What Are Microplastics and What Are They Doing to Our Bodies
Earlier this month, six years after that pivot, Campen published an alarming paper that made headlines around the world. The adult human brain, his research found, today contains about a disposable spoon’s worth of plastic — roughly 50 percent more than eight years ago. The rate of accumulation mirrors the rate that plastic is increasing in prevalence in our environment. “It’s frighteningly correlated,” he said when he announced his results. To illustrate his findings, Campen, who is sandy-haired with a youthful face and a wry sense of humor, held a disposable spoon next to his head. “My prop,” he called it. “I certainly don’t feel comfortable with this much plastic in my brain,” he said, “and I don’t need to wait around 30 more years to find out what happens if the concentrations quadruple.”
Goddamn.
Other studies have looked at the way the chemical compounds in these particles might harm the body. Some of the most common additives in plastics, like bisphenols and phthalates — which make products more flexible, durable, or flame resistant — have been extensively studied for decades. These additives are known to be endocrine disrupters, meaning they can wreak havoc on our hormones; this can be particularly dangerous for the developing bodies of infants and children. Once lodged in our tissues, microplastics may leach these chemical compounds continually into our bodies. They are “what we call sustained-release vehicles,” Don Ingber, a professor at Harvard’s medical and engineering schools, told the Harvard Gazette. “They’re just sitting there, and every day they’re releasing a little bit for the rest of the lifetime of those cells in your gut or other organs.”
I think microplastics will turn out to be the cause of many of our modern ailments: autism, dementia, many of the neurological disorders we're discovering in older generations, low fertility rates, etc. They're everywhere, and there's nothing we as individuals can do to avoid them. It's terrifying, yet feels so obvious in hindsight, no? Of course plastics do this to us…
What was that famous DuPont slogan? "Better Living…through Chemistry."