Our brains are full of plastic.
This was the fun news I read earlier this week while picking up dinner take-out, packed in plastic containers, crammed in a plastic bag and accompanied by Styrofoam cups. Great, I thought, convenience culture is killing us.
But is it? This is the problem with the slew of research finding microscopic shards of plastic in our arteries, kidneys and livers, the findings that our oceans, food, soil and air are teeming with tiny bits of Tupperware. Scientists still don’t know what this plastic is doing to us. And because research takes time, while scientists are trying to answer question, we just keep inhaling, eating and drinking tiny pieces of plastic.
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Why? Regulatory action has never really stopped the U.S. plastics industry from cranking out more plastic, even as clean air and water advocates try to fight the industry’s pollution problems in court and locals wage grassroots wars to slow the permitting of more plants that spew all those toxic chemicals. And now, back in office, is a president beholden to fossil fuel interests (where petroleum and natural gas are plastics precursors), a leader who uses his new powers to demand the use of plastic straws, and an administration that is hell-bent on crippling EPA’s mission to keep us safe rather than empowering it.
Meanwhile, we do not know what all this plastic is doing to us. And no one currently in charge seems to care.
Everything that goes into our bodies gets filtered through our livers and kidneys, so maybe it’s not a big surprise that bits of plastic find their way into those organs. Same with our hearts; microplastics end up in our blood and can get stuck in our clogged arteries. But our brains are designed to keep things out, through something called the blood-brain barrier. The researchers behind the brain plastics study think the tiny shards of plastic hitch a ride on fat molecules to get inside brain cells. And what’s worse is how much microplastics the researchers think might be in a whole human brain: 10 grams. Imagine 2.5 teaspoons of sugar. Now sub in plastic. Gross.
They looked at preserved brains from about a decade ago and compared them to brains from last year. The fresher brains had more plastic in them than the older brains. And yes, they accounted for all the plastic needed to hold and manipulate the brains in their study, just in case those tubes and such were leaching plastic. So, year after year, surrounded by more and more plastic, our bodies are at minimum, storage tanks, and at worst, under an unrelenting attack.
How is this even happening? Chemistry. Capitalism. Convenience culture. To make plastic, petroleum refineries isolate hydrocarbons and then crack those hydrocarbons into even smaller compounds like ethylene or propylene. They then do a little chemistry to stick those smaller compounds into repeating structures called polymers. These polymers then juiced with other chemicals that give them different properties, to mold them into plastics that are bendy, plastics that are hard, plastics that are resistant to heat and other things.
Each year, millions of tons of plastic waste ends up in the ocean, with some plastics taking an estimated 1,000 years to decompose. Over time, larger pieces of plastic break down into microplastics, which can accumulate in marine life and possibly enter the human food chain.
In the face of renewable energy and electric cars charging up all over the country, lowering demands for gas, this is how our fossil fuel industry diversifies. And to great success; the U.S. produced 130 billion pounds of plastics in 2023. Chemists try to find cleaner and greener ways to make (and break down) plastic, but its manufacture is a dirty process. So, here we are, surrounded by this stuff that will never go away, slowly building up inside us.
Thousands of plastics exist, each with its own recipe of chemicals. Since the EPA generally regulates individual chemicals, and not groups of chemicals based on what they do, going after every single component of plastics is basically impossible. Instead, under the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Biden administration started the process of regulating chemicals with known health effects that are also plastics precursors and additives. But this process could take years, and its fate looks dicey in the new administration. EPA’s single-chemical approach is what tobacco researchers called in a recent Scientific American piece a whack-a-mole strategy. A tweak here, a tweak there, and now EPA has one more plastics mole to whack.
So many moles, a push to build more refineries, and our general inability to recycle plastic, and here we are, slowly becoming Homo plasticus.
Scary, yes. But dangerous?
Probably.
There are oodles of studies that show that microplastics cause biochemical changes in cells and animals that we also see in humans who have various illnesses. All that said, cells are not people, and animals are models for what we think is happening in people.
But recently, a group of Italian researchers followed 257 people who had plaque in their carotid arteries. They found that 20 percent of the people in their study who had microplastic-laden plaque had had a heart attack, stroke or had died after almost three years, compared to 7.5 percent of the people who didn’t. In studies of cells, those with microplastics in them also tended to show biochemical signatures of inflammation. And those people who had microplastics in their carotid arteries also tended to show some of those same signatures more often than the people who didn’t.
So, yes, while correlation does not equal causation, these are fairly alarming signs. Yet we live in a country that believes wholeheartedly that we just keep doing what we are doing while we figure it all out. Meanwhile people in the shadows of plastics plants in Louisiana get cancer. Fish, the meat that was supposed to save our hearts, is teeming with plastic that we know now can end up clogging our arteries. The brains of people with dementia are full of plastic.
So, recycle all your plastic containers! Cancel your food delivery! Take bags to the grocery store! All wonderfully insidious ways that we shift the responsibility of environmental calamity onto individuals. Don’t fix the problem of wasteful and destructive plastics chemistry, just tell people to stop using the product.
Meanwhile, entire countries are trying to stop using so much plastic. And some places in the U.S. ban certain plastics. We could be like Maine, which makes large companies that use plastic help pay to deal with the waste. The responsibility for plastic is not just the consumer’s.
I see pictures all the time of beaches covered in plastic pebbles, landfills overflowing with water bottles, and giant dumps of technology products with their sad beige plastic shells. Chemistry is a beautiful thing. When it comes to plastic, when are we going to hold the petrochemical industry accountable for this ugliness?
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
