In a first, tiny plastic fragments have been found in human blood. In late March of this year, researchers published a study that detected microplastics in the blood samples of more than three-quarters of their anonymous, healthy volunteers. Half of the blood samples had traces of a kind of plastic used to make beverage bottles; more than a third had polystyrene, used for disposable food containers and many other products. The researchers said the microplastics could have entered the body by many other routes, too, such as air and water, but also from toothpastes, lip gloss, and tattoo ink, among others. Previous studies have shown plastic in infants’ excrement, likely shed by their bottles. We are what we eat, we know, but what we did not realize was that that includes little bits of the containers our food and drink come in.
Microplastics have been found atop the world’s tallest mountains and in the deepest parts of the oceans. They are in the snow at the North and South Poles, in your beer and in your table salt. The particles are small — in the worst case, people might ingest about a credit card’s worth each year — yet they are thought to carry a health risk. Fibrous plastics, when inhaled, are suspected of causing lung problems not unlike those from asbestos. These undesirable fragments are known to be shed by heating food in plastic containers in a microwave, for example.
The tiniest among them, known as nanoplastics, could enter cells, potentially disrupting cellular activity, or even get into our brains. The issue for human, plant, and wildlife health is that plastics contain a toxic stew of substances, used for color, flexibility, and shelf life. The effects that these chemicals could have is being closely watched, though it is a relatively new area of study. In the seas, zooplankton, at the base of the food web, grow more slowly and reproduce less successfully in the presence of microplastics; this means that we could actually be starving shellfish, fish, and marine mammals. Part of the problem is that at nano size, plastic neither sinks nor floats, remaining ubiquitous in the most important portion of the marine environment. So-called garbage patches have been found in the Pacific, North and South Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.
Southampton and East Hampton were early leaders in taking on some kinds of plastic waste. In 2011 East Hampton Village was among the first local municipalities in New York State to ban thin plastic shopping bags. Then, in 2015, East Hampton Town followed — at the time, the town’s Natural Resources Department estimated that there were more than 10 million of the bags used here each year. The use of polystyrene-foam takeout containers was banned in 2019. County and state legislators followed on these initiatives, including a restriction on single-use drinking straws in Suffolk in 2020. The bag ban went into effect statewide later that year. Consumers adapted and quickly began taking their own reusable bags with them when going shopping.
Eliminating plastic beyond shopping bags will be another matter altogether, requiring, at a minimum, state-level action, as well as a change of mind-set. Food production has become centralized in the hands of a few large corporations, and consumers have become used to buying items in plastic of one sort or another. With the discovery of plastics in the blood, we hope the movement to end what could be called single-use culture will gain additional momentum.