patients with inflammatory bowel disease had higher amounts of microplastics in their stools than those without the disease. One small Studying at the University of Hawaii published in November documented the growing presence of microplastics in the placentas of new mothers.
And a paper published on Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that people with microplastics in their cardiovascular systems are at higher risk for complications from heart attacks and strokes.
Researchers discovered that microplastics are embedded in the fatty plaque that clings to the walls of blood vessels, and that patients with plastic-infused plaque are 4.5 times more likely to experience a heart attack, stroke or death compared to people without plaques. of microplastics. The study included 312 people who underwent surgery to remove plaque from the carotid artery in the neck. The researchers followed them for about three years.
said Dr. Giuseppe Paolisso, an author of the study, which appears that microplastics, together with nanoplastics, have made the fatty plaque drops more vulnerable, increasing the risk that they can be removed from the artery wall, block blood flow to a smaller vessel and trigger a heart attack or stroke.
“This is the first evidence that microplastic pollution in the blood is associated with a disease,” said Dr. Paolisso, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli in Caserta, Italy. More research is needed to confirm the findings, he added.
There are several theories about how microplastics affect the body. These include the potential for inflammation caused by a foreign body residing in human tissue and the toxic compounds that make up many plastics, many of which are known to be harmful to human health.
Nienke Vrisekoop, a microplastics researcher at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands, he says he found that immune cells that come into contact with microplastics die three times faster than those that don’t. He said that the polystyrene that are commonly used to make packaging materials are especially toxic to the immune cells that consume them.
Research conducted by another Dutch researcher, Barbro Melgert, found that microplastics inhibits lung development structures grown in his lab. Professor Melgert, a respiratory immunologist at the University of Groningen, says nylon seems to be most damaging to lung structures. Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, he discovered, was the least toxic of the plastics he tested.
Professor Melgert is still trying to understand how microplastics affect living cells, but he suspects the damage could be related to any number of chemicals that can leach from the plastics into the human body.
While he knows the study results don’t definitively prove harm in humans, nor do they quantify the risks, previous research in the nylon factory workers showed up wide lung damage in those exposed to large quantities of nylon particles.
Foreign particulate matter such as asbestos, coal dust or cigarette smoke often proves problematic for human health, he said. “If the particulate is organic and soluble, at least your body can eventually break it down and get rid of it,” Professor Melgert said. “Plastic is different. It can only stay in the lungs.”
The same can most likely be said for microplastics that find their way into the brain. The discovery, perhaps the most important revelation of the new film, was made by two Turkish researchers, Sedat Gündoğdu, a biologist, and Emrah Çeltikçi, a neurosurgeon.
Dr. Gündoğdu, a researcher at Cukurova Universityhas been studying microplastic pollution since 2016. Over the years, he has collaborated on numerous peer-reviewed studies documenting microplastics in fishing, land, salt and intravenous fluid bagsand his alarm grew with each new discovery.
It’s only a matter of time, he said, before researchers discover microplastics in the human brain. “It’s scary but not surprising,” he said.
Of the 15 samples examined so far, six plastic particles have been identified in tissue from two patients with tumors, Dr. Gündoğdu. It is not clear how the fragments entered the brain, but he said that due to the documented presence of microplastics in the blood, they likely arrived through the vessels that feed the tumors.
Despite the sense of urgency and doom conveyed by “Plastic People,” Ms. Tong, the co-director and former host of Discovery Channel’s science show “Everyday Planet” hopes that the film can inspire change, as did “Silent Spring,” the 1962 book that documented the dangers of agricultural pesticides and helped lead to the ban on DDT.
On an individual level, this means encouraging consumers to reduce their reliance on single-use plastics, which make up 40 percent of global plastic production, he said.
But that also means encouraging political leaders to take regulatory action. Right now, Ms. Tong is looking at a UN assembly next month in Ottawa, where delegates from 175 countries will continue negotiations on a proposal of agreement which will stop the explosive growth of plastic pollution. The conversations are the opposition in the industry at times.
“It’s not like we need some amazing new invention to solve the problem,” Ms. Tong. “We just need to use less plastic.”
