Microplastics are everywhere. Here’s what that means for your health.

This is "In Conversation," from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, how microplastics reached every corner of our planet, and what that means for your health.

When you think about how often you use plastic, the first thing that might come to your mind is drinking out of a plastic water bottle, or packing your lunch in a plastic container, or maybe it's using the occasional plastic bag from a grocery store. But what if I told you you are almost definitely underestimating your exposure, because many of the plastics you knowingly interact with are shedding little particles all the time. And those little particles get everywhere…

Everywhere, and I'm not exaggerating. I'm not kidding around when I say everywhere. Everywhere that scientists look, they find microplastics.

Matt Simon is a science journalist at "WIRED" and the author of the book, "A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies." It looks at just how much microplastics have pervaded every inch of the world from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, to Mount Everest, to the human body.

This is a planetary catastrophe. Everything is exposed.

Now, a lot is still unknown about the exact impact of all of these tiny plastic particles on human health, but the science so far paints a pretty bleak picture.

We know from early studies that microplastics, when inhaled, do terrible things to lung cells, human lung cells.

I started by talking to Matt about the different types of plastics out there. There's macro-, micro-, and nanoplastics.

Microplastics, as defined in the scientific community, are a little bit smaller than five millimeters, and that's about the width of a pencil eraser. These things get much, much smaller than that because there are now things called nanoplastics, and the definition is a little squirrely still at the moment, but typically it's defined as particles that get smaller than a millionth of a meter. These are now on the size, on the scale, that can get into individual cells. So nanoplastic get into cells, microplastics get into our bodies, obviously, and the bodies of basically every other creature on the planet, macroplastics are the stuff floating around on the ocean that are being ingested by turtles and things like that. So we have really this broad scale of plastics that can get into every organism on the planet.

Yeah, and it's hard to understate just how many things that we use on a daily basis have plastic in it, even sort of unexpected things. I like how you pointed out that until scarily recently toothpaste regularly had plastic in it, right?

Yeah, some brilliant product designer thought it would be great to put little pieces of plastic in toothpaste for its scrubbing power. But we all of course know about microbeads in face washes that has the same scrubbing effect. The issue was that when the Obama administration actually banned microbeads in products, you might remember that they were doing that for wash-off products. That would be like face washes and things like that, that did not include cosmetics. So, cosmetics is this other really sneaky way that we're directly applying little bits of plastic to our body. They're in things like eyeliner to make it actually go on more smoothly because they act as little ball bearings. And we are applying it directly to our bodies in addition to all the other products that are made of plastic that surround us in our daily lives.

And where are microplastics typically found in our environment?

So the research on microplastics really began in the sea, and obviously oceanographers were concerned when they were pulling up in their nets these little bits of plastic. Since then, we've actually had a lot of really good atmospheric work in particular where scientists are actually catching this stuff falling outta the atmosphere. In the book I talk about going to a remote mountain in Utah, hiking up to the top of it, with a scientist who has essentially a plastic catcher. It's a bucket, and she actually can quantify all the microplastic that is literally raining out of the sky. And her one calculation was that in just 6% of the US land mass, these western protected areas, the equivalent of 300 million plastic bottles fall out of the sky as microplastic each year. Scaling that up, that means that billions of bottles of plastic are falling on the United States as microplastic each year. That's a stunning figure and just a fraction of the atmosphere. Scientists are finding that these things are traveling thousands of miles because they're very light. You know, that's one of plastic's charms is that it's-- it's very light, less dense material. So, we are now then of course finding these things in all sorts of environments that we formally thought to be pristine. So, they're falling out in rainforests. You know, if you have an uncontacted tribe in South America, they are exposed to microplastics. They are finding little bits of tire-- This is another one of these sneaky sources of microplastic. Tires are made out of synthetic rubber, that's a polymer. These little bits of tires fly off of roads, get boosted up into the atmosphere and blow thousands of miles. They're finding tire particles in arctic sea ice far away from any vehicles. You can ask any microplastic scientist "Is there anywhere that is untouched?" and they will tell you no, nowhere.

Wow. Wow. I mean, you gave the example of tires. That makes a lot of sense. But how else are plastics making their way into the environment?

So, so many sneaky ways. So, one surprising one is cigarette butts. Cigarette butts, we throw around four trillion of them into the environment each year. Those are made out of synthetic fibers like our clothing is now made out of synthetic fibers. When cigarette smokers step on them, on the ground, it primes them to disintegrate. So these are flushing out into the ocean in extreme numbers. And cigarette butts are one of the most consistently discovered pieces of plastic, kinds of plastic, on beach clean-up walks. So that's a huge problem.

Wow. I think a lot of people assume that that's like, you know, "biodegradable," quote-unquote.

Nope. I mean, if they were made out of natural fibers, maybe, but even then you are breathing in smoke through those fibers and loading them with all kinds of toxins. So we are sending out not only the cigarette buts as microfibers, but the microfibers have all kinds of other nasties from the cigarette smoke as well. So the major one, and this gets into the environment in a number of ways, is, as we're talking about here, these microfibers in our clothing. So, some two-thirds of clothing is now made out of plastic. That's things like nylon and polyester, and even natural fibers like wool and cotton is now often coated in polymers to make them waterproof and fireproof. So when we do laundry, you wash your synthetic clothing, millions of these fibers break off in a single load of laundry and wash out to a wastewater treatment facility. From there, it's either sequestered in something called sludge, which is a not-nice term for a not-nice product, it is human waste that's then spread on fields as fertilizer, so we are spreading concentrated microplastic on our crops… The rest of it is flushing out to sea. But even when you and I are walking down the street, there was one calculation that showed that we shed maybe a billion fibers a year just by moving around in our synthetic clothing. That's a huge source of these particles into the environment. And then the other one obviously is when macro plastics like bottles and bags that are out there floating around, they're breaking down. Plastic is tough, but it does break down over time. It never disappears though. It breaks into these smaller and smaller pieces until it gets down to the nano scale and corrupts literally every corner of this planet.

Wow. And I should say that the place that you describe as one of the most plastic polluted places really is your home. [CHUCKLES] And I know that you don't say that to be alarmist, you say that factually.

Yeah, there have been a number of studies that have quantified the amount of microfibers in particular in the home. When you sit down on a couch that is made out of synthetic materials, those fibers break off as well. Carpets is a major source, but even vinyl flooring. You know, flooring now, unless you're very rich and can afford pure wood floors, you have floors made out of plastic and there have been calculations that show that that that is shedding a lot of microplastics into indoor air. It's difficult to quantify in a certain way because each home is going to be different given how much plastic we're surrounded by, but one researcher reckons that it might be around 7,000 particles that we're inhaling each day. And that is for adults. And when you think about toddlers who are crawling around on the floor where these particles are settling-- In a typical living room, you might have hundreds of thousands of these particles settling on the floor each day, and that is the extreme concern here, that these children are much more susceptible to pollutants just because their bodies are smaller and they're developing. And we know that these plastics are loaded with all kinds of materials that we know for sure to be toxic. But this is the frontier, is determining, Okay, well, how much microplastic in the human body is too much microplastic?

Could you maybe describe what we know about all the different places in the human body that they've now been documented?

So, we know that it's in the lungs, and we know from lab studies that these things do terrible things to human cells in Petri dishes. There's some calculations that say that we might eat 50,000 particles a year. How much of it's getting absorbed through the gut? We don't know. But studies on mice have shown that they readily pass through the gut and into other tissues. Again, these things can get very small, in the nano- scale, and enter individual cells. We are finding them in breast milk, again in new-borns' first feces, in our blood. The concern now is that, Alright, well, is it getting into our brains? So, we have the blood-brain barrier, which keeps nasties out of our brain, but it's almost certain that nanoplastics are small enough to pass through that.

Help us understand what is actually in these microplastics. Like, what do we understand that is toxic in inside these?

The tricky thing about this is that the plastics industry is not required to tell us what's in these plastics, and even then it would be very difficult given the diversity of plastic products around us. A bottle is a fundamentally different plastic than yoga pants or something like that. So what chemists have to do is they actually have to reverse engineer these plastics in the lab and pick apart which chemicals are in them. And one study found that it's at least 10,500 different chemicals used in plastic, a quarter of which are of concern to scientists, so they're either known to be toxic, or suspected to be toxic, we just need more studies on what these chemicals are doing to our bodies. But it's stuff that plastics producers I don't think would ever thought would end up in the human body, so things like lead and arsenic. Lead is a colorant in a lot of plastics. And when you think about tire particles that are flying off the road and you're breathing those as you're walking down the street, tire manufacturers never went through testing to determine if it was okay for people to eat their tires, just wasn't on their radar because microplastic sciences is very, very new actually. We didn't know about the extent of this problem until the past couple of decades.

You mentioned that the research here is still in a fairly early stage to try and understand what the impacts might be on human health. What do we know at this point?

So, we can say for a fact that there is a particularly nasty group of chemicals and plastics known as endocrine disrupting chemicals or EDCs. These, even in very, very low doses, perhaps what we might be inhaling day-to-day, have severe effects on human health. So this makes our hormone system go absolutely bonkers. It's been tied to obesity and and diabetes, any number of other ills. And so what researchers have started to do, and there was a good study that I talk about in the book that looked at thalates, which are some of these endocrine disrupting chemicals, researchers went and looked at samples of human blood and compared the amount of thalates in that blood to, you know, what was happening health wise with those people. And they are saying, on a conservative estimate, a very conservative estimate, perhaps a hundred thousand early deaths a year in the United States from thalates alone. These are plasticizers, they're plastic chemicals. They haven't found a-- like a causative link, like how does thalate do this to the human body, they don't know that yet, and they're going to need to do that going forward. We already know, though, that, you know, certain chemicals in plastics are truly terrible for us.

And what about kids and babies? What do we know about the health impacts on them?

We know for certain that microplastics are being found in placentas and that mothers are passing these particles to their children in utero. Children are tainted with microplastics before they're born, and we are in desperate need of more studies as to what the consequences could be. And I think in the next five to ten years, we're going to see, I think, in my opinion, some studies tying microplastics to human ailments.

Perhaps the most well-known endocrine disrupting chemical or EDC in plastic is BPA.

There was a big hullabaloo about that because it's been tied to any number of human health effects.

The Food and Drug Administration says the level of BPA exposure you get from something like plastic food packaging is safe, although it's banned BPA from baby bottles, sippy cups, and infant formula packaging. Some states and localities have passed their own restrictions. Maybe you've seen products in stores with the label "BPA free." But Matt says those labels give a false sense of security.

What they're doing is just substituting in similar EDCs, very similar in structure to BPA, that may be as toxic or more toxic.

Matt argues that banning individual chemicals isn't enough.

Just because there are so many of these chemicals in these plastics, environmental health groups are saying that we need to ban groups of these, not individual chemicals like BPA. That's a good start, because that actually gets this problem on the radar of consumers to actually push for this change, but we need to be careful that we're not just letting the plastics industry substitute in things that are equally terrible.

I'm really curious, Matt, if there are any other environmental health disasters that you could equate this to? I mean, I guess I think about lead paint and the lead paint crisis. Maybe that's just based on my age, but does this compare to that at all?

Is there a comparable public health crisis? I don't think so because of the extreme complexity of microplastics. This is not a single cohesive pollutant, it is a bunch of different kinds of plastics made out a bunch of different kinds of chemicals that leach out as these things move through water or through the human body. We have to focus on all of those individual chemicals. It's not like mercury, right? So, like, don't use mercury anymore, don't use lead anymore, we know that those are neurotoxins. They're terrible for human health. But plastics are also this physical presence, and because it is this physical thing, it's this physical pollutant, it can get trapped in our lungs like asbestos, it can move through different organs and perhaps damage them that way. But it's also this thing that can change soil properties, so if we're adding it in large quantities to our crops, there's research showing that it actually messes with the way that water moves through the soil, the water evaporates away quicker. That is why this is a poison like no other.

There is no practical way to remove all the microplastics that are already out there. Scientists estimate that humans have produced more than 18 trillion pounds of plastic so far, and if nothing changes, by 2050 we'll quadruple that. And Matt is really clear about who needs to be held accountable for all the harm: the plastics industry.

They're killing ecosystems and they're killing organisms in this way that scientists didn't fully realize until recently. We knew that macroplastics like bags and bottles were a problem, we just didn't really have an idea of the extent of microplastic contamination until quite recently. And I think as the public becomes more aware of that, that there are severe consequences to using single use plastic, not because you as the consumer asked for it, but because these companies profit from doing it.

Now, there are things that we can choose to do, as a society and as individuals, to limit our contact with plastics. Let's start with society-level changes. We've seen local governments take action by banning certain single-use plastics. Some places have explored urban design principles, like rain gardens. Those are the little slivers of greenery you might see on the side of a road or highway.

Studies have shown that actually captures a lot of tire particles that would otherwise flow into rivers or oceans.

Other design features focus on getting bigger plastics out of the environment, so they don't have the chance to break down into smaller particles.

One of my favorite pieces of technology of all time is called "Mr. Trash Wheel" in Baltimore Harbor. It is a barge with giant googly eyes. It intercepts floating plastic.

But even if we are stopping macro- and microplastics from getting into our environment, we also need a much better way to dispose of them.

There was a recent calculation that, in the United States, we recycle 5% [CHUCKLES] of the stuff that gets thrown in the recycling bin, which is insane.

Which is just upsettingly low.

So that is where we're going to need to have a lot of movement and improvement.

By now, you might be thinking this is just inescapable. What could I possibly do, at the individual level, to mitigate risks? You might start with a hard look at all the plastics you use and ask yourself "Can I replace this plastic with a different material, like glass?" "How can I reduce my exposure?"

You can buy an aftermarket filter for your washing machine. I have one at home, it works very well. The water goes through, it captures the fibers before they flush out to a wastewater treatment facility. Do not, under any circumstances, prepare hot liquids in plastics. Do not freeze plastics. I know that's hard to hear. Like frozen foods. The less plastic in contact with your food, the better, because even if it's not breaking into microplastics, it could be leaching chemicals directly into the food. Vacuuming religiously, because again, a lot of the stuff is settling on the floor, especially if you have a toddler who's crawling around, but also just for your health as well. As we walk around, we kick up these particles into the air.

It does help, you're saying. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And just, in general, buy less plastic if you can.

You know, I was surprised to see even that the label biodegradable doesn't necessarily mean that it is bio-made or natural materials, it might just mean that the plastic breaks down faster, right?

Yep, it just shatters into microplastics quicker, [LAUGHS] so…

[LAUGHS] Yeah, so even buying biodegradable things doesn't necessarily mean that you're-- that you're going plastic free.

No, still plastic. And so when you get a compost bag, a lot of times this will be designed for a specific set of environmental conditions, and that is in an industrial composting facility where there are very high temperatures that can break down not only that organic matter to turn into compost, but also these plastics. And there was a study in I think it was Germany that found that these plastic compostable quote-unquote bags are actually a significant contributor to microplastics in soils there, because they take that fertilizer that has all this broken down composting bag in it… And that's in addition to the sludge that we're putting on our fields, which is microfibers from our washing machines, so-- And this just comes back to: we just need to use less plastic. We can't rely on these alternatives because we have to fundamentally renegotiate our relationship with these polymers. As individual consumers, there's things you can do like microfiber filters on your washing machines, but I think more impactfully you can donate time or money to anti-plastics groups that are actually working on the political level that you as an individual might not be as powerful on to really affect this change.

Matt, I wonder for you just how do you think about personally negotiating this for yourself, the trade-offs involved, especially knowing all that you know, having researched this book.

It's-- I'll just go back to nihilism, just fall-- [CHUCKLES] fall into nihilist despair. No, that's not ever good. And that's the trick here is that I can't get dejected because I know that's exactly what the plastics industry would want us to feel. So this is what they did with recycling, right? When recycling started to take off the United States, the plastics industry really pushed it onto consumers, "It's your fault that a lot of this plastic is escaping into the environment," when in fact it should be their responsibility, they're the ones that produce this stuff. They're going to do the same going forward with microplastic pollution, is they're going to say "Oh, it's your fault. Why would it be our fault? You're the one who bought this product." No, we need to not get dejected and nihilistic. As alluring as that is, especially for me writing about this stuff and climate change too, which doesn't help, we cannot fall into despair because that's exactly what the plastics industry wants us to feel, because that allows them to keep producing as much of the stuff as possible. We need to get angry. We need to get very angry at the really the planetary vandalism that these companies have done.

You can read Matt Simon's book, out now, called "A Poison Like No Other," on Apple Books. You can find a link on our show notes page.