Table of Contents
Video
Transcript
Intro
It’s been said that every piece of plastic that’s ever been produced still exists. In your home. In an office. On the side of a highway. Neighborhood streets. In rivers that lead to the ocean.
And while it’s basically impossible to really verify that claim, scientists estimate that of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic that we’ve produced, 6.3 billion metric tons have ended up as waste. About 9% of that has been recycled, but the rest has been incinerated or just discarded (Geyer et al., 2017)
We’ve known that this is a problem for a while now, but we’re only just starting to realize how much of a problem it is. See, because you and I, we’re thinking of straws in turtles’ noses and seagulls choking on plastic rings, but there’s a more alarming side to the plastic pollution epidemic, and it’s reached every corner of the earth.
From your home to remote forests, from the top of mount Everest to the bottom of the Mariana trench, we’re finding them everywhere: microplastics
What are microplastics?
To know what we’re up against, we first have to define them. So what are microplastics?
Microplastics are any piece of plastic that are between 5 millimeters and 1 micrometer in size. So we’re talking on the scale of anything from a pencil eraser down to smaller than a human hair.
Technically, any piece of plastic smaller than 1 micrometer is a nanoplastic, but for the sake of this video, we’ll just consider anything less than 5 millimeters a microplastic.
And that’s kind of a whole thing — because we’ve known about microplastics for a while now, but a lot of research and studies are still pretty new, so a lot of standards and definitions haven’t been defined yet.
There is, however, a broad distinction between “primary” and “secondary” microplastics.
Primary microplastics are made to be microplastics. Most commonly, this is used in industrial air blasting. A bunch of tiny microbeads are added to the air to increase scrubbing power. But until the mid 2010s, microplastics were added to your toothpaste as well for the same reason — mixing in a bunch of microbeads into toothpaste makes it more abrasive and helps scrub your teeth clean.
As a matter of fact, 9 out of 10 cosmetic products have microplastics in them — shaving cream, hair care, lotions, facial scrubs — you name it! They don’t just increase scrubbing power: small, round, squishy microplastics are mixed in with gels and lotions to make them feel smoother (Plastic Soup Foundation, 2022; Simon, 2022).
Secondary microplastics aren’t intentionally small, they’re just pieces of larger plastic products that have broken down. Plastic bags, bottles, and packaging shed pieces of themselves as flakes or strands, and then they just… don’t go away.
An odyssey of microplastics
And that’s the problem. Plastics are bioresistent and biopersistent, meaning there are very few natural processes that degrade plastics
When you try to break it apart, it’s like a Minecraft slime: it just breaks into smaller and smaller pieces of itself.
And as they break apart into smaller and smaller pieces, they’re tumbling through their environment and they’re collecting whatever pathogens and pollutants are there. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, the longer a piece of microplastic tumbles through its environment, the more crap it collects (Enyoh et al., 2019; Simon, 2022).
Scientists have found that microplastic pollution accumulates a wide variety of things: pharmaceuticals like ibuprofen, heavy metals like lead and mercury, and forever chemicals like PFASs. It’s such a thriving little cocktail of bad chemicals and microbes that scientists have coined the term “plastisphere” to describe the microbiome that builds on plastic (Picó et al., 2020; Simon, 2022).
A salad full of glitter and plastic
After tumbling through the environment and collecting a bunch of pollutants, microplastic pollution most commonly ends up in our waterways and the ocean, where it then infiltrates the food chain.
In the ocean, phytoplankton form the base of the food chain. Phytoplankton are tiny organisms that photosynthesize like plants to get their energy. Primary consumers like small fish and crustaceans eat the phytoplankton and then predators like larger fish eat the smaller fish and crustaceans.
The problem is that the primary consumers will confuse microplastics for phytoplankton and eat those instead
The first problem with that is that the plastic obviously doesn’t have any nutritional value, but it makes them feel full. It’s like eating a salad that’s partially glitter and plastic beads. It may fill you up quicker, but the plastic will just go right through you. We see fish that eat plastic don’t end up growing as large as they should (Simon, 2022)
The second problem is that they’re eating a salad full of glitter and plastic beads. It may look pretty, but it’s certainly not good for you, especially after those microplastics have accumulated all those chemicals and pollutants that we talked about earlier.
And the third problem is that microplastics entering the lowest point in the food chain work their way up to the highest point. Not only have scientists found plastic in baby fish (Gove et al., 2019) — which can stunt their growth or flat out kill them — but we’ve found them in the excrement and digestive tracts of larger predators, including whales and walruses in the arctic (Carlsson et al., 2021; Lusher et al., 2015).
A concerning picture
But you might be eating your own glitter and plastic bead salad. So much food, including produce from grocery stores and supermarkets, is wrapped in plastic. We know that microplastics get into food through plastic packaging. That is, if it hasn’t already been contaminated during its production (Kosuth et al., 2018). This “clean” plastic hasn’t had the time to accumulate a plastisphere like plastic pollution, but it can still be problematic because of the chemicals they’re made from.
I want to give a disclaimer here: we don’t really know the full effects that plastics and microplastics have on our health yet. But there is a lot that we do know, and it paints a concerning picture.
We know that some of the most common chemicals added to plastics — phtalates and bisphenols especially — are known as “endocrine disrupting chemicals,” or EDCs. These EDCs throw off the hormone balance in humans, and can cause problems with your heart, brain, immune system, reproductive system — it’s a mess (Ong et al., 2020; Simon, 2022; Williams & Rangel-Buitrago, 2022).
We know that we’re eating plastics, either because they were in the animals we consumed or because it leeched in through the packaging and production process. (Kosuth et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2021)
We know that we’re drinking plastics, from a 2017 report that found plastic in 83% of tap water samples around the world (Kosuth et al., 2017). That report indicated that plastic contamination was worst in North America.
We know that we’re inhaling microplastics in the very air around us. Indoor environments can have up to 1,000 microplastic per gram of dust in the air, and one study estimates that adults inhale about 20 microplastics per day (Zhu et al., 2022).
Whether by inhaling or eating or something else, we know that plastics get into our blood, where they may be leaching chemicals and heavy metals straight into our bloodstream (Simon, 2022; Song et al., 2024; Zuo et al., 2024)
Some scientists have speculated that microplastics could be contributing to the rises we’re seeing in cardiac and neurological health issues, although there’s no direct link for that right now (Simon, 2022).
The majority of these microplastics in the air come from our clothing — a significant portion of clothing is made from polyester and nylon, which are plastics.
Doing just a single load of laundry releases tons of microplastic fibers into the air and our sewage systems (Kacprzak & tijing, 2022; Simon, 2022).
But think of how many other things in your home are made of plastic. Even things like flooring, upholstery, and paints are made from plastics, and they shed particles every time you use them.
Outdoors is a lot better, but it’s still not perfect. Urban environments tend to have less than 100 microplastics per gram of [dust in the] air, compared to the over 1,000 of indoor air (Zhu et al., 2022). Microplastics in the atmosphere come from countless sources. Wear and tear from our clothing is part of it, but a huge source is tires. As your tire tread wears down, it’s flinging millions of tiny particles of rubber into the atmosphere, contributing to the almost 4 billion pounds of rubber microplastics that the US generates per year from driving (Kole et al., 2017).
We also know that a common thread seems to be that exposure is higher for children and babies. Plastic baby bottles are a huge source of this, but children are also just lower to the ground, where dust is being stirred up and settling (Zhu et al., 2022). Not even to mention that microplastics are being passed on to newborn babies from their mothers (Sun et al., 2024; Simon, 2022).
This is getting out of hand, these microplastics are coming from everywhere, we don’t know how they affect us yet, how can we stop this?
A way out
So how can we stop this?
The truth is, on a personal level, you just can’t avoid exposure to microplastics. But the good news is there are things you can do to reduce your personal exposure.
Cut out single-use plastics as best you can, replace plastic tools in your home with ones made from natural materials like wood, wear long-lasting clothes made from natural materials like wool and cotton, vacuum and clean regularly (Kacprzak & Tijing, 2022). You can get a HEPA air filter to help keep the air in your home clean, or getting an aftermarket filter for your washing machine can help keep pollution out of our waterways.
But all of this is just picking glitter out of the salad, we should really just… stop putting glitter and plastic beads in the salad.
This is going to take global collaboration and policy to really fix.
A geological indicator
Plastic is so ubiquitous in the environment that it’s been suggested as a geological indicator of human activity. Plastic production is only set to increase unless something changes, and about half of that new plastic production will end up in landfills or in the environment. That’s only going to make our microplastics problem exponentially worse (Williams & Rangel-Buitrago, 2022).
So what policy should we be enacting?
We can incentivize the development of technology as part of the solution. There are already some really cool technologies being developed.
Bioplastics currently make up a tiny portion of global plastic production, but it is a growing sector. Bioplastics are plastics that are made from carbon sources other than fossil fuels, or that are biodegradable (Williams & Rangel-Buitrago, 2022). Of those two, biodegradable is obviously preferred, but even that has its caveats, so it’s only really a small part of the total solution.
Another solution is barriers to help filter litter and pollution out of waterways before they reach a larger body of water. A great solution here comes from a Dutch company by the name of The Great Bubble Barrier. They have deployed an incredibly simple solution to pollution filtering. They run a PVC pipe with holes in it under a waterway and then just pump air through the pipes. The bubbles allow fish and ships to pass through, but they catch and redirect floating pollution into collection bins (Williams & Rangel-Buitrago, 2022; https://thegreatbubblebarrier.com).
Another thing would be improving the treatment technology for wastewater and drinking water plants around the world. That could help filter out microplastics from laundry and drinking water. We actually already have the technology to significantly improve treatment in these sectors, but we’re just not investing in making it happen, partially because of larger, systemic issues of inequity (Simon, 2022).
But one of the coolest solutions that you may of heard of is “plastic-eating microbes.” That’s not quite accurate, though — scientists are genetically engineering microbes to produce an enzyme that breaks down plastic into its parts (Fohler et al., 2024). There are a lot of issues facing this before it can be deployed at scale, but this is one of the most promising options for the future, in my opinion, because the enzyme breaks plastic down so cleanly that it can be recycled with almost no loss in quality.
A call to action
But all of these solutions are at best flex taping together a boat that was sawed in half. What we really need to do is take the saw away from the maniac who’s cutting boats in half. We need to decide as a society to hold corporations accountable. In 2022, the US alone just flat-out gave the plastic and oil industry $3 billion in subsidies, but they also undercharged them for environmental costs to the tune of $757 billion (Black, 2023).
And that trend extends globally, resulting in $7 trillion in total subsidies for oil and plastic in 2022 (Black, 2023).
We’re at least keeping glitter out of the salad now, but let’s stop the people who keep spilling it in.
So we need to be banning single-use plastics, placing restrictions on plastic packaging, hold the plastic industry responsible for the entire lifecycle of their product. The plastic companies aren’t just gonna fix the problem on their own, they’re too busy making money. So we need to be coming up with solutions or, even better, forcing these plastic companies to solve the problem they’ve created. They can’t just get away with filling up our rivers, ourforests, and our own bodies with plastic.
In a more and more divided world, this is not a partisan issue, so we need to be getting involved in our local and federal politics and pressuring our representatives to pass policies that help everyone out.
Outro
At this point, it’s hard to imagine a life without plastic. Even though we got by just fine without plastic 100 years ago, I don’t see us going back to that. And after all, plastic has plenty of merits — plastics have saved countless lives in its various uses in the medical industry, and it’s made access to technology more equitable.
But we can’t keep doing this. Sustainability isn’t about going back to the 1900s, it’s about finding a compromise between modern convenience, and not destroying our own health and the planet. We can find a middle ground, but it’s going to be a world that doesn’t maximize convenience.
Another big barrier to plastic policy that we’ve found is just lack of public awareness of the issue (Kacprzak & Tijing, 2022). So share this video, talk about microplastics with your friends. If this video made you uncomfortable at just much we’re surrounded by plastic, take that and use it to help us change, help us build a more sustainable world.
A lot of this video was based on the book A Poison Like No Other by Matt Simon, so if you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend checking it out. It goes way more into detail than I was able to here. The link for that will be available in the description below
Thank you very much for watching. As always, all references and a full transcript will be available at beanstem.org, linked in the description below. And thank you very much, have a great day!
Attributions
B-roll
- Bubble barrier: The Great Bubble Barrier/YouTube (YouTube license)
- Flex tape: Flex Seal/YouTube (YouTube license)
- Car driving across bridge: AwaisAhmadowii/Pixabay (Pixabay Content LIcense)
- Plastic floating in ocean: Engin_Akyurt/Pixabay (Pixabay Content License)
Music
- Russian River: Dan Henic/YouTube Audio Library (YouTube Audio Library License)
- Gonna be gone: Kjartan Abel/freesound (CC BY 4.0)
- chill background music: ZHRØ/Freesound (CC BY 4.0)
- Simple step: Slenderbeats/YouTube Audio Library (YouTube Audio Library License)
- Half Past Murder Time: Kjartan Abel/freesound (CC BY 4.0)
- High noon: TrackTribe/YouTube Audio Library (YouTube Audio Library License)
- Background music: ZHRØ/Freesound (CC BY 4.0)
Video credits
- Ben Rankin (Host, research, writing, editing, graphics)
- Amanda Dyar (Script review, video review, special thanks)
- Sarah Buckberry (Camera)
- Austin Lord (Camera)
- Laura Eye (Video review, special thanks)
- Nick Bolles (Video review)
- Megan P (Camera)
- Brent Wilson (Script review)
- David Crompton (Special thanks)
- Simone Schuster (Script review, fact checking)
- Caden McGee (Script review, video review)
References
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