To be human now is to be partly plastic. An article last week from the New York Times was about how we have ingested plastic nanoparticles into our bodies.
It is bad. In 2019, a study commissioned by the World Wide Fund for Nature found that the average person may be consuming as much as five grams of plastic every week – the equivalent, as the report’s authors put it, of an entire credit card.
“There is plastic in our bodies; it’s in our lungs and in our bowels and in the blood that pulses through us,” the NYT article begins. “We can’t see it, and we can’t feel it, but it is there. It is there in the water we drink and the food we eat, and even in the air that we breathe.
“We don’t know, yet, what it’s doing to us, because we have only quite recently become aware of its presence; but since we have learned of it, it has become a source of profound and multifarious cultural anxiety.
“Maybe it’s nothing; maybe it’s fine. Maybe this jumble of fragments – bits of water bottles, tires, polystyrene packaging, microbeads from cosmetics – is washing through us and causing no particular harm. But even if that was true, there would still remain the psychological impact of the knowledge that there is plastic in our flesh.
“This knowledge registers, in some vague way, as apocalyptic; it has the feel of a backhanded divine vengeance, sly and poetically appropriate. Maybe this has been our fate all along, to achieve final communion with our own garbage.”
Like the virus in COVID, we are dealing with something very small. Microplastic is the term being used. “But there is also, more worryingly still, the stuff you can’t see: so-called nano-plastics, which are a tiny fraction of the size of microplastics. These are capable of crossing the membranes between cells and have been observed to accumulate in the brains of fish.”
If it harms fish, it must eventually harm us too. Fish exposed to microplastics, the NYT article reports, were shown to have lower levels of growth and reproduction. And it affects fish down several generations.
Scientists have discovered that these minute particles can enter our bloodstream and potentially accumulate in our organs over time. Now comes research confirming that tiny plastic particles can breach the brain-blood barrier, a network of blood vessels and tissue that protects the brain from toxins and pathogens.
The article wonders: could microplastics be shortening our lives and making us stupider and less fertile? Experts now have a name for the emerging malady: plasticosis.
Plastics are an everyday part of our lives. A World Bank report notes that “In the Philippines, the plastics industry is not only vital to the national economy (contributing $2.3 billion in 2018), but plastics also provide low-cost consumer goods to poor and middle-income families.
“However, a high dependence on single-use plastics like multilayer sachets and pouches has led the Philippines to become a ‘sachet economy’ that continues to worsen the alarming levels of marine plastic pollution in the region. By some estimates, the Philippines consumes a staggering 163 million pieces of sachets every day.
“Like many rapidly developing countries, the Philippines grapples with unsustainable plastic production/consumption and insufficient solid waste management infrastructure…”
Comprising more than 7,500 islands, the economies and livelihoods of Philippine coastal communities, from fishing, shipping, and tourism are especially vulnerable to this tidal wave of plastic debris.
According to Ocean Conservancy and McKinsey (2015), the Philippines is the third-ranking contributor to plastic pollution in the world, with at least 2.7 million metric tons of plastic waste generated every year. It makes sense to call for Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) to hold corporations accountable.
Coca-Cola, Nestle, Universal Robina, Colgate and Unilever, among others, have been identified as the top plastic polluters. According to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), only nine percent of plastic worldwide is recycled, while the rest is incinerated, dumped in landfills, or improperly disposed of. Of this nine percent, only two percent are effectively recycled, while the others are downcycled and end up as plastic waste.
Companies must be made responsible for their plastic products and packaging’s end-of-life impact on the environment. These companies must be pressured or required by law to develop alternatives like fully biodegradable options for packaging like cassava bags or sugarcane bagasse takeout boxes. Or do more research on bacteria that eats and actually digests plastic. Or do a better job of recycling plastic they use.
It is like the cost of nuclear power that looks misleadingly cheap. But it should include the cost of retiring the power plant and dealing with spent fuel rods. The cost of sachet packaging should include proper disposal.
The NYT points out another scary fact: “In a study conducted last year, in which researchers in Italy analyzed the breast milk of 34 healthy new mothers, microplastics were present in 75 percent of the samples. A particularly cruel irony, this, given the association of breast milk with purity and naturalness, and given new parents’ anxieties about heating formula in plastic bottles. This research itself came in the wake of the revelation, in 2020, that microplastics had been found in human placentas.
Microplastics have also been found in human bloodstreams. Maybe 80 percent of the human population have microplastics in their flesh. Concern has also been expressed in the NYT article about an alarming effect of phthalates, a chemical used to increase the durability of plastics, in human bloodstreams. And because of it, babies are being born with smaller “taints.” (The taint was the distance between one’s penis and one’s anus.)
“Not only were the taints of infants shrinking at an alarming rate; so, too, were penises and testicles themselves… it’s literally changing the hormonal profile and the reproductive systems of human beings, and making us weaker, making us less masculine.”
Our bad habits have a way of haunting us. That’s happening now with microplastics. We know ka-plastikan is not good. But we are partly plastic now, so maybe that’s why many of us can’t help being… plastic.
Boo Chanco’s email address is bchanco@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco