a growing problem for human health

“Plastics,” says McGuire, the starchy executive of a company that makes key recommendation about his prosperity formula. “There is a great future in plastics,” she remarks according to the script of a new film that has just been released.

In fact, plastics have changed the rules of the game for humanity, and the enormous variety of cheap and durable productsfrom food containers and PVC pipes to polyester clothing and disposable medical products, are here to stay.

The problem, as almost everyone knows, is that plastics are forever and very little of them has been recycled.

The United Nations estimated that most of the 400 million tons produced annually (production doubling since 2000) will remain on Earth in some form as sunlight, wind and sea break down plastics into tiny particles.

About twenty years ago, marine biologist Richard Thompson discovered a worrying accumulation of small particles of plastic in ocean habitats and coined the word “microplastics.”

Since then, scientists have found these fragments everywhere, from distant mountain peaks and the Arctic to the seabed.

In the following decade, researchers began to discover them embedded in a wide variety of living thingslike the seafood we eat.

More recently microplastics were found inside the human body: in the lungs, blood, feces and even breast milk.

In 2021, Italian scientists identified microplastics in some human placentas for the first time.

The question that science is asking with increasing urgency is whether these synthetic foreign bodies constitute a threat to human health. “

We know that microplastics are everywhere, we know that they are harmful to marine life and fisheries, but research on how they impact humans they’re not up to speed yet,” said Imari Walker-Franklin, an environmental engineer and chemistry researcher at RTI International, who studies microplastics.

Plastic Peoplea new documentary directed by Ben Addelman and Ziya Tong, looks at the new science of this mini waste and comes to a worrying conclusion: The potential health risks related to plastic pollution are increasingly difficult to ignore.

The film, which premiered a few weeks ago at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, follows the work of microplastics researchers from a half-dozen countries, including a pair of Turkish scientists who They said they had recently discovered them inside the human brain.

Some of the particles were found deep in the tissue of cancerous brain tumors.

“The revelation that the human body is full of microplastics is recent and I believe that its implications will be one of the environmental stories and health issues of our time,” said Rick Smith, president of the Canadian Climate Institute and one of the film’s executive producers.

“It doesn’t matter if we are rich or poor. There is no way to protect yourself from this type of new contamination”, he highlighted.

Microplastics, fragments less than 5 millimeters in size that can normally be seen with the naked eye, They should not be confused with nanoplasticswhich are smaller than a speck of dust and are often the unintentional byproduct of plastic production.

Research into the possible health effects of nanoplastics is still in its infancy. first stagesat least in comparison to studies on microplastics, a field of study that has expanded rapidly in recent years.

Scientific evidence of the effects of microplastics on humans is limited, at least in the peer-reviewed literature.

A study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology in 2022 concluded that patients with inflammatory bowel disease had a significantly higher amount of microplastics in feces than those without the disease.

Another study from the University of Hawaii published last November revealed its increasing presence in the placenta of new human mothers.

And an article published a few days ago in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that people who had microplastics in their cardiovascular system ran increased risk of complications from heart attacks and strokes.

The researchers found that microplastics had become embedded in fatty plaque that adheres to the walls of blood vessels, and that patients with plaque with plastic content They were 4.5 times more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke or death than those whose plaque was free of microplastics.

The study included 312 people who had undergone surgery to remove plaque from the carotid artery in the neck. Researchers followed them for almost three years.

Giuseppe Paolisso, author of the study, said that microplastics, along with nanoplastics, appear to make fat plates more fragile, increasing the risk of detach from the artery wallblock blood flow in a smaller blood vessel and cause a heart attack or even stroke.

“This is the first evidence that microplastic contamination in the blood is related to a diseasesaid Paolisso, a professor of internal medicine at the Luigi Vanvitelli University of Campania in Caserta, Italy. More research is needed to confirm these findings, he added.

There are several theories about how microplastics affect the body. They include the possibility of inflammation caused by a foreign body lodged in human tissue and the toxic compounds that contain various plasticsmany of which are known to harm human health.

Nienke Vrisekoop, a microplastics researcher at Utrecht University Medical Center in the Netherlands, found that immune cells that come into contact with microplastics die three times faster than those who do not.

He explained that the polystyrene commonly used to make packaging materials was especially toxic for the immune cells that ingested it.

Research by another Dutch researcher, Barbro Melgert, found that microplastics inhibited the development of lung structures grown in his laboratory.

Melgert, a respiratory immunologist at the University of Groningen, said that nylon seemed to be the most harmful to the lungs and that polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, was the least toxic of the plastics he tested.

Melgert is still trying to understand how microplastics affect living cells, but suspects the damage may be related to the whole a variety of chemicals that can leach from plastics into the human body.

While you know the study results do not definitively prove harm to humans or quantify the risks, previous research on nylon factory workers showed extensive lung damage among those exposed to large quantities of particles.

Foreign particulate matter such as asbestos, coal dust or cigarette smoke it is often problematic for human health, he noted.

“If the particles are organic and digestibleat least the body can eventually break them down and get rid of them,” Melgert said.

And he added: “Plastic is different. “It can remain in the lung.”

The same can probably be said for microplastics that reach the brain. The discovery, perhaps the most significant revelation of this new film, was made by two Turkish researchers, Sedat Gündoğdu, a biologist, and Emrah Çeltikçi, a neurosurgeon.

Gündoğdu, a researcher at Cukurova University, has been studying microplastic pollution since 2016. Over the years, he collaborated on dozens of studies documenting the presence of microplastics in fisheriessoil, table salt and intravenous fluid bags, and their concern has increased with each new discovery.

He said it was only a matter of time before investigators Microplastics were discovered in the human brain. “It’s scary, but not surprising,” she added.

Of the 15 samples examined so far, they have identified six plastic particles in the tissue of two patients with tumors, Gündoğdu reported.

It was unclear how the fragments reached the brain, but he said that given the documented presence of microplastics in the blood, they most likely arrived through the vessels that feed the tumors.

Despite the urgency and fatalism it conveys Plastic PeopleTong, co-director and former host of the scientific program Daily Planet Discovery Channel, hopes the film can drive changesin the same way as did Silent Spring, the 1962 book that documented the dangers of agricultural pesticides and contributed to the banning of DDT.

At the individual level, that means encouraging consumers to reduce your dependency of single-use plastics, which represent 40% of global plastic production, he explained.

But it also means convincing political leaders to dictate regulatory measures. For now, Tong has his sights set on a UN meeting next month in Ottawa, Ontario, where delegates from 175 countries will resume negotiations on a proposed treaty that would stop the explosive growth of plastic pollution. Talks have at times been stymied by industry opposition.

“It’s not that we need a remarkable new invention to solve the problem,” Tong said. “We simply have to use less plastic,” she said.

Translation: Elisa Carnelli