You eat a credit card’s worth of plastic in a week. That may bother you. But does it harm you?
The answer depends on who you ask. Awareness of microplastics in general is certainly increasing; the most recent news is the detection of microplastics in human breast milk. Other research has suggested that we may be consuming up to 5 grams of plastic each week from our food, water, and certain consumer products.
The World Health Organization has been releasing reports on microplastics and human health since 2019. Their most recent report was released in late August 2022.
“Although the limited data provide little evidence that nano- and microplastic particles have adverse effects in humans, there is increasing public awareness and an overwhelming consensus among all stakeholders that plastics do not belong in the environment, and measures should be taken to mitigate exposure,” the WHO said at the time.
The WHO can’t go beyond what the data shows, of course. If microplastics are wreaking long-term havoc in our bodies as we speak, science hasn’t connected the dots enough to definitively say “this is the problem.”
But some researchers are willing to speculate – and, at the very least, the risks are becoming impossible to ignore. Dick Vethaak, PhD, a microplastics researcher and emeritus professor of ecotoxicology at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, is blunt, calling them “a plastic time bomb.”
The plastic problem
Every piece of plastic that has ever been created is still on our planet today, apart from what has been burned. Past estimates show we only recycle about 9% of all plastic, leaving 9 billion tons in our landfills, oceans, and ecosystems. For context, that amount is 1,500 times heavier than the Great Pyramid of Khufu.
New data is even more dire. A 2022 report from Greenpeace showed a 5% U.S. recycling rate in 2021, with a large portion of what consumers think of as “recycled” still winding up in garbage piles or bodies of water.
And this plastic doesn’t disappear. Instead, it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces known as microplastics and nanoplastics.
Microplastics have been confirmed in human blood, lung tissue, colons, placentas, stool, and breast milk. But how they impact our health is still unknown.
To assess risk, we must ask: “How hazardous is the material?” said Flemming Cassee, PhD, professor of inhalation toxicology at Utrecht (the Netherlands) University and coauthor of the WHO’s recent microplastics report.
There are three potential hazards of microplastics: their physical presence in our bodies, what they’re made of, and what they carry. To determine the extent of these risks, we need to know how much we’re exposed to, said Dr. Cassee.
The first initiative to research the impact of microplastics on human health came from the European Union in 2018. Although microplastics were around before then, we were unable to detect them, said Dr. Cassee.
That’s the real problem:
“But looking into the future, I believe that we are likely facing a public health emergency,” warned Dr. Vethaak.