| From the Villa ge of Brook ly n |
OUR TIME PRESS THE L OCAL PAPER WITH THE G LOBAL VIEW
| VOL. 22 NO. 10
Since 1996
March 8 – 14, 2018 |
Plastic Bags are Only the Beginning
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Photo: svobodnenoviny. Pages 2, 11
Invisibles: The Plastic inside us ■■ By Dan Morrison and Chris Tyree www.orbmedia.org
I
t is everywhere: the most enduring, insidious, and intimate product in the world. Plastic wraps our meals and streamlines our cars. It clothes hipsters downtown and climbers on Mount Everest. It exfoliates and insulates. It transports sewage and delivers human blood. Look around your home – your closet, your refrigerator, your bathroom, and bedside – and count the plastic articles. How high did you reach before giving up? That’s just the stuff you can see. Beyond the packaging and the pill boxes, the bags and baby bottles, is a realm of invisible plastic: tiny fibers, fragments, and chemical byproducts that infiltrate every aspect of daily life. Plastic is in the air around you, right now. It floats like pollen in sunlight. It’s thick in the rivers and oceans. It’s in seafood, and salt, and in millions of wild animals. And, according to exclusive research by Orb Media, plastic has contaminated tap water samples from around the world. Microscopic plastic fibers are pouring out of faucets from New York to New Delhi for consumption by people, pets, and livestock. “This should knock us into our senses,” Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of Grameen Bank, told Orb. “We knew that this plastic is coming back to us through our food chain. Now we see it is coming back to us through our drinking water. Do we have a way out?”
This previously unknown contamination defies wealth and geography: The number of plastic fibers found in tap water at the Trump Grill, at Trump Tower in Manhattan, was no different from that found in samples from Beirut, Lebanon; and Kampala, Uganda. Orb even found plastic fibers in bottled water from leading U.S. brands, and in homes that use reverse-osmosis filters. Based on our results, a person who drinks two liters of water a day, or beverages like coffee, tea, and soda, might ingest eight plastic fibers – more than 2,900 each year. The findings come as polls indicate hefty distrust in the safety of drinking water by consumers around the world, and as microplastic pollution is gaining prominence among the public and policymakers. “We see the noose is getting tighter around our neck,” said Yunus, who plans an initiative against plastic waste later this year. “We have been warned before that plastic is a threat to life and the planet. But I did not realize how imperiled our lives are until these new research findings were presented.” Scientists suspect plastic can leach toxins once inside the human body. In animal studies, “it became clear very early on that the plastic would release those chemicals and that actually, the conditions in the gut would facilitate really quite rapid release,” Richard Thompson, an associate dean for research at Plymouth University, in the United Kingdom, said in an interview. “When we think about plastics,” Thompson said, “the benefit they bring is completely decoupled from all of the harm.”
Invisible plastic is inside our bodies. Inside our babies. Inside the Queen of England. “Elizabeth has probably got her fair share of plastic, as does [Prince] Charles, and all sorts of people,” said Mark Browne, an eco-toxicologist at the University of New South Wales, in Australia. “Whatever material we put on the market I’m sure finds its way into humans and wildlife — and that’s the problem.” The problem is that plastic dominates our world. We keep making more, and we keep disposing of it badly. There’s ample evidence that plastic qualifies as hazardous waste, and that it’s a threat to wildlife. Chemicals used in plastic have been linked to a roster of illnesses, including cancer. Plastic fibers join a disturbing list of pollutants threatening the world’s water supplies, including endocrine-disrupting chemicals. But governments haven’t examined what plastic in drinking water, food, and the air might mean for human wellness. “You can’t make a determination that this is a real problem until you understand how this impacts the human organism,” Albert Appleton, a former New York City water commissioner, said in an interview. “Does it bio-accumulate? Does it impact cell formation? Is it a vector for transmitting harmful pathogens? If it breaks down, what are its break-down products?” Orb’s research “raises more questions than it answers,” Appleton said. The U.S. doesn’t regulate plastic particles in drinking water. The European Union requires
member states to protect tap water against all sources of pollution. “The research on human health is in its infancy,” said Lincoln Fok, an environmental scientist at the Education University of Hong Kong. Sherri Ann Mason, a pioneer in microplastics research, supervised Orb’s study, which included more than 150 tap water samples from five continents. Researcher Mary Kosuth tested the samples at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Tweet“We have enough data from looking at wildlife and the impacts that it’s having on wildlife” to be concerned, said Mason, chair of the department of geology and environmental science at the State University of New York in Fredonia. “If it’s impacting them, then how do we think that it’s not going to somehow impact us?” Fibers in tap water, then, are both a discovery and a marker -- a visceral sign of how far plastic and plastic-related chemicals have penetrated human life and human anatomy. We can’t see the long-chain molecules of pervasive toxins like polyfluoroalkyl chemicals, even if they do reside in more than 98 percent of the U.S. population. But when plastic fibers are filtered in a lab and enlarged by microscope, their contamination is made real. “There are various routes that you could be exposed to plastics or plastics-associated chemicals,” Tamara Galloway, an eco-toxicologist at the University of Exeter, in the United Kingdom, said. “The main route would be through food or water.” “What we don’t know is what implication that might have for human health.”