Editor’s note: A new report that microplastics pollution is hampering photosynthesis in plants, and that the result is the loss of some 10% of the world’s primary productivity, including food crops. We are now risking to blot out the planetary photosynthesis machine, just because we think that stopping the growth of the plastics industry is a subversive idea. But the report gets something in reverse: it is not that these effects “extend from food security into planetary health.” It is the opposite .But that changes little in a situation in which nothing changes, except for the desperate attempt of solving problems by killing the messenger, that is, “driving a dagger into the climate change religion”
“Previous research has indicated that microplastics can damage plants in multiple ways. The polluting particles can block sunlight reaching leaves and damage the soils on which the plants depend. When taken up by plants, microplastics can block nutrient and water channels, induce unstable molecules that harm cells and release toxic chemicals, which can reduce the level of the photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll.”
We got rid of acid rain. Now something scarier is falling from the sky. Here’s why you should never, ever drink the rain. A number of studies have documented microplastics in rain falling all over the world — even in remote, unpopulated regions. Plastic particles have infiltrated the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. Also, the microscopic shards of plastic found in every corner of the planet may be exacerbating antibiotic resistance, a new study has found.
Plastic Pollution: So Much Bigger Than Straws
Over the past couple of weeks we’ve seen the current U.S. administration grasping at straws, mocking restrictions on single-use plastics, and trying to distract from the real issue: Plastic poisons people and the planet, and the industries that produce it need to stop making so much of it.
When I started “The Last Plastic Straw” movement in 2011, the sole purpose was to bring attention to a simple, tangible issue and raise awareness about the absurdity of single-use plastic items and engage people to take action.
So what are the real problems with plastic? Plastics don’t break down, they break up: Unlike natural materials that decompose, they fragment into smaller and smaller pieces, never benignly degrading but remaining forever plastic. All plastic items shed plastic particles called microplastics and even smaller nanoplastics, which we inhale, ingest, and absorb into our bodies. Plastics, depending on their manufacturing composition, contain a mixture of more than 16,000 chemicals, at least 4,200 of which are known hazards to human health. When we use plastic straws, cups, plates, utensils, and food packaging, we are literally swallowing those toxic plastic particles and chemicals.
These tiny microplastic and nanoplastic particles accumulate at alarming rates throughout our bodies: in our blood, hearts, lungs, penises, testicles, uteri, and more. Researchers estimate a whole spoon’s worth of plastic resides in the average human brain, where it definitely doesn’t belong.
Plastic particles have also been found in placenta and breast milk, so children today are being born plasticized. This is a toxic burden that today’s youth should not have to bear.
🧠 A new study found the amount of microplastics & nanoplastics in human brains increased by 50% between 1997 to 2024. Researchers found that in people with dementia, plastic particles were six times more numerous than in people without dementia. It was also found that plastic particles in human livers are increasing over time.
🔬75% of the plastics found in human tissue samples were one of the most common types of plastics: polyethylene. Polyethylene (PET) is used in everyday items like food packaging, bottles, bags, toys, and more.
📈 With microplastics and nanoplastics building up in our bodies it’s time to put plastic-free solutions in place, for people and the planet.
Source: The Journal of Nature Medicine
It goes without saying that plastic’s harms to our health come at an enormous cost to us, who must suffer through the heartbreaking and painful diseases it causes. It’s estimated that every 30 seconds, someone dies from plastic pollution in the Global South, an area overburdened by mountains of plastic pollution that is shipped away from the Global North under the guise of “recycling” only to be dumped and often burned, releasing additional toxic pollution. Financially too, plastics are expensive: The chemicals in plastic alone cost the U.S. healthcare system $250 billion in just one year.
We can’t recycle our way out of this. Plastic was never made to be recycled and is still not made to be recycled.
Our leaders who support continued or even increased plastic production seem ignorant of the facts about plastic pollution. Let us enlighten them: All plastic pollutes, and single-use plastic items like straws are not only hazardous to our health, they’re especially wasteful.
We could all save money if our government prioritized building up plastic-free reuse and refill systems, where we hold on to our stuff rather than continuously buy it and throw it away. Such reuse and refill systems were the reality before single-use plastic was mass-produced and marketed. And they worked. Most U.S. voters support reducing plastic production, along with national policies that reduce single-use plastic, increasing use of reusable packaging and foodware, and protecting people who live in neighborhoods harmed by plastic production facilities.
To change this nightmare scenario, our leaders need to support policies that reduce plastic production, not grow it. This means curbing wasteful plastic production and supporting plastic- and toxic-free, regenerative materials and systems of reuse and refill.
As the advocacy and engagement manager at Plastic Pollution Coalition, my work continues to support the solutions to this massive global crisis — strong policies that focus on plastic pollution prevention, better business practices, and a culture shift. We work together with our allied coalition organizations, businesses, scientists, notables and individual members every single day to make these solutions a reality — no matter how much the U.S. administration or other leaders try to undermine, belittle, or dismiss efforts to minimize the use of straws and other quickly disposed plastic products that poison our planet and our bodies.
Plastic never was and never will be disposable, and neither are people.
This article first appeared on The Revelator and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Banner Credit: Taklamacuwv Lamia on Wikimedia Commons
There is NO solution to this sort of problem as long as the underlying issue of how many humans this planet can endure is ignored. Changing how most people live is simply not going to ever happen. Preaching abstinence is not going to convert most peop’le into ”environmentalists”. It is going to make them angry and defensive. One major reason Trump got elected is most Americans were fed up with the constant barrage of moralizations and lectures from the Left.
Nobody is going to win over the working class majority by threats of catastrophe from living what most people consider a normal life, including use of plastic and anything else that makes life more convenient. And they are right; how any individual lives and what plastic waste they produce or any other actions they take does not add up to enough harm to matter. The factor that matters is how many OTHER people are doing the same thing. If the total human population of the earth was only 10% of what it is now, they could live exactly the same way they do now and do only 10% of the damage.
So the way to stop the damage being done is to reduce the number of humans down to a sustainable number. Then they can live4 however they wish and not cause much harm.
So instead of uselessly preaching asceticism the hard-core environmentalists need to work on recycling most of the excess humans back into the food chain where they belong. 8,000,000,000 humans is at least 7.9,000,000,000 too many. They are hoarding carbon in their bodies that has been stolen from other species and should be returned to it’s rightful owners.
“Changing how most people live is simply not going to ever happen.”
What you really mean is that you don’t WANT it to happen, which is clear from the rest of your post. Ultimately, yours is an elitist position: a small fraction of fortunate humans gets to do whatever it wants, regardless of harms, killings, and destruction to the Earth and the native life here that lifestyle causes. There is nothing moral nor ecologically sound about this position.
What’s needed is a major mental and spiritual evolution of humans: from materialism, self-centeredness, and egotism, to oneness, empathy, wisdom, and expanding our consciousness. The rest, like great reductions in human overpopulation and lifestyles, will follow. Anything less is no more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
”What’s needed is a major mental and spiritual evolution of humans: from materialism, self-centeredness, and egotism, to oneness, empathy, wisdom, and expanding our consciousness” and: ”What’s needed is a major mental and spiritual evolution of humans: from materialism, self-centeredness, and egotism, to oneness, empathy, wisdom, and expanding our consciousness”
Any concrete suggestions on how to make that happen? Within the short time left before the biosphere collapses? What odds to you give for a change in culture that drastic in the time remaining? What percentage of the total population would have to undergo that change to solve the problems? How are the changed ones to take power? There has been an anti-war movement for centuries now and there are still wars. If a moralistic argument cannot stop the majority from killing their own spcies, what makes you think a moralistic movement preaching voluntary poverty will have any more success??
Of course plastic shouldn’t exist, and of course it does great harm by its mere existence; it’s made from fossil fuel, which does its own great harms and which should have been left in the ground, along with all else under the surface of the Earth. The traditional indigenous cultures that had (or have, for the very few still remaining) absolute prohibitions on digging into the Earth were (or are) right. The rest of us destroy the Earth and kill all the life here with our modern lifestyles. The only effective and adequate solution is for humans to evolve mentally and spiritually to the point where they wouldn’t even consider living in a manner that is harmful to nonhumans. Short of that, it will just be more of the same, even if the specific types of harms change.
The biggest problem with plastic is not in the post-coinsumer stage, but iun the manufacturing process. Chemicals used to make polastic have an estrogen-mimicking effect in the body and arre released into the vwater supply and get iunto the food chain. If ingested by a pregnant woman at the stage when the hypothalamus of her fetus is developing, that part of the brain, which controls autonomic functions including sexual respñonse, fails to develop properly. The result will be, in the adult, improper sexual response to the wrong stimuli. This accounts for the enormous epidemic in recent decades of homesexuality, ”transgenerism, and other sexual defects.
The proliferation in recent decades of this form of pre-natal brain damage due to chemical polution is one of the worst threats caused by the mass production of un-natural substtances like plastic.