As if that’s not bad enough, evidence is piling up that we are truly and unavoidably breathing in and ingesting plastic. We have long known of the growing plastic menace and Aunty here has written on the topic eight times over the last 10 years.
It’s been two years since my last column of plastic pollution, and I am behooved to write on this global crisis today because it has clearly reached another shocking level: Plastic is rife in the air we breathe and in just about everything we put into our mouth.I was worrying over my cholesterol levels and doing my best through diet and exercise to control it because it can muck up my blood with plaque, leading to strokes, heart disease and other health problems. Now I am not sure if it is all in vain if I am breathing and eating microplastic, which could be worse than plaque in my arteries.
In case you missed the news, a study by Cornell University researchers found that South-East Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines ingested the most microplastics among 109 countries. There are conflicting reports as to whether Indonesia or Malaysia tops the list, but that’s an “honour” no country would want.
People in both countries “eat” about 15g of microplastic, which is equivalent to three credit cards, a month. That gets into our bodies via our food, mainly fish and seafood. That’s because microplastics are ingested by pytoplankton and zooplankton, which fish and aquatic animals feed on. As the saying goes, we are what we eat.
The alarm was sounded at least half a decade ago. By 2019, at least 50 studies globally showed that on average, we were ingesting about 5g – that’s one credit card-size worth – of plastic every week from the air, food we eat and water we drink. I highlighted this in my July 3, 2019 column titled “This should really be our last straw”.
In May that year, 186 countries were galvanised to sign a legally binding UN pact to track and significantly reduce plastic pollution. Our government, like many others, started to ban single use plastics. Our goal was its total elimination by 2030, and Selangor was to ban drinking straws from July 2019.
After the initial effort to dispense with plastic straws, we are back to sipping our drinks with them at restaurants and bubble tea outlets, aren’t we?
I think we got complacent by the promise of recyclable and biodegradable plastic, which turned out to be largely false. Most types of plastics are not easily recyclable and the biodegradable ones do not harmlessly degrade but disintegrate into microplastics, polluting our air and food chain.
Two years ago, Dutch scientists detected microplastic in human blood for the first time; the minute particles were in almost 80% of the people tested.
According to British daily The Guardian, half of them had PET plastic, commonly used in drink bottles; a third had polystyrene, used for packaging food and other products; and a quarter of the blood samples contained polyethylene, from which plastic carrier bags are made. Not only that, the particles were also found in the placentas of pregnant women and babies’ faeces.
Since the Cornell University study says we South-East Asians got plasticised by our consumption of fish and seafood, one might think we can remedy that by avoiding seafood.
Not so fast, because another study commissioned by the Plastic Soup Foundation found plastic particles in all blood samples collected from pigs and cows on Dutch farms, which indicate that these animals are also absorbing microplastics from their feed, water or air.
There is simply no escaping plastic and our dependence on it has only widened. As sciencenews.org reported, “Durable, versatile and cheap to manufacture, they are in our clothes, cosmetics, electronics, tyres, packaging and so many more items of daily use.”
It added that nanoplastic particles (that are smaller than one micrometre) are also intentionally added to cosmetics to improve their feel and finish, and to personal care products, like face scrubs, toothpastes and shower gels, for their cleansing and exfoliating properties. These get washed off and into the sewage system and waterways.
According to scientists, all the different types of plastic humankind has recklessly created have their own chemical makeup and potential toxicity. And the urgent task ahead is to investigate what damage microplastics may do to the human body.
Albert Rizzo, the American Lung Association’s chief medical officer, quoted by National Geographic, cites the decades-long effort to convince governments that smoking causes cancer as the most relevant analogy.
“By the time we got enough evidence to lead to policy change, the cat was out of the bag. I can see plastics being the same thing. Will we find out in 40 years that microplastics in the lungs led to premature ageing of the lung or emphysema? We don’t know that. In the meantime, can we make plastics safer?” he asked.
Salvation for the human race from plastic could lie in the discovery of plastic-eating bacteria and fungi in Chinese coastal salt marshes.
The Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew announced in a statement in May last year that a total of 184 fungal and 55 bacterial strains capable of breaking down various plastics were found in Jiangsu province, eastern China.
While there are already 436 species of fungi and bacteria capable of breaking down plastic, Kew Gardens scientists believe the new additions present new possibilities for global waste management through the development of efficient enzymes designed to biologically degrade plastic waste.
But what I found even more interesting was that the researchers discovered these species in a distinct “terrestrial plastisphere” that was practically a “man-made ecological niche”. It was an ecosystem that had evolved to live with the presence of coastal plastic debris.
This is not the first instance of organisms mutating or evolving to live with something that is alien and potentially toxic to their well-being or existence.
Possibly the most well-known example is the peppered moth, which changed its colour from speckled white to black in response to soot and air pollution arising from Britain’s Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.
The minnow-like Atlantic killifish living in highly contaminated waters in the United States have evolved genetically to not only survive but also thrive in their environment polluted with normally lethal levels of toxic chemicals.
If humans cannot eradicate plastic from the planet, is it conceivable that our species can also evolve with plastic becoming a needed element in the human body?
After all, our bodies have evolved to need elements like iron, zinc and magnesium to function and stay healthy.
Plastic is essentially carbon and carbon is the most common element in the human body. It’s either that or it’s extinction by plastic for the human race and the rise of a new organism born of plastic.
In the meantime, today’s humans can just hope and pray that all the microplastic coursing through our bloodstreams and embedded in our tissues remain quiet and inert because we can’t stop breathing and eating.
The views expressed here are the author’s own.
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