Microplastics are a big problem, a new film warns

It’s been more than fifty years since Dustin Hoffman’s character in “The Graduate” received a kernel of wisdom about the path to prosperity.

“Plastics,” it is told to him by Mr. McGuire, the starched manager who gives the advice. “There is a great future in plastics.”

Plastics have indeed been a game changer for humanity, and the vast array of cheap, durable plastic goods, 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 that has happened very rarely recycled. The UN estimates that the majority of… 400 million tons produced annually – a doubling of production since 2000 – will remain on Earth in some form as they are broken down into tiny specks by sunlight, wind and the sea.

About twenty years ago, Richard Thompson, a marine biologist, said, discovered for the first time a worrying accumulation of tiny plastic particles in ocean habitats and coined the word ‘microplastics’. Since then, scientists have found these fragments everywhere at a distance mountain peaks and the Arctic to the ocean floor.

In the decade that followed, scientists began discovering microplastics embedded in a wide range of plastics living creatures, also in the seafood we eat. More recently, microplastics have been found in the human body: in our lungs, our blood, our feces and in breast milk.

In 2021, Italian researchers identified this for the first time microplastics in the human placenta.

The increasingly urgent question scientists are asking is whether these synthetic foreign bodies pose a threat to human health.

“We know microplastics are everywhere, we know they are harmful to marine life and our fisheries, but the research side of the impact they have on people is still catching up,” says Imari Walker Franklinan environmental engineer and chemical researcher at RTI International who studies microplastics.

“Plastic people,” a new documentary directed by Ben Addelman and Ziya Tong, examines the emerging science on microplastics and comes to a disturbing conclusion: the potential health risks associated with plastic pollution are becoming difficult to ignore.

The film, which premieres on Saturday in the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, follows the work of microplastic researchers in half a dozen countries, including a pair of Turkish scientists who said they recently discovered microplastics in the human brain. Some particles were found deep in the tissue of cancerous brain tumors.

“The revelation that the human body is full of microplastics is a recent one, and I think its implications will become one of the most dominant health and environmental stories of our time,” said Rick Smith, president of the Canadian Climate Institute and one of the film’s executive producers. “It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, you cannot protect yourself from this kind of new pollution.”

Microplastics, fragment less than The five millimeter dimensions usually visible to the naked eye should not be confused with nanoplastics, which are smaller than a speck of dust and are often the unintended byproduct of plastic production. Research into the potential health effects of nanoplastics is still in its infancy, at least compared to studies of microplastics, a field that has expanded rapidly in recent years.

Scientific evidence of the effects of microplastics on humans is limited, at least in peer-reviewed literature. A survey in the journal Environmental sciences and technology 2022 found that patients with inflammatory bowel disease had a significantly higher amount of microplastics in their stool than those without the disease. A small Study from the University of Hawaii published last November, mapped the growing presence of microplastics in the placentas of new mothers.

And an article appeared on Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that people with microplastics in their cardiovascular systems were at increased risk of complications from heart attacks and strokes.

The researchers found that microplastics were embedded in the fatty plaque that adheres to the walls of blood vessels, and that patients with plastic-soaked plaque were 4.5 times more likely to have a heart attack, stroke or death compared to those whose plaque was free. used to be. of microplastics. The study involved 312 people who had undergone surgery to remove plaque from the carotid artery in the neck. Researchers followed them for almost three years.

Dr. Giuseppe Paolisso, an author of the study, said it appeared that microplastics, along with nanoplastics, made these greasy blobs of plaque more fragile, increasing the risk that they would detach from the artery wall and block blood flow in a smaller area . blood vessel and cause a heart attack or stroke.

“This is the first evidence that microplastic pollution in the blood is linked to a disease,” says Dr. Paolisso, 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 a number of theories about how microplastics affect the body. These include the potential for inflammation caused by a foreign body lodged in human tissue, and the toxic compounds that make up many plastics, which are known to harm human health.

Nienke Vrisekoop, a microplastics researcher from the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands said she found that immune cells that come into contact with microplastics die three times faster than cells that do not. She said the polystyrene which is commonly used for the production of packaging materials, was especially toxic to the immune cells that consumed it.

Research by another Dutch researcher, Barbro Melgert, showed that microplastics inhibited lung development structures grown in her laboratory. Professor Melgert, a respiratory immunologist at the University of Groningen, said nylon appeared to be the most damaging to lung structures. Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, she found, was the least toxic plastic she tested.

Professor Melgert is still trying to understand how microplastics affect living cells, but she suspects the damage could be linked to some of the chemicals that can leach from plastics into the human body.

While she knows the study results do not definitively prove harm to humans or quantify the risks, previous research on nylon factory workers showed extensive lung damage in people exposed to large amounts of nylon particles.

Foreign particles such as asbestos, coal dust or cigarette smoke often prove problematic to human health, she noted. “If the particles are organic and digestible, your body can at least eventually break them down and remove them,” says Professor Melgert. “Plastic is different. It can just stay in the lung.”

The same can most likely be said for microplastics that end up in 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 dozens of peer-reviewed studies investigating microplastics fishing, soil, table salt And intravenous fluid bagsand his anxiety grows with each new discovery.

It was only a matter of time, he said, before researchers discovered microplastics in the human brain. “It’s scary, but not surprising,” he said.

Of 15 samples examined so far, six plastic particles have been identified in tissue from two patients with tumors, said Dr. Gündoğdu. It was unclear how the fragments got into the brain, but he said that given the documented presence of microplastics in the blood, they most likely entered through blood vessels feeding the tumors.

Despite the sense of urgency and foreboding conveyed by ‘Plastic People,’ Ms. Tong, the co-director and former host of the Discovery Channel science show “Daily planet,” hopes the film can spark change like “Silent Spring,” the 1962 book that documented the dangers of agricultural pesticides and helped lead to a ban on DDT, did.

At an individual level, this means encouraging consumers to reduce their reliance on single-use plastics, which make up 40 percent of global plastic production, she said.

But that also means convincing political leaders to take regulatory action. Right now, Ms. Tong has her eye on one UN meeting next month in Ottawa, where delegates from 175 countries will begin negotiations on a treaty proposal that would counter the explosive growth of plastic pollution. The conversations have happened sometimes hampered by industry opposition.

“It’s not like we need a remarkable new invention to tackle the problem,” Ms Tong said. “We just need to use less plastic.”