Your brain on microplastics
This week the Guardian dropped a piece about how microplastics are everywhere. Buckle up.
This week the Guardian dropped a piece about how microplastics are everywhere. Buckle up.
It reported a study that found participants’ brain tissue contained 0.5% microplastic by weight. And that’s an average, not a max. The brain accumulated 20x more microplastic than other organs – like the liver, gut, heart, buccal fat, etc.
That’s plenty to wash me away in a wave of anxiety, but there’s more. There are tiny bits of plastic everywhere in your body. There’s shredded bottlecap in your joints. You’ve got specks of packing foam in your marrow. Later today you’ll drink plastic fibres in your tap water (or bottled water). There’s plastic in balls, even plastic in cum. There’s plastic in every human placenta. Plastic is gumming up your arteries, and it makes you more likely to have a stroke or heart attack.
Are you grossed out yet? No? Great, let’s keep going.
Microplastics come from plastic products that are ubiquitous in modern life. Yes, the amount of microplastic you’re exposed to is a function of where you live and your lifestyle, but everyone is exposed to it in some way. Macro plastic is everywhere, and so is microplastic.
I’m writing this on my couch, typing on my plastic phone case. My underwear is 4% elastane (a kind of plastic), my shirt is 3% elastane. the only clothes I am wearing that are plastic-free are my pants, which are 100% cotton (and my only pair that don’t have elastane in them). The air in this room is getting blown in from a plastic air conditioner. My couch was inexpensive, so probably has polyester fibers in the upholstery.
Microplastic is produced by normal plastic objects through normal use. Crumpling a PET bottle chips off crispy plastic fragments into the air. Washing your clothes drags off plastic fibers that wash down the drain and into a nearby reservoir. When you drinking through a straw you’re sucking up all the gushy swishy microplastic bits.
What I really struggle with is how this microplastic is produced in the most mundane way: through abrasion & sitting in the sun. It gets carried around the world by wind and water, and ends up in places that humans rarely go. Bits of Twinkies wrappers end up in the Arctic, grocery bags find themselves on the top of Mount Everest.
This mundane pollution makes any effort to narrow where harmful plastics are used moot. Who cares if my water bottle is BPA-free, if there’s BPA-leaching hunks of polycarbonate in my water anyway?
Instead we need to seriously interrogate whether so many household objects ned to be made of plastic. Single-use plastics are the obvious first step, but what about the synthetic fibers in my clothes? What about the plastic folding chair in my living room, or my plastic phone case?
Free market capitalism was supposed to give me choice, but everything’s still made of plastic!
Fun links and other things to check out
My friends invited me to a Music League this week and I’m thrilled. It’s Cards Against Humanity, but replace the problematic one-liners with songs.
This year, governments are negotiating an international binding policy on measuring and regulating plastic production and waste. It’s called the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution.
The Biden administration has outlined a plan to reduce plastic pollution, probably in response to imminent international regulation.
Here are some of my favourite newsletters:
- Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At (technology)
- We, The Citizens (Singapore)
- Horniness Kills (pop culture)
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