by DGR News Service | Aug 27, 2020 | Toxification
The production of plastics must halt. It is the only way to stop the influx of toxic substances into streams, rivers, lakes, oceans, and into our own bodies. This piece, which is made up of excerpts from a longer article, discusses new research into microplastics found in human organs.
by Krissy Waite / Common Dreams
“The best way to tackle the problem is to massively reduce the amount of plastic that’s being made and used.”
… Arizona State University scientists on Monday presented their research on finding micro- and nanoplastics in human organs to the American Chemical Society…
Microplastics are plastics that are less than five millimeters in diameter and nanoplastics are less than 0.001 millimeters in diameter. Both are broken down bits of larger plastic pieces that were dumped into the environment. According to PlasticsEurope.org, 359 million tons of plastic was produced globally in 2019.
Previous research has shown that people could be eating a credit card’s worth of plastic a day; a study published in 2019 suggests humans eat, drink, and breathe almost 74,000 microplastic particles a year. Microplastics have been found in places ranging from the tallest mountains in the world to the depths of the Mariana Trench.
The Arizona State University scientists developed and tested a new method to identify dozens of plastics in human tissue that could eventually be used to collect global data on microplastic pollution and its impact on people. To test the technique, the scientists used 47 tissue samples from lung, liver, spleen, and kidney samples collected from a tissue bank. Researchers then added particles to the samples and found they could detect microplastics in every sample.
These specific tissues were used because these organs are the most likely to be exposed to, filter, or collect plastics in the human body. Because the samples were taken from a tissue bank, scientists also were able to analyze the donors’ lifestyles including environmental and occupational exposures.
“It would be naive to believe there is plastic everywhere but just not in us,”
Rolf Halden, a scientist on the team, told The Guardian. “We are now providing a research platform that will allow us and others to look for what is invisible—these particles too small for the naked eye to see. The risk [to health] really resides in the small particles … This shared resource will help build a plastic exposure database so that we can compare exposures in organs and groups of people over time and geographic space.”
The researchers found bisphenol A (BPA) in all 47 samples and were also able to detect polyethylene terephthalate (PET)—a chemical used in plastic drink bottles and shopping bags. They also found and analyzed polycarbonate (PC) and polyethylene (PE). These particles can end up in human bodies through the air or by consuming wildlife like seafood that has eaten plastic; or by consuming other foods with trace amounts of plastic from packaging. The team also developed a computer program that converts the collected data on plastic particle count into units of mass and area.
“In a few short decades, we’ve gone from seeing plastic as a wonderful benefit to considering it a threat,”
Charles Rolsky, a member of the team, said in a press release. “There’s evidence that plastic is making its way into our bodies, but very few studies have looked for it there. And at this point, we don’t know whether this plastic is just a nuisance or whether it represents a human health hazard.”
This article was first published on 17th August 2020.
by DGR News Service | Jul 27, 2020 | Toxification
In this article Elizabeth Claire Alberts describes Charles Moore’s discovery of microplastics throughout the ocean, freshwater rivers and lakes, and even in mist and rain.
‘Our life is plasticized’: New research shows microplastics in our food, water, air
by Elizabeth Claire Alberts / Mongabay
- Microplastics, plastic pieces smaller than 5 millimeters, have become increasingly prevalent in the natural world, and a suite of studies published in the last three years, including several from 2020, shows that they’ve contaminated not only the ocean and pristine wildernesses, but the air, our food, and even our bodies.
- Past research has indicated that 5.25 trillion plastic pieces are floating in the ocean, but a new study says that there are 2.5 to 10 times more microplastics in the ocean than previously thought, while another recent study found that microplastic “hotspots” could hold 1.9 million pieces per square meter.
- Other emerging research suggests that 136,000 tons of microplastics in the ocean are being ejected into the atmosphere each year, and blowing back onto land with the sea breeze, posing a risk to human health.
- Microplastics are also present in drinking water, and edible fruits and vegetables, according to new research, which means that humans are ingesting microplastics every day.
In 1997, Charles Moore was sailing a catamaran from Hawaii to California when he and his crew got stuck in windless waters in the North Pacific Ocean. As they motored along, searching for a breeze to fill their sails, Moore noticed that the ocean was speckled with “odd bits and flakes,” as he describes it in his book, Plastic Ocean. It was plastic: drinking bottles, fishing nets, and countless pieces of broken-down objects.
“It wasn’t an eureka moment … I didn’t come across a mountain of trash,” Moore told Mongabay. “But there was this feeling of unease that this material had got [as] far from human civilization as it possibly could.”
Moore, credited as the person who discovered what’s now known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, returned to the same spot two years later on a citizen science mission. When he and his crew collected water samples, they found that, along with larger “macroplastics,” the seawater was swirling with tiny plastic particles: microplastics, which are defined as anything smaller than 5 millimeters but bigger than 1 micron, which is 1/1000th of a millimeter. Microplastics can form when larger pieces of plastics break down into small particles, or when tiny, microscopic fibers detach from polyester clothing or synthetic fishing gear. Other microplastics are deliberately manufactured, such as the tiny plastic beads in exfoliating cleaners.
“That’s when we really had the eureka moment,” Moore said. “When we pulled in that first trawl, which was outside of what we thought was going to be the center [of the gyre], and found it was full of plastic. Then we realized, ‘Wow, this is a serious situation.’”
This new research shows that there’s actually a larger quantity of plastic in the ocean than previously thought, and that the plastic even enters the atmosphere and blows back onto land with the sea breeze. Recent studies also indicate that plastic is infiltrating our bodies through food and drinking water.
Originally published on 15 July 2020. Read the rest of the article here: https://news.mongabay.com/2020/07/our-life-is-plasticized-new-research-shows-microplastics-in-our-food-water-air/
Featured image: Marine debris litters a beach on Laysan Island in the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, where it washed ashore. Image by Susan White / USFWS.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 18, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Toxification
By Charlotte Dormer / Planet Earth Online
Tiny pieces of plastic contaminate almost every sea in the world. Now scientists have found that marine creatures like fish and birds are eating this microscopic waste, which may be harming their health.
The main concern is that microplastics are plastic pieces too small to see with the naked eye. They may be small by design, or be fragments of larger pieces of plastic waste.
Their size means they can be mistaken for food by even the smallest sea creatures, as well as large animals like seabirds and fish.
Scientists are concerned about the damage this could be causing. Plastics could block animals’ digestive systems or lower the amount of food they can eat. Not just that, but microplastics can carry toxic chemicals on their surface. So, scientists are calling for further research into pollution from microscopic waste.
“Things have progressed in terms of understanding where you can find microplastics and how much is out there, but we still haven’t worked out what damage this is doing to animals,” says Matthew Cole from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory and University of Exeter, who has co-authored a major review of all published microplastic studies.
“We’re still on the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding how these particles affect the health of marine animals,” he adds.
Mass production of plastic began in the 1940s, and has since exploded. In 2009, 230 million tonnes of plastic were produced, equivalent to the weight of a double decker bus every two seconds. The increase in large plastic waste in the sea quickly concerned people, because of its visibility. Understandably, the spread of microscopic plastic fragments has gone largely unnoticed by the general public.
But the chemicals these fragments carry may be more dangerous than the plastics themselves. Plastic often contains additives to make it last longer. These additives can be harmful to health, changing hormonal patterns in fish and birds. And, because plastics are oil-based, they are particularly good at attracting waterborne pollutants from other sources.
These persistent organic pollutants can lead to hormone disruption, development problems and cancer. If marine animals swallow tiny plastic particles, the chemicals on their surface could be easily taken up.
“Almost like a Trojan horse, microplastics can help transfer potentially dangerous chemicals to animals,” Cole explains.
The scientists also looked at where these microplastics come from. Some are designed to be microscopic. These include the beads used in exfoliating facial washes, as well as those used in air-blasters to remove rust and paint from the hulls of boats. Other microplastics may be fragments of bigger objects, from plastic bags to fishing gear.
Half the world’s population lives within just 50 miles from the coast, so it’s easy to see how plastic waste gets into the marine environment. It finds its way into storm drains and sewage systems, where it slips through the filters in wastewater treatment works into rivers and out to sea. Around 80 per cent of plastic debris in the sea comes from inland.
Now, Cole is trying to work out whether the tiniest sea creatures, called zooplankton, can take up microplastics. This is the first stage in trying to understand whether these particles can travel up the food chain. If they can get into zooplankton, then they could be passed on to bigger animals which eat them. This so-called trophic transfer could ultimately affect us too.
“If they’re trophically transferred they could end up in the human food supply,” says Cole. “But, without doing a lot more work we won’t know what the full effects of these compounds are.”
From Planet Earth Online: http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=1229
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 9, 2012 | Toxification
By University of California, San Diego
A 100-fold upsurge in human-produced plastic garbage in the ocean is altering habitats in the marine environment, according to a new study led by a graduate student researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.
In 2009 an ambitious group of graduate students led the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX) to the North Pacific Ocean Subtropical Gyre aboard the Scripps research vessel New Horizon. During the voyage the researchers, who concentrated their studies a thousand miles west of California, documented an alarming amount of human-generated trash, mostly broken down bits of plastic the size of a fingernail floating across thousands of miles of open ocean.
At the time the researchers didn’t have a clear idea of how such trash might be impacting the ocean environment, but a new study published in the May 9 online issue of the journal Biology Letters reveals that plastic debris in the area popularly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” has increased by 100 times over in the past 40 years, leading to changes in the natural habitat of animals such as the marine insect Halobates sericeus. These “sea skaters” or “water striders”—relatives of pond water skaters—inhabit water surfaces and lay their eggs on flotsam (floating objects). Naturally existing surfaces for their eggs include, for example: seashells, seabird feathers, tar lumps and pumice. In the new study researchers found that sea skaters have exploited the influx of plastic garbage as new surfaces for their eggs. This has led to a rise in the insect’s egg densities in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.
Such an increase, documented for the first time in a marine invertebrate (animal without a backbone) in the open ocean, may have consequences for animals across the marine food web, such as crabs that prey on sea skaters and their eggs.
“This paper shows a dramatic increase in plastic over a relatively short time period and the effect it’s having on a common North Pacific Gyre invertebrate,” said Scripps graduate student Miriam Goldstein, lead author of the study and chief scientist of SEAPLEX, a UC Ship Funds-supported voyage. “We’re seeing changes in this marine insect that can be directly attributed to the plastic.”
The new study follows a report published last year by Scripps researchers in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series showing that nine percent of the fish collected during SEAPLEX contained plastic waste in their stomachs. That study estimated that fish in the intermediate ocean depths of the North Pacific Ocean ingest plastic at a rate of roughly 12,000 to 24,000 tons per year.
The Goldstein et al. study compared changes in small plastic abundance between 1972-1987 and 1999-2010 by using historical samples from the Scripps Pelagic Invertebrate Collection and data from SEAPLEX, a NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer cruise in 2010, information from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation as well as various published papers.
In April, researchers with the Instituto Oceanográfico in Brazil published a report that eggs of Halobates micans, another species of sea skater, were found on many plastic bits in the South Atlantic off Brazil.
“Plastic only became widespread in late ’40s and early ’50s, but now everyone uses it and over a 40-year range we’ve seen a dramatic increase in ocean plastic,” said Goldstein. “Historically we have not been very good at stopping plastic from getting into the ocean so hopefully in the future we can do better.”
From PhysOrg: http://phys.org/news/2012-05-plastic-trash-ocean-habitats.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 29, 2012 | Toxification
By Jeanna Bryner / Live Science
An oceanographer who noticed a disappearing act in which the surface of the ocean went from confetti-covered to clear now suggests wind may driving large amounts of trash deeper into the sea.
Oceanographer Giora Proskurowski was sailing in the Pacific Ocean when he saw the small bits of plastic debris disappear beneath the water as soon as the wind picked up.
His research on the theory, with Tobias Kukulka of the University of Delaware, suggests that on average, plastic debris in the ocean may be 2.5 times higher than estimates using surface-water sampling. In high winds, the volume of plastic trash could be underestimated by a factor of 27, the researchers report this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Plastic waste can wreak havoc on an ecosystem, harming fish and other organisms that ingest it, possibly even degrading a fish’s liver; the trashy bits also make nice homes for bacteria and algae that get carried to other areas of the ocean where they could be invasive or cause other problems, the researchers noted.
In 2010, the team collected water samples at various depths in the North Atlantic Ocean. “Almost every subsurface tow we took had plastic in the net,” Proskurowski told LiveScience, adding that they used a specialized tow net that isolated certain layers of the water, so it would only open at a specific depth and close before being pulled up.
Next, they combined the trash tally with wind measurements to come up with a mathematical model, which allowed them to calculate the amount of debris at different depths on average as well as look at how that amount changed with different conditions, such as on a windy day.
They found 2.5 times more debris in the layers of water below the “surface water” (defined as the top 9.8 inches or 25 centimeters) as was found in that surface section. The debris was distributed down to a depth of about 65 to 82 feet (20 to 25 meters).
The findings mean the estimates of plastic litter in the ocean, conducted by skimming the surface water only, may in some cases vastly underestimate the true amount of plastic debris there.
“The scope of the [plastic debris] problem is not just at the very surface but goes down to 20 meters or so, and that plastic is distributed throughout this layer,” Proskurowski said during an interview.
He and his colleagues plan to publish a simplified version of the model so others investigating ocean plastics can use it.
From Live Science: http://www.livescience.com/19940-plastic-trash-oceans-underestimated.html
