SECOND THOUGHTS
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Dominika Front
EDITING & PROOFREADING
Adrianna Bartoszek
Dominika Front
Piotr Gorczyński
Karolina Kordońska
Julia Krzeszowska
Kacper Kusio
Sara Kusio
Antonina Nizielska
Aleksandra Socha
Dawid Wośko
Helena Żegnałek
ILLUSTRATORS:
Janek Bodzioch
Daria Chmielewska
Paulina Durakiewicz
Julia Kozłowska
Sanaz Nouri
Palina Sachyvets
Natalia Urban
FRONT COVER DESIGN
Natalia Urban
DESIGN AND LAYOUT
Janek Bodzioch
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BACK COVER DESIGN
Julia Kozłowska
The views and opinions expressed through our magazine, social media, websites or any medium of information we send out are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the Second Thoughts student club. Any content provided by our authors and designers are of their opinion and are not intended to malign anyone else’s opinion or beliefs.
When we decided on the topic of this issue, I almost instantly had the concept for the lead in my head. Because what is white noise, really? Surely, a marvellous book by Don DeLillo (sadly no text about it here). But in the most basic meaning of the word, it refers to a random signal at equal intensity, especially one that obscures other sounds. You could hear this buzz from old television sets. Metaphorically speaking, one can also use this phrase to describe a meaningless or disturbing commotion, a nonsensical chatter, or a constant information supply in which details are occluded. Pondering briefly upon the facets of this definition, a thing came to my mind. A thing that can be found virtually everywhere, and that offers a multitude of options. The Żabka shops.
Żabka’s 11,000th store opened in Warsaw in December 2024. While the brand has been around for nearly 30 years, the real explosion in store numbers has taken place in just the past few years. The company has been aiming to open a thousand new stores annually – a goal they’ve largely managed to achieve so far. You’ve probably noticed it yourself – Żabka stores are everywhere. Sometimes they’re right across the street from each other, and new ones seem to appear out of thin air. The question is: do we need this many? And financially, can this model even be sustainable?
Janek Bodzioch
Surprisingly, it is. Clusters, a concept introduced first by Michael E. Porter in the 1990s, are centres that connect enterprises where competitors work together in order to gain profit. They nurture cooperation as well as competition. Hollywood and Silicon Valley are the best-known examples. Porter writes that “[c]ompared with market transactions among dispersed and random buyers and sellers, the proximity of companies and institutions in one location—and the repeated exchanges among them—fosters better coordination and trust”. At the same time, business rivals compete to attract and keep clients, thus enhancing business efficiency.
Initially, Porter’s concept involved the cooperation of businesses – everyone contributes and in turn makes a profit. However, why share the profit with other companies when you can have it all to yourself? This is exactly what Starbucks did in the 90s. As the company expanded throughout the U.S., it relied on the cluster strategy by opening numerous cafés in close proximity. The idea was simple: more locations meant greater convenience for customers, stronger brand presence, and built-in advertising – especially since Starbucks relied little on traditional marketing at the time. This approach fuelled the company’s rapid growth. Just like Starbucks, by clustering its shops, Żabka gains a decisive advantage: it prohibits other enterprises from starting and crushes competition. The key difference between Starbucks and Żabka? Ownership. Unlike Żabka, which operates on a franchise basis, Starbucks owns all its cafés. That means it never had to deal with frustrated franchisees losing their life savings when a location failed. Personal dramas aside, even though not every store thrives, generally, the company brings in money. Just a means to an end, right?
Żabka fills all the gaps it possibly can. Spatial clustering is just one example. This company started out as a convenience store chain but soon expanded the meaning of the word “convenience”. After rebranding in 2016, it started offering healthy snacks, coffee from a coffee machine, and nowfamous hot dogs and other warm foods. The company also owns Maczfit, a catering service that offers box diets. Moreover, they have their own delivery service, Jush, with an option to order online. You don’t even have to visit the nearest store (although you can be 100% positive it is very close), because the store will come to you! But Żabka offers a far broader scope of services than only foods and drinks. You can post and pick up parcels (DPD, DHL, Poczta Polska), deposit and withdraw money as well as pay the bills, have your shoes (!) and smartphone (!) fixed, buy a gift card, have your vehicle (e-scooter included) insured, and even get an online doctor consultation. Finally, in January, the company announced that it is considering the introduction of a transport service. Why get an Uber, go to the post office, and a shoemaker, when you can just use Żabka’s offer?
You might be wondering why this text opens an issue on white noise. As I mentioned earlier, white noise drowns out other sounds. In many ways, Żabka operates the same way – steadily creeping forward, saturating every corner, and suffocating other businesses in the process. In this issue, our authors invite you to discover the multitude of meanings behind the topic. Tune in. Let’s dive into the random buzz of white noise.
Leader: Żabkotopia | Dominika Front
5 I Saw the TV Glow and It Terrified Me | Julia Kozłowska SOCIAL
10 Why Do We Love to Suffer? | Hanna Bondarenko POLITICAL
13 “How Was the Best Case Scenario Joe Biden?” | Aleksandra Socha SCIENCE
17 I’ve Got Plastic on My Mind (And in My Body Too) | Dominika Front
Julia Kozłowska
I Saw the TV Glow and It Terrified Me
“Do they see me staring?” the thought penetrated my mind, making my skin crawl. The people did not notice my sudden distress, but maybe they were just pretending out of politeness. I slowly stood up and started backing away, almost knocking over my plate of cut fruits. Apples were always my favorite, even though they made my lips feel a little bit itchy. That’s what intrigued me about them, I think. Delicious, comforting in their familiarity, and yet, paradoxically causing physical discomfort. One, two, three steps. I could feel my tiny spine bumping directly into grandma’s coffee table. I was petrified, but never shifted my gaze away from the silver screen. The concept of actors, directors, and camera operators was still foreign to me. I will never forget the feeling of accidentally violating someone’s privacy, and even worse, being watched myself.
Another time, my insomniac child self set on a journey to the kitchen to get a glass of cold water as a pitiful, final attempt at raising my chances of falling asleep. Walking through the dark hallway as fast as I could, I noticed a faint light coming from the living room. My dad was asleep on the couch, snoring like a bear mid-hibernation, when my ears picked up something else. A soft murmur coming out of the TV. It was mesmerizing. In that moment I felt like I could watch the screen for hours, listening to its peculiar melody. But at the same time, I could not banish one thought from my mind: “I shouldn’t be seeing this.” There was something awfully wrong about the addictive properties of TV static. Both the sound and the snowy visuals seemed to threaten me with the ability to either suck me into another realm or let out something (or someone) dangerous into my family home.
Those random thoughts of an anxious preschooler with a wild imagination happen to correlate with Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott’s observations about the portrayal of TV in horror. In the book TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen, Jowett and Abbott demonstrate how TV horror infiltrates our homes, our safe spaces, and continues to push the limits of socially acceptable content in popular media. There even is an established horror trope of characterizing the television as a portal to another realm, some of the most famous examples being Poltergeist and both the Japanese and American versions of The Ring. Nostalgic aesthetics of television snow and crunchy VHS tape recordings are used as visual shorthand for understanding the TV as a conduit between the spiritual and the material world. Why? Because of white noise.
Static would appear on old TV screens whenever there would be no signal from the broadcaster. It was like a hidden realm existing in the liminal space in-between TV channels or specific transmissions. This liminality is a perfect setup for horror scenarios because it can create a new threat lurking on the other side of the screen. In Poltergeist and The Ring, the viewer recognizes the TV as a portal because of the way it is stylized even before ghosts start coming out of the screen and threatening the characters’ fragile sense of security.
According to Jowett and Abbott, Poltergeist’s TV has the properties of “both a wondrous and a frightening presence in the home.” Most people look at the family television through a practical lens. They know that it works but not precisely how it works. Poltergeist’s Freeling family believe their TV to be safe despite knowing very little about it. For instance, they treat the fact that the same remote control affects their TV as well as their next-door neighbor’s as a minor inconvenience, not as an opportunity to broaden their knowledge and find a solution to this problem. To many people the technology making TV transmissions possible is more akin to magic. No matter how mundane inventions like the TV set or the internet might seem to us, to some they are still shrouded in mystery, and, as Jowett and Abbott point out, mystery can trigger wonder as well as fright. I could say the same about my love for apples. There is some special irony in my comfort food routinely causing me discomfort.
TVs in horror are not restricted to just being conduits between the land of the living and the dead. As Jowett and Abbott highlight, memory can also be a haunting. Films such as The Ring or Sinister, which play into the cursed tapes trope, highlight TV’s time-morphing properties. The recorded memories gradually destroy the people exposed to the tapes once their obsession with analyzing the past devours them.
TVs disrupt the linear flow of time. They allow the viewer to stop, rewind, and replay specific moments, focus on the most minute details, and find hidden faces in the shadows, encouraging the watcher to pay close attention. Traditional rules of time and space do not apply here. Even outside of horror cinema, television screens can be windows into the past. You can watch old family home videos to reminisce about the good old days, switch to 80s sitcoms with canned laughter of people from the 60s, or watch early films of baby-faced award-winning actors forever frozen in time. You can also see those who are long gone. It is a bit cliché to mention, but watching Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting still feels like being stabbed in the heart with hundreds of needles. In a way, the viewer can be seen as a time traveler who is given the opportunity to watch famous creatives in their prime, and they can do it as many times as they please. The viewer can stop, rewind, replay, and… spiral.
Daria Chmielewska
Jane Schoenbrun’s most recent film I Saw the TV Glow takes the idea of characterizing the television screen as a conduit even further, making it a link between alternate realities. I Saw the TV Glow tells the story of Owen and Maddie, two teenagers obsessed with the supernatural teen drama The Pink Opaque. Owen and Maddie feel overwhelmed by family problems, the growing discomfort in their own bodies, and the societal pressure to conform to gender norms, which causes them to seek escapism in their favorite TV show. They begin to identify themselves so deeply with its protagonists, Isabel and Tara, that they start to dissociate from real life and their own bodies more and more often.
The TV lures the viewer with the promise of finding comfort in the fictional world and creates a mental separation between body and mind. When Owen and Maddie watch The Pink Opaque, they are hunched over, trying to be as close to the screen as possible, mouths slightly opened. Once again, TV is the cause of dissociation. Mentally sucked into the show where they feel at home, they leave their numb bodies stuck on the couch. When Maddie and Owen are interacting in the real world, they look stiff, uncomfortable, and not fully aware of their reality. Subtle static in the background contributes to Schoenbrun’s signature surreal aesthetics, hinting at a possible plot twist straight out of The Truman Show.
The lines between the real and the unreal are blurred: Owen goes to Void High School (VHS for short) and talks with Maddie at a queer-friendly bar Double Lunch (referenced in the show). Maddie starts to pick up on these subtle, uncanny details and attempts to convince her friend that they are living in a simulation. She even comes up with a plan for her and Owen to die and be reborn in their real bodies. Sounds like complete insanity, but the twist is, Maddie turns out to be right; their lives are fake, staged by the villain of The Pink Opaque – Mr. Melancholy. Hints of this fakeness become increasingly frequent as Owen tries to deny them and repress his identity as Isabel, his physical health worsening as a result. He repeats a line from the show – “they can’t hurt you if you don’t think about them” – like a religious mantra. By the end, the references to The Pink Opaque become overt, with arcade machines literally spelling it out to the viewer: “Mr. Melancholy’s Midnight Dash. The Race for Your Life,” and the most obvious one, “YOU ARE DYING.” This is where the horror of I Saw the TV Glow lies: being aware that your life is killing you, having the universe scream at you to get out, and yet being deathly afraid of starting anew. The first step will always be the hardest one to take, especially when you no longer trust yourself to distinguish reality from fiction.
Daria Chmielewska
Julia Kozłowska
Hanna Bondarenko
Why Do We Love to Suffer?
I hate happy endings in books and films. They never seem to be right. Every time I read something like “and then they lived happily ever after”, I feel as if I was in Barbie Land riding an artificial pink pony. Why does happiness seem so fake sometimes? Is it just poor screenwriting? Maybe, but I’d look for the answers elsewhere. Namely, in the lack of suffering.
Throughout the history of art, pain has been the key ingredient of all masterpieces. “Art doesn’t typically get made by happy people” – writes Gabrielle Zevin in her bestseller Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Think of the greatest movies of all time, and you will hardly name one that’s all peaches and cream. Most of them are full of hardship and misery. Even when it comes to musicians, we can easily find many who have built their entire repertoires around the topics of moral dilemmas and difficult experiences. Look no further than Billie Eilish or Lana del Rey. Struggles are the soundtrack to everybody’s life.
We need to overcome obstacles in order to attribute some sense to the things we do or experience. Scientists have long noticed this causal chain and have put forward hypotheses to explain this. Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, claims that pain serves us by adding meaning and value to our lives. “I think there’s no meaning if there’s no suffering”, says Bloom. What are you more likely to boast about: passing a tough exam or a simple test? We tend to associate suffering and difficulties with a reason for pride, while things that come easily to us usually remain unnoticed. Pain is inextricably linked to the neurological features of our brain. To keep itself “in good shape” it needs constant stimulation in the form of challenges. Whenever we do something strenuous and demanding our neurons grow and multiply. In other words, we develop through pain.
Suffering can take many forms. For instance, it can involve intentionally putting ourselves in less favourable positions. This deliberate suffering is often praised and considered a sign of morality and good. Daylian Cane and George Newman, professors at Yale’s School of Management, have conducted research on this feature of perception of reality. They ran four experiments and found out that many people consider selflessness an inherent element of any act of help.
Sanaz Nouri
In one of the experiments, 145 adults were asked to give their opinions about two ways of developing a business. The first one was to donate money to a charity which would boost the business’ reputation and attract new clients. The second way was to invest the same amount of money for advertising. Surprisingly, participants evaluated the first method more negatively than the latter. They stated that the entrepreneur who donated money was not altruistic enough while the entrepreneur who spent money on advertising wasn’t even judged from the perspective of altruism. He was given a neutral rating. At the same time, study participants expected selflessness from the donor. They would rather he hadn’t donated money at all. His good deed was diminished since he did it without suffering.
This phenomenon is called tainted altruism. It explains why we sometimes see doing some good as worse than doing no good at all. Imagine that the company you’re working at is looking for new employees. Your manager tells you that if you recommend a person and they get the position, you will be given a bonus. In the end, the friend you recommended is hired, and the bonus makes it to your bank account. It’s a win-win situation. However, you face a lot of judgement and comments about helping your friend only for your own benefit, simply because you didn’t have to suffer in the process. Our focus is not on the final effect, but whether or not you had to endure hardship to achieve it.
In the end, I suppose my dissatisfaction with happy endings makes perfect sense. I can’t relate to a situation which suggests that the rest of a character’s life will go flawlessly right, because mine rarely does. We all want some reassurance that we’re not the only ones who are miserable and stuck with an imperfect life scenario. Why not give the audience what they really want and make a perfect ending a little bit imperfect? Thus, if by any chance you’re thinking about writing a novel or directing a movie, do make your characters suffer a bit. Your audience will love it.
Sanaz Nouri
Aleksandra Socha
“How Was the Best Case Scenario Joe Biden?”
Disclaimer: This piece was originally written in July 2024, before the November election which would ultimately end in Donald Trump’s win over Kamala Harris
The expectations for Joe Biden’s first (and what would become his last) 2024 presidential debate were already quite low before he finally came face-to-face with Donald Trump on June 27. Biden’s critics have nicknamed him “Sleepy Joe,” citing his slow speech, occasional stuttering, and tendency to lose his train of thought halfway through bizarre anecdotes about men in suits kissing, cannibals, or a gangster named “Corn Pop.” As for Biden’s Republican opponent and predecessor, Donald Trump’s performance would undoubtedly be graded on a curve of his own making. If he had survived the debate without rambling, losing his temper, or constantly interrupting Biden, as he did in 2020, he’d have likely come out victorious. So while the bar for both politicians’ performances was barely above the floor, the blowback that came next was unprecedented. What followed was pure shock and panic, a sense of betrayal, and an unparalleled number of calls for Biden to step down as presidential candidate. Although the debate backfired in such a spectacular fashion that even Biden’s fiercest allies came to oppose him, President Biden initially turned a blind eye to the criticism, letting it fall on deaf ears. Biden finally dropped out of the race on July 21 and immediately backed the candidacy of Vice President Kamala
Harris, anointing her as his replacement just 107 days before the election. However, Biden’s age and other shortcomings have been well-known for years – so how come they went unaddressed for such a long time? And in an environment dominated by voices dissatisfied with Biden, how did he even make it that far into his campaign run?
Let’s rewind the clock to four years ago. After Barack Obama, Biden didn’t seem like the obvious contender for the next Democratic President. Obama, a symbol of hope and progress for Americans, famously used the single word “change” as his 2008 slogan; short and sweet, and certainly to the point. With Obama emerged an era of Americans who rejected politics as usual and who believed that a profound change within the Democratic Party was possible. If a young, relatively inexperienced biracial man with a Muslim-sounding name was able to become President, surely a generation of other young, energetic, diverse politicians would follow. Perhaps the 2020 voters would nominate a woman, like Elizabeth Warren, or a gay millennial, like Pete Buttigieg, or another racial minority, like Kamala Harris. Certainly, it would have to be a progressive candidate. Right? Right?
Not exactly. During the 2020 primary, Democratic voters ended up electing Joe Biden as their nominee. He was 78 when he assumed office, making him the oldest President ever elected. He was a moderate
who clashed with his fellow Democrats over their support for a progressive agenda. With Biden’s history of brutal gaffes and support for semi-conservative values, voters felt that he was alienated from the struggles of the increasingly diverse and young Democratic electorate. Biden was vanilla ice cream. But in 2020, when Democratic voters were desperately searching for an alternative to Donald Trump’s fire and fury, vanilla suddenly seemed good enough to eat. “Grandpa Joe” was the safe option – already vetted and experienced, well-known and liked for his role in Obama’s White House, and moderate enough to appeal to undecided voters and the Republicans who had drifted from Trump. In 2020, Democrats settled for Biden the way my family settles for French fries when everyone wants something different for dinner. But here’s the catch: Biden was supposed to be a bridge between the old and the new generation. While he never outwardly said he’d resign after the end of his first term, his comments about being a “transition candidate” made most Democrats assume that he wouldn’t seek reelection. So what happened?
As Franklin Foer, the author of The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future claims, Biden’s “heroic self-conception” propelled him to believe that fate pushed him into his position. Biden publicly maintains he decided to seek reelection because he was the only one who could beat Donald Trump. But even if Biden did believe that, the polls didn’t seem to agree with him. In July 2020, four months before the election, Biden was beating Trump by 9 points on average. In 2024, it was Trump who was 2 points ahead of Biden. He and his advisors argued that the polls were unreliable, asserting that Trump’s advantage fell within the margin of error. But in today’s highly polarized society, the Electoral College, the American system of voting, tends to give an advantage to the Republican candidate. Last time Biden won by a margin of around 40,000 votes spread over 3 swing states. In 2024, it was almost certain that the election was also going to be on the margins. It was safe to assume that the choice between Biden and Trump would depend on a group of voters so small that it couldn’t even fill an American football field. This is precisely why Biden couldn’t afford to lose any of his 2020 voters.
As the race progressed, the inevitable slowly became clear – Biden was losing his voters’ support. But the summer of 2024 was not the first time Americans expressed their dissatisfaction with Biden or called on him to step down. His approval rating started tanking in August 2021, after the U.S.’s messy withdrawal from Afghanistan resulted in the Taliban takeover. Rather than apologizing, Biden, who tends to double down when cornered and criticized, stood behind his decision. Perhaps this stubbornness and lack of humility is what irked his constituents the most. September 2021 marked the first time more voters disapproved than approved of Biden’s handling of the presidency. Since then, he’s suffered from historically low approval ratings. Voters have blamed Biden for inflation, the housing crisis, and chaos within the immigration system. Imagine arriving at work only to discover a mere 38% of the people you work for approve of the job you’re doing. Unless you’re Joe Biden, you might take it as a hint that you should probably quit when your contract is up. Instead, Biden kept pleading with voters to grant him another term to “finish the job” without ever admitting that some of his decisions were mistakes. So who says he was the right person to “finish the job”?
At first glance, it might seem like the Democratic base did. In the U.S., the presidential nominee from each party is chosen not by party leadership, but by the party’s voters through a primary election. But if the sitting President is looking to secure a second term, the process is a mere technicality. After the initial backlash to Biden’s debate performance, a handful of friends and relatives all asked me the same question: “Why wouldn’t the Democratic Party simply nominate someone else in his place?” To put it crudely, that’s because, at the time, Biden was the Democratic Party. Unlike Poland, political parties in the U.S. don’t have an official leader. Usually, the party is de facto led by its highest-ranking politician. When Biden was sworn in as President, he became the unofficial head
of the party. When Biden said “jump,” the Democratic National Committee would ask, “How high?”. This explains why no major politician challenged Biden during the 2024 primaries, and why Biden was able to win them by a large margin.
Make no mistake – as already established, Biden’s straightforward primary win didn’t actually mean that he was popular. It also didn’t mean that he was completely unchallenged. Dean Phillips, a little-known congressman from Minnesota, decided to run against Biden. Although he claimed to be in agreement with Biden over most policy issues, Phillips took notice of what other Democratic officials had overlooked – Biden’s chances of
Paulina Durakiewicz
defeating Donald Trump were slipping by the day (Phillips has since been dubbed the “modern Cassandra of American politics”). Phillips wanted to provide Democrats with an electable alternative, but his campaign was so obscure and loathed by most officials that it never gained much traction. Phillips even claimed that Democratic leadership actively suppressed his campaign. Due to his weak showings, he finally dropped out in March and endorsed Biden. At the same time, a small but significant fraction of Democratic voters chose to demonstrate their opposition to Biden’s reelection, especially in the light of his support for Israel during the invasion of Gaza. Disappointed Democrats voted “undecided” during their primaries, sending Biden a clear signal of disapproval. According to a 2023 poll by NBC News Survey, 70% of Americans didn’t want Biden to run for reelection. Crucially, this included a half of his own electorate – 51% of Democrats. But the Democratic primary was a series of extremely low turnout votes that acted as a mere illusion of party unity, culminating in Biden’s inevitable win. With no suitable alternative, most Democrats resigned themselves to Biden and his baggage. If 2020 Biden was vanilla ice cream, the 2024 version was expired milk. In the words of CNN political commentator Bakari Sellers: “It is what it is.”
Yet, all this seems to have changed after the first presidential debate, which showcased Biden’s greatest weakness: his age. It’s easy to understand why American were concerned – if reelected, Biden would end his second term as an 86-year-old. In April, an Ipsos and Reuters poll showed that 81% of Americans considered him too old for his role. Biden’s debate against Trump was meant to squash those concerns. Instead, it accelerated them. What was most striking about the response to Biden’s disastrous performance was that it came not just from the voters, but also from inside the house, with major liberal politicians, donors, journalists, and pundits turning against the President. Jon Favreau, a political commentator and former head speechwriter for President Obama, called it the worst debate he’d ever seen. Numerous congresspeople called on Biden to resign. Even the actor George Clooney, a loyal donor and surrogate to Biden, asked the President to withdraw from the race. Just weeks before, these pundits, politicians, and supporters had backed and defended him. But the debate opened their eyes to what the voters had worried about for years. Biden’s age was just the tip of the iceberg.
Most significantly, it was Biden’s lack of humility and unwillingness to listen which exasperated the American public. Time after time, he continued to ask his voters to blindly put their faith in him. When criticized or questioned, he doubled down, insisting voters’ concerns were manufactured by journalists and acting like a victim of media frenzy. Biden’s legacy will ultimately be that of a man who chose unity over power – but let’s keep in mind that even when he decided to drop out of the race, he signaled he was doing it for the sake of party unity, not because he believed the nation’s worries were valid.
I’ve Got Plastic on My Mind
(And in My Body Too)
Note: this article is filled with links. You don’t have to read them to follow the text. Rather, they are there should anyone be more curious and/or wish to fact-check the author.
Plastic’s great. It’s cheap, it’s comfortable; it allows you to store food and keep stuff; it makes up tyres, plumbing, household appliances, wrappers, electronics, paint, clothes, and much more. No wonder that since its invention, we’ve been obsessed with it.
But it does come with severe drawbacks. Some plastics are harmful, and may cause cancer or tamper with bodily hormones. On top of that, we are producing more plastic than we need and more than our recycling systems can handle. Typical decomposition time is 500-1000 years. During that time, it pulverises and gets scattered all around the world. And that’s a problem – it would be difficult to swallow a plastic bottle, but when it comes in pieces smaller than 5 millimetres? Piece of plastic cake. Actually, the amount of plastic we eat is equivalent to a credit card. Every week.
Such pieces, 5 mm or smaller, are called microplastics (MPs). Nanoplastics, a subtype of microplastics, are smaller than 1,000 nanometres (nm) and can’t be seen by the human eye. There are two types of microplastics. Primary microplastics are manufactured so small on purpose, while secondary microplastics are the product of the degradation of larger plastics during a process called fragmentation.
Microplastics come from various sources. One way they may enter the environment is through washing our clothes. During each washing cycle, a garment sheds fibres that are not filtered by the washing machine, which then enter the water cycle. Actually, up to 35% of ocean microplastic pollution comes from textiles, such as polyester, acrylic, or nylon.
Other sources of MPs include tyre erosion; shipping and transport, when packages are thrown away; and the construction industry, which uses lots of plastic materials, such as Styrofoam. A significant portion of microplastics comes from the fishing industry, especially from rope abrasion and fishing gear that is dumped in the water.
Palina Sachyvets
One of the biggest offenders in this regard is the cosmetics industry, which utilises primary microplastics especially in the form of exfoliating cosmetics, including microbeads (tiny little balls that you can find in body peeling). You can learn more about microbeads on the “Beat the Microbead” website. They also published a list of over 500 microplastic ingredients used in cosmetics. Some countries took action to deal with this problem. According to the OECD, the Netherlands were the first country to ban microbeads in cosmetics in 2014. Other countries have taken their lead, e.g. Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Canada, Italy, South Korea, the UK, and the US. Furthermore, the EU has recently banned microplastics in personal care products, such as toothpaste or face wash. They claim this regulation will “prevent the release to the environment of about half a million tonnes of microplastics”.
Yet, single-use plastic products are probably the most notorious source of microplastics in the environment. After being used just once, they pollute the environment the very moment they get discarded. They later add to the plastic
pollution again after breaking down into smaller pieces. However, before polluting the environment, single use plastics make a mess in our bodies, too. Consider a simple coffee-to-go ordered in a seemingly paper cup. If it consisted of paper only, the moisture from your drink would be absorbed by cellulose. To prevent leakage in paper cups, a light layer of low-density polyethylene (LDPE) is used to coat the inside of the cup, which will later be discharged into your drink.
Recently, some studies have been published on the release of microplastics from single-use plastic products. A 2023 paper highlights that the quantities of released MPs vary from 1,000 to 5,000 particles per litre. The same study also draws attention to the fact that heat accelerates releasing MPs. When it comes to microplastics, the consequences might not be as detrimental as with nanoplastics. The former are almost fully expelled from the body (“with below 0.3% absorption rates”), while the latter can be absorbed into bodily tissues, posing a much higher risk than larger particles.
Palina Sachyvets
This problem, of course, is common not only to disposable cups, but other single-use plastic products as well, such as food containers (especially those heated up in microwaves), water bottles (93% out of 259 bottles tested, purchased in 19 different locations in 9 countries), and – I bet you did not see that one coming – baby bottles. Scientists at Trinity College followed international sterilisation guidelines to prepare the formula in 10 different feeding bottles – sterilising with 95°C water, then shaking the formula powder with 70°C water in the bottle. The team found millions of microplastics and trillions of nanoplastics per litre of liquid. Their estimates also put everyday microplastic intake by babies at 1.6-2M during their first year of life.
According to the United Nations, 430M tonnes of plastic is produced every year, two-thirds of which is thrown away and is degrading in our environment. 358 trillion microplastic particles are estimated to be floating in oceans, even in the deepest trenches, and they have an enormous influence on marine life.
MPs persist throughout the food chain. It means that aquatic creatures may mistake them for food or eat another animal that already absorbed microplastic particles. It can have dire consequences. Larger particles can cause physical harm, e.g. tissue damage. Moreover, plastics contain a multitude of toxins, which can easily be absorbed by all organisms since microplastics cross the blood-brain barrier, and they can enter testicles and follicles. The toxins can function as endocrine disruptors, posing a threat to the entire endocrine system, which is closely connected to the reproductive system. The latter’s contact with toxins can result in genetic mutations. Not only do the microplastics imperil individual species, but also the biodiversity and stability of ecosystems.
Wait a second, if this is how microplastics influence aquatic life, shouldn’t we be panicking right now? Yes and no. The problem is that there’s a lot of uncertainty here. A paper published in 2021 concludes that “the accurate assessment of human exposure to nanoplastics remains a scientific challenge due to the lack of validated methods, certified reference materials, and standardization across the analytical procedures used”. Similarly, Albert Rizzo, Chief Medical Officer for the American Lung Association, explains that science does not provide clear answers on the matter and that exposure time is crucial. As he tells the National Geographic, the situation can be compared to the attempts to change the policy on smoking:
“By the time we got enough evidence to lead to policy change, the cat was out of the bag,” he says. “I can see plastics being the same thing. Will we find out in 40 years that microplastics in the lungs led to premature aging of the lung or to emphysema? We don’t know that. In the meantime, can we make plastics safer?”
And can we do anything to avoid its potential dreadful effects on our bodies?
For one, we must recycle plastics so that they don’t end up in landfills or oceans. Proper filters on water treatment plants and in washing machines will stop fibres from entering the environment. Instead of single-use plastics, we can try using metallic, ceramic, or glass products. With baby bottles, the scientists who conducted the aforementioned study suggest the bottle be rinsed three times after sterilisation with water boiled and cooled in a nonplastic container. The formula should also be prepared in a non-plastic container and then poured into a clean bottle.
Generally, education and funding are key. The greater the awareness, the fewer people pollute the environment, and the fewer microplastic particles are there as a result. Without funding, research and educational actions won’t take off. However, the question arises to what extent our initiatives against microplastics will be successful. We could potentially slow down the dispersion process, but I doubt that we can eradicate the problem. Microplastic has been found on Mt. Everest and in the deepest trenches of the oceans; in humans’ brains, placenta, milk, lungs, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if we took some MP particles to the moon.
