Plastics, developed only in the last century and widely used only after the end of the Second World War, have become ubiquitous in our everyday lives.
Indeed, it’s getting hard to find things that don’t contain plastic, and if they do, odds are they’re packaged in containers may with plastic.
Indeed, as I write o, I do so on a plastic keyboard looking at a plastic-encased monitor, sipping coffee from a plastic-topped cup while wearing a robe made of plastic microfibers.
Do what’s wrong with this picture?
We begin with a public service announcement from the Plastic Pollution Coalition:
First, some background, via the National Academy of Science:
The plastics industry began in the early 1900s when the first synthetic plastic was created in the U.S. Since the industry began, annual global plastic production has exploded from some 1.5 million metric tons in 1950 to 359 million metric tons in 2018. The cumulative production of plastic surpassed eight billion metric tons worldwide, and it is expected to further increase in the coming decades. Plastics cause pollution at almost every stage of their lifecycle, starting with the use of fossil fuels for their production.
And while they add convenience to our fast-paced lives, plastics may also be killing us.
From Norwegian SciTech News:
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of chemicals from plastics can leach into water under natural conditions. This water may contain substances that we know are toxic under laboratory conditions, says Martin Wagner, an associate professor at NTNU’s Department of Biology.
Wagner is part of a research group that has investigated how ordinary plastic products leach chemicals into the water under natural conditions.
The plastic we surround ourselves with contains up to 20 000 different chemical compounds. Many of these chemicals are toxic under laboratory conditions, but so far we have known precious little about how harmful this plastic is for us.
These chemicals wouldn’t pose a danger to us if they stayed bound to the plastic and weren’t released into the environment. But we may not be so fortunate.
All plastics leach chemicals
“We examined 24 common plastic products over ten days to see if they leached chemical substances into water under natural conditions. We then examined the water for chemicals and toxicity,” says Wagner.
All of the products leached chemicals into the water. Several of the substances have potentially toxic effects.
Oxidative stress was associated with 22 of the 24 plastic products that leached substances into the water. This can damage cells and cause inflammation and chronic disease.
Thirteen of the products leached antiandrogens, which can affect men’s fertility.
One of the plastic products leached oestrogens that can affect fertility in women and men.
Plastics leach very differently
A single plastic product could leach up to 8700 different substances into the water. However, the amount of chemicals leached into the water varied greatly for different types of plastics. One product could release anywhere from 1 to 88 per cent of the assorted chemicals it contains.
The research group was able to identify with certainty only a small proportion – about 8 per cent – of the substances that leached into the various water samples. This means we still know very little about the effects of the rest of the chemicals.
Much more leaching than suspected
“Our research shows that plastic products leach many more chemicals than we previously knew about,” says Wagner.
Humans and other animals are far more exposed to various substances from plastic than we’ve previously known.
We know that some of these chemicals are toxic under laboratory conditions. Plastics used for wrapping food and for drinks are perhaps of particular concern.
“This study shows us that humans and other animals are far more exposed to various substances from plastic than we’ve previously known or than is reflected in Norway’s current health guidelines and health policy,” says Wagner.
All but one of the products that were screened came from Germany, but there is no indication that these plastics are any different in Norway.
Zdenka Bartosova, a staff engineer in NTNU’s Department of Biology, was also part of the research group. NTNU researchers collaborated with the Goethe-Universität and the Institute for Social-Ecological Research, both in Frankfurt am Main.
New studies reveal that one class of so-called forever chemicals linked to a wide range of physical ailments, are ubiquitous in our environment.
They’re called forever chemicals because they don’t degrade, remaining dangerous for decades and even centuries.
From the Guardian:
Many of the world’s plastic containers and bottles are contaminated with toxic PFAS, and new data suggests that it’s probably leaching into food, drinks, personal care products, pharmaceuticals, cleaning products and other items at potentially high levels.
It’s difficult to say with precision how many plastic containers are contaminated and what it means for consumers’ health because regulators and industry have done very little testing or tracking until this year, when the Environmental Protection Agency discovered that the chemicals were leaching into a mosquito pesticide. One US plastic company reported “fluorinating” – or effectively adding PFAS to – 300m containers in 2011.
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But public health advocates say new revelations suggest that the compounds are much more ubiquitous than previously thought, and fluorinated plastic containers, especially those used with food, probably represent a major new exposure point to PFAS.
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds that are used to make products like clothing and carpeting resistant to water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down and can accumulate in humans.
The chemicals are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid disease, plummeting sperm counts, kidney disease, decreased immunity and a range of other serious health problems.
Plastic pollution’s polar penetration
Plastic contamination pervades in the world’s oceans and waterways, and now it’s even embedded in the ice caps of the North and South Poles.
From Utrecht University:
Polar regions are regarded as some of the last areas on Earth that are pristine and relatively untouched by human influences. Yet, both North and South polar ice appear to contain significant amounts of nanoplastics, or plastic particles smaller than a micrometre in size. Nanoplastics may cause toxic effects in organisms, but since they’re difficult to measure, the worldwide extent of nanoplastic pollution remained unclear until now.
Using new methods to measure nanoplastics, an international team of scientists have now identified nanoscale plastic particles in ice samples from Greenland and Antarctica. The samples were derived from 14-meter-deep ice cores from Greenland and sea ice cores from Antarctica. Researchers from Utrecht University, the University of Copenhagen and the Université Libre de Bruxelles were involved in this study.
Earlier studies had already suggested that nanoplastic can be carried over distances by wind and water currents. Still, the research team were surprised to find substantial quantities in their samples.
Now we know that nanoplastics are transported to these corners of the Earth in these quantities. This indicates that nanoplastics is really a bigger pollution problem than we thought, said Dušan Materić, lead author of the study. In an earlier study, using the same techniques, his team identified nanoplastic particles in samples from the Alps.
Pollution dates to 1960s
Although Materić’s team are the first to identify nanoplastics in polar ice, their results show that nanoplastic contamination has been taking place for decades.
Our data suggest that nanoplastics pollution is not a new problem, said Materić.We are only now becoming aware of it, because we have recently developed the right method to measure it. In the Greenland core, we see nanoplastics pollution happening all the way from 1960s. So organisms in that region, and likely all over the world, have been exposed to it for quite some time now.
Different types of plastic
The teams identified several types of nanoplastic particles in polar ice. The most prominent nanoplastic type was polyethylene, which accounted for more than half of the particles. In the Greenland ice core, the team also found significant amounts of nanoparticles originating from tyre wear. The amount of nanoplastic particles appears to differ between the North and South ice core samples. The Greenland ice contained 13.2 ng/mL on average, whereas the Antarctic Sea ice contained 52.3 ng/mL.
Constraining sources
Given the large range of areas in which nanoplastics have now been identified, Materić and his team urge for more research into its toxicity and the extent of the pollution. The presence of nanoplastics in polar ice samples most likely involves a combination of complex processes that carried the particles. This could include both atmospheric and marine transport, (re)emission, deposition and ice incorporation.
Further studies are clearly needed to better constrain the source of theses contaminants to the polar regions.“
A short summary of key findings from the report itself:
- The most prominent nanoplastics type was PE, with relative contribution of >50%.
- In a 14 m firn core from Greenland, we detected on average 13.2 ng/mL nanoplastics.
- In sea ice from Antarctica, we detected on average 52.3 ng/mL nanoplastics.
- Tire wear nanoplastics are significant in the Northern but not in Southern polar site.
More on the implications from the Guardian:
Half the nanoplastics in the Antarctic ice were PE as well, but polypropylene was the next most common, used for food containers and pipes. No tyre particles were found in Antarctica, which is more distant from populated areas. The researchers took samples only from the centres of the ice cores to avoid contamination, and tested their system with control samples of pure water.
Previous studies have found plastic nanoparticles in rivers in the UK, seawater from the North Atlantic and lakes in Siberia, and snow in the Austrian alps. “But we assume the hotspots are continents where people live,” said Materić.
The researchers wrote: “Nanoplastics have shown various adverse effects on organisms. Human exposure to nanoplastics can result in cytotoxicity [and] inflammation.”
“The most important thing as a researcher is to accurately measure [the pollution] and then assess the situation,” Materić said. “We are in a very early stage to draw conclusions. But it seems that everywhere we have analysed, it is a very big problem. How big? We don’t know yet.”
And now for a musical break, featuring a prescient piece of music from Jefferson Airplane, released 45 years ago today:
Industry’s seven generations of willful ignorance
Plastic manufacturers have long known of their products’ harmful effects, yet have spent countless dollars in fighting any effort to regulate their filthy business.
From the Center for International Environmental Law [CIEL], a brief look at what they knew and when they knew it:
Plastics are pollutants of unique concern, as they do not break down quickly and accumulate in the environment as more is produced. Scientists first became aware of the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean in the 1950s, shortly after the introduction of oil-based plastics in consumer goods. The chemical and petroleum industries were aware of, or should have been aware of, the problems caused by their products by no later than the 1970s.
“Unfortunately, the answer to both when the plastic industry knew their products would contribute to massive public harms and what they did with that information suggests they followed Big Oil’s playbook on climate change: deny, confuse, and fight regulation and effective solutions,” says Steven Feit, CIEL Attorney and lead author of Fueling Plastics.
The plastics industry has opposed sustainable solutions and fought local regulations of disposable plastic products for decades, even as evidence of the plastic crisis continues to mount. While the industry acknowledges the problem, plastics producers often take the position that they are only responsible for plastic waste in the form of resin pellets and that all other forms of plastic waste are beyond their control.
“The narrative that consumers bear primary responsibility for the plastics crisis is a public relations myth perpetuated by the petrochemical industry,” continues Feit. “Consumer changes on their own won’t solve the plastics crisis, as hundreds of billions of dollars from the petrochemical industry are being poured into new plastic production. We need a global, binding treaty that regulates plastic pollution throughout its lifecycle, from well head production to ocean waste.”
Plastics linked to yet another disease
We’ve written extensively about plastics and their suspected role in a host of physical and psychological ailments, and now there’s yet another ailment in which plastic is the key suspect.
From Norwegian SciTech News:
Microplastics — tiny pieces of plastic less than 5 mm in length — are everywhere, from bottled water to food to air. According to recent estimates, people consume tens of thousands of these particles each year, with unknown health consequences. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology found that people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) have more microplastics in their feces than healthy controls, suggesting that the fragments could be related to the disease process.
The prevalence of IBD, which includes Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, is rising globally. Characterized by chronic inflammation of the digestive tract, IBD can be triggered or made worse by diet and environmental factors. Microplastics can cause intestinal inflammation, gut microbiome disturbances and other problems in animal models, so Faming Zhang, Yan Zhang and colleagues wondered if they could also contribute to IBD. As a first step toward finding out, the researchers wanted to compare the levels of microplastics in feces from healthy subjects and people with different severities of IBD.
The team obtained fecal samples from 50 healthy people and 52 people with IBD from different geographic regions of China. Analysis of the samples showed that feces from IBD patients contained about 1.5 times more microplastic particles per gram than those from healthy subjects. The microplastics had similar shapes (mostly sheets and fibers) in the two groups, but the IBD feces had more small (less than 50 μm) particles. The two most common types of plastic in both groups were polyethylene terephthalate (PET; used in bottles and food containers) and polyamide (PA; found in food packaging and textiles). People with more severe IBD symptoms tended to have higher levels of fecal microplastics. Through a questionnaire, the researchers found that people in both groups who drank bottled water, ate takeaway food and were often exposed to dust had more microplastics in their feces. These results suggest that people with IBD may be exposed to more microplastics in their gastrointestinal tract. However, it’s still unclear whether this exposure could cause or contribute to IBD, or whether people with IBD accumulate more fecal microplastics as a result of their disease, the researcher say.
And the U.S. is the world’s biggest culprit
From United Press International:
Plastic waste of all shapes and sizes permeates the world’s oceans. It shows up on beaches, in fish and even in Arctic sea ice. And a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine makes clear that the United States is a big part of the problem.
As the report shows, the United States produces a large share of the global supply of plastic resin — the precursor material to all plastic industrial and consumer products. It also imports and exports billions of dollars’ worth of plastic products every year.
On a per capita basis, the United States produces an order of magnitude more plastic waste than China — a nation often vilified over pollution-related issues. These findings build off a study published in 2020 that concluded that the United States is the largest global source of plastic waste, including plastics shipped to other countries that later are mismanaged. Advertisement
And only a small fraction of plastic in U.S. household waste streams is recycled. The study calls current U.S. recycling systems “grossly insufficient to manage the diversity, complexity and quantity of plastic waste.”
Just how does the U.S. stack up compared to all other countries?
The graphic from the National Academy of Sciences report spells it out:
And then there’s the COVID plastics problem
From Higher Education Press, via EurekaAlert!:
[T]he pandemic has increased the generation of medical waste by 18%–425%. It is estimated that the daily output of COVID-19 related medical waste in the world has increased from 200 tons per day in February to more than 29000 tons per day in September during 2020. Secondly, in the long term, the demand for personal protective equipment will continue to grow. Moreover, the lockdown, isolation, quarantine and other measures have greatly reduced the volume of commercial waste in cities, especially in tourist cities, some of which have been transformed into domestic waste.
The spread of COVID-19 has also changed residents’ consumption behaviors. People are more willing to use online shopping and food delivery services during the pandemic than before. As a result, it may lead to an increase in the amount of disposable plastic waste, which seems to conflict with the previous plastic restriction policies and should be paid attention to. In addition, the implementation of lockdown and isolation policies could have led to a certain amount of food waste, but meanwhile, it may also help people improve the consciousness of reducing food waste.
The pandemic has led to a surge in medical waste, which may far exceed the available capacity of the management system. Therefore, it is necessary to update the strategies and plans for emergency medical waste treatment during and after the pandemic. Many countries have adjusted or updated their emergency waste management policies under the attack of COVID-19, from which China could learn valuable experiences, such as establishing a comprehensive disposal system of medical waste combining centralized disposal with on-site emergency disposal, for example, mobile treatment equipment and industrial kilns for medical waste disposal.
And it’s not just plastic trash
Even the production of plastics produces massive amounts of global warming chemicals.
From the Natural Resources Defense Council:
Our addiction to plastic also has negative impacts on the climate. A recent report showed that plastic production contributes to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions at every point in its life cycle. The process of drilling for plastic’s source materials, oil and gas, leads to methane leaking and flaring and is often combined with clearing forests and wetlands that otherwise would have sequestered carbon. Refineries where crude oil is turned into plastic make up one of the most greenhouse gas–intensive industries in the manufacturing sector. And “cracker plants”—which break, or “crack,” ethane molecules, a component of natural gas, into the chemical building blocks of plastic products—are energy intensive and highly polluting. In 2015 a mere 24 of these ethane cracker facilities in the United States had the combined carbon output of 3.8 million passenger vehicles. And the recent fracking boom, resulting in a surplus of oil, is fueling a subsequent rise in cracker plants, too. That’s bad news for our carbon reduction goals: if plastic production continues unabated, its greenhouse gas emissions could reach 1.34 gigatons per year by 2030—equal to adding nearly 300 new coal-fired power plants—even as the need to curb global climate change becomes more urgent.
A malady diagnosed decades ago
A 2017 report from the Center for International Environmental Law reveals that scientists and manufacturers knew of plastic problems seven decades ago, with companies qquickly adopting a “blame the consumers” line:
Plastics are pollutants of unique concern, as they do not break down quickly and accumulate in the environment as more is produced. Scientists first became aware of the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean in the 1950s, shortly after the introduction of oil-based plastics in consumer goods. The chemical and petroleum industries were aware of, or should have been aware of, the problems caused by their products by no later than the 1970s, according to the report.
“Unfortunately, the answer to both when the plastic industry knew their products would contribute to massive public harms and what they did with that information suggests they followed Big Oil’s playbook on climate change: deny, confuse, and fight regulation and effective solutions,” says Steven Feit, CIEL Attorney and lead author of Fueling Plastics.
The plastics industry has opposed sustainable solutions and fought local regulations of disposable plastic products for decades, even as evidence of the plastic crisis continues to mount. While the industry acknowledges the problem, plastics producers often take the position that they are only responsible for plastic waste in the form of resin pellets and that all other forms of plastic waste are beyond their control.
“The narrative that consumers bear primary responsibility for the plastics crisis is a public relations myth perpetuated by the petrochemical industry,” continues Feit. “Consumer changes on their own won’t solve the plastics crisis, as hundreds of billions of dollars from the petrochemical industry are being poured into new plastic production. We need a global, binding treaty that regulates plastic pollution throughout its lifecycle, from well head production to ocean waste.”
The Koch brothers do their bit
One American family joined the exalted ranks of America’s richest plutocratic dynasties whilst, amongst other things, firing up their oil pipelines and refineries refineries to spew forth an ocean of the complex compounds essential to conjuring up plastic.
Brothers Charles and now-deceased David Koch symbolize the dangerous intersection of wealth and political extremism.
From the Guardian:
Charles and his late brother David were second-generation extremists. Their father, Fred, was not only one of the founders of the John Birch Society, which famously accused President Dwight Eisenhower of being a “tool of the communists”. He also helped the Nazis construct their third-largest oil refinery, which produced fuel for the Luftwaffe – although you would have to read Jane Mayer’s brilliant book, Dark Money, to learn that particular detail.
In 1980, David Koch was the Libertarian candidate for vice-president. The party’s modest plans included the abolition of “Medicare, Medicaid, social security (which would be made voluntary), the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.”
The Koch ideology is classical libertarian, meaning that while they oppose almost all regulations affecting businesses, their funding has supported immigration rights and pro-choice organizations, the latter opposed by their own Catholic church.
The Kochs have funded some of the most extreme pro-Republican fundibng groups, as the New York Times noted in its 23 August 2019 obituary for David Koch:
Since the 1970s, the Kochs have spent at least $100 million — some estimates put it at much more — to transform a fringe movement into a formidable political force aimed at moving America to the far right by influencing the outcome of elections, undoing limits on campaign contributions and promoting conservative candidacies, think tanks and policies.
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Still, he and his brother acknowledged roles in founding and contributing money to Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing advocacy group that was widely reported to have provided logistical backing for the Tea Party and other organizations in election campaigns and the promotion of conservative causes.
Among the groups they supported was the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative state legislators and corporate lobbyists. Alec, as the group is known, drafts model state legislation that members may customize for introduction as proposed laws to cut taxes, combat illegal immigration, loosen environmental regulations, weaken labor unions and oppose gun laws.
A November report from Fortune notes the massive funding the Kochs provided for Trump’s congressional hallelujah chorus:
Through Americans for Prosperity, they got over 400 members of Congress to sign a pledge to vote against climate change legislation that does not include equivalent tax cuts. In California, they were influential in rolling back emission regulations, and between 1997 and 2018 they spent $145,555,197 financing nearly 100 groups that attacked climate change science.
Following the 2011 Supreme Court Citizens United decision, the Kochs spent nearly $200 million to elect Republicans who said that they would not pass any new environmental regulations.
“We did not create the tea party. We shared their concern about unsustainable government spending, and we supported some tea-party groups on that issue,” [Charles] Koch wrote in an email to Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas Belkin on Friday. “But it seems to me the tea party was largely unsuccessful long-term, given that we’re coming off a Republican administration with the largest government spending in history.”
The Kochs are also major players in the climate change denial business.
To conclude, a word of advice
To conclude. we offer up a clip from The Graduate, released the same year as Jefferson Airplane’s “Plastic Fantastic Lover,” in which the newly graduated Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, receives some advice for the future from a businessman:
