How you are eating a credit card-sized plastic each year?
Microplastics are everywhere, and we are now ingesting them daily with our food and water
A fast-food delivery pack. A fruit juice bottle. Your favorite pickle jar. All these containers are likely to be plastic. But, after the limited time you use them, you discard such plastics, seldom thinking about what happens to them.
An estimate says just about ten percent of humans have recycled just ten percent of the plastic they made over the past century. Most plastic ever made is in landfills, soil, water, and discovered in the air. As plastics degrade, they break down into microplastics, particles that are 10-6 meters to 5 mm in diameter.
We now find them everywhere on earth (including places where humans don’t live), including air, water, soil, food, and our bodies.
Microplastics form when plastics break down into small particles or microscopic fibers detach from polyester clothing or synthetic fabric. Some microplastics are present as tiny beads in detergents and personal care products.
Microfibers: Synthetic fabrics such as nylon, polyester, and acrylic release Plastic fibers during wear and tear. Washing synthetic garments release microfibers into the water, which accumulate in wastewater treatment plants. Drying synthetic clothes also generates microfibers which, like the microfibers into wastewater, enter lakes, rivers, and oceans.
Microbeads are small particles less than 1 mm. in size, which you find in face washes and toothpaste. Personal care product manufacturers use microbeads as part of their products, and those beads enter the water during product use. Fishes absorb them from water which the microbeads enter.
Other microplastics are deliberately manufactured, such as the tiny plastic beads in exfoliating cleaners.
One of the first discoverers of microplastic pollution was explorer Charles Moore. He found out the Great Pacific Garbage Patch full of plastics while traveling from Hawaii to California in 1997. In the twenty-five since Moore’s discovery of the marine floating plastic patch, microplastics have only spread more and are now part of our everyday life – they are all around us and increasing in us.
If we think that we are safe as the plastics in oceans are far from us, we must know that microplastics exist in the atmosphere and winds carry them from the sky to the earth. Studies show that we now have plastics in our bodies that enter through food and water. Earth is now full of plastic particles, and we don’t know what they are doing to life forms on earth as we know very little about the harm that plastics do inside our bodies.
Over the past twenty-five years, the estimate of microplastics in the oceans has only increased. However, it is not easy to estimate microplastics in ocean water as the sampling method determines the quantity researchers collect. Further, as human activity regularly introduces plastics to oceans, the quantity from any estimate is always likely underestimated.
An even more challenging issue in estimating ocean microplastic numbers and quantities is the constant breakdown of plastic into smaller particles that may escape sampling. However, they are present in the water.
The study of ocean microplastics has led researchers into the fate of plastics that enter ocean waters. Some researchers discovered that some such microplastics return to air from the ocean. In the air, microplastics keep the company of nano plastics (one nanometre is 1 X10-9 meter) that are more difficult than the former to detect.
As aerial contaminants spread more easily and rapidly than in water, you will likely find microplastics far from their origin, even hundreds of kilometers away from where winds would have carried them. In addition, micro and nano plastics are efficient carriers of other pollutants like phthalates, flame retardants, and heavy metals, thus contributing to the easier spread of pollutants.
We are thus breathing air with plastic particles, drinking water with them, and eating food containing plastics.
Oceans are not the only sink for the plastics we consume and discard. Plastics enter freshwater ecosystems and the clouds and return to earth in rainwater and snowfall. We now drink water with plastics and eat fruits and vegetables laced with plastics. Though the plastic particle count in water may be in the thousands, average counts of hundreds of thousands (lakhs) are common in fresh produce. These tiny plastic particles in our food and water make us ingest 0.1 to 5 grams of plastic a week, equivalent to the quantity of plastic in a credit card in a year.
Very little is known about plastic ingestion or inhalation on human health. Humans likely excrete some or all of the plastic particles they ingest. A natural reaction to any foreign particle entering the human body is inflammation, an expected outcome. Nanoparticles tinier than microplastics may enter human cells and even enter the blood.
In aquatic creatures, microplastics accumulate in their respiratory and digestive systems, hastening their death. People eating fish and other aquatic creatures are likely to be eating more than 5 grams of plastics a week as the organisms they eat accumulate plastics in their muscles which then enter human bodies and likely find their way to muscles in the people who at such food.
Though it is impossible to free the environment in our vicinity from fabrics, simple habits can limit our exposure to micro and nano plastics.
Filtered water: Water filters with physical filters can screen out microplastics, and you can check with your water filter manufacturer the specification of their filtration cartridge. Though bottled water may seem safer, researchers have found almost every bottled water from around the globe to have microplastics due to the process. When the water you consume is from a plastic bottle, and the bottling process involves manufacturing a new PET Plastic bottle, the chances of introducing plastic fibers exist. Adding hot water to plastic bottles or heating water in plastic kettles is likely to add plastic fibers to the water. Plastic baby feeding bottles also add microplastics to water or milk that a baby consumes from such bottles.
Limit nonvegetarian food: The chances of ingesting plastics from food increase when consuming nonvegetarian food, including fish and meat. As animals are at the top of the food pyramid, they naturally accumulate plastics in their muscles, and those plastics enter the body of humans consuming such animals.
Limit plastic food containers: Plastic containers are likely to add microplastics into food when people use them for heating food in microwaves. Acidic foods like juices, squashes, pickles, and others in plastic bottles or sachets degrade the plastic and introduce microplastics into food. Widely used food delivery containers also may have microplastics as restaurants either microwave the food in such containers or add hot foods, which can generate microplastics through the degradation of the plastic container.
Switch to natural fabrics: Cotton and other natural fabrics degrade without persisting in the atmosphere apart from having good breathability and being comfortable to the wearer. Polyester, nylon, acrylic, and other synthetic fabrics may have some advantages but release the microfibers they generate during washing. Synthetic carpets and upholstery fabric are also microfiber sources that you can minimize or eliminate from your home.
Like one scientist wisely said, we use a plastic object that remains in the environment for the next five hundred years for our twenty-minute pleasure. So next time you use any plastic object, ask yourself, can’t you do without it, and you will find that you can get by without plastic in most cases.
Very very informative and eye opener article. Thanks Mr.Pai for such informative articles
Need of the hour. Thanks