Following in the Charles Dickens tradition, this is Part 1 of a series on the plastic in our water, the plastic in us, and the impacts on human health.
There was a time when plastic fascinated me. I grew up in a tight neighborhood of two dozen newly built homes surrounded by farmland. We were the first wave of suburban sprawl but didn’t know it. Our dads – and one or two of the moms – commuted to office buildings in Washington, D.C. or Arlington, Virginia for their white-collar jobs, many of them government related. Manufacturing was something we kids didn’t think much about. My stepfather, who was in the car business, once took us to Detroit where we saw a Ford assembly line, but otherwise my mind was in the out-of-doors. Even through college, my free time was spent on or in the water, riding bikes, hiking, weeding vegetables or shoveling manure. All that changed when I moved north and landed my first salaried job.
The energy crisis of the mid-1970’s was still fresh in everyone’s mind. The solar engineering class I took in college included enough thermodynamics and heat-transfer homework to land me a position in energy conservation. My new employer, a community organization in Lawrence, Massachusetts, provided low-income households with a variety of services including help with their winter energy bills. My job was to help those same clients lower their bills and make their homes more comfortable by giving them weatherstripping, caulking, and insulation to stop drafts from blowing through electrical outlets. I also gave them plastic to cover their windows, creating a cheap imitation of double-paned glass.
Lawrence was a city that made things – textiles, garage doors, and a long list of life’s necessities that I’d always taken for granted. Mostly I just saw these places of production from the outside, but somehow, in the search for plastic window coverings I wrangled my way inside a factory that produced plastic film. I was fascinated by the mammoth machines that blew air through liquefied polyethylene, stretching it into long tubes of clear plastic. So, this was how plastic bags were made! Like Alice, I’d stepped through a looking-glass into a whole new world. If this was what hid behind the façade of the plastic factory, what went on in the garage door factory? The mattress factory? What other magic hid in the crevasses of cities?
In time, I, like plenty of others, developed a certain wariness about plastic. Cautious as I was, however, I didn’t rank it among my top ten environmental worries. I reduced, reused, and recycled but I didn’t get my undies in a bundle over floating islands of marine debris, and certainly not over the itty-bitty pieces floating around in lakes and oceans. It’s not that I thought it was okay, it’s that there was a limit to how many things I could fret about at one time and plastic didn’t make the cut. But notice that my verbs are in past tense. That was then. Now it’s another ball game. One I’d like to play with a leather ball while wearing a cotton T-shirt and taking refreshment from a stainless-steel water bottle.
A dozen or so years ago, while still living in Wisconsin and working just a short stroll from Lake Michigan’s inviting swells, scientists started finding large concentrations of microbeads in the Great Lakes. Up until then I’d never even heard of microbeads, much less had reason to worry about them. But I quickly learned that the term refers to tiny spheres of plastic, one millimeter or less in diameter. They have a role in biomedical research, but most of the attention focused on their role in personal care products like exfoliating scrubs, soaps, and shampoos. Some toothpaste brands added it to boost scrubbing power. Though I’d never knowingly seen one, microbeads were hiding in medicine cabinets and shower stalls across the continent, including mine.
Even though the health ramifications were still relatively unknown, there was a general consensus that microbeads couldn’t be good - for people or for fish. The public demanded protection. With uncharacteristic speed, by 2015 nine states had banned plastic microbeads in “rinse-off cosmetics”, and by the end of that year the federal government passed The Microbead-Free Waters Act, phasing in nation-wide restrictions for rinse-off cosmetics as well as non-prescription drugs. At least a dozen countries around the globe followed suit, prompting some cosmetic manufacturers to phase out their use entirely. However, those bans, as important as they were, were only a drop in the proverbial pool of plastic problems.
Plastic pollution started showing up in ocean surveys as early as the mid-1950s, began to climb in the 1970’s and 80’s, and then shot up like a meteor after 2000. Initially the attention was on “macroplastics” – big stuff like bottles, plastic straws, fishing nets, frisbees – but post-millennium we have a new worry: microplastic and nanoplastic particles. For the most part, plastic does not biodegrade or decompose, it just falls apart into smaller bits of plastic. All forms of plastic debris are potentially deadly to aquatic animals, but the super-small plastics are the ones that are a gut-punch for us humans.
Next week I’ll share what I’ve learned about what those plastics do once they get into our bodies. They’re not as benign as I’d allowed myself to believe. If you’re not already a subscriber, please sign up so that you’re sure to get the next installment.
Splash Zone
If you want to read more on microbeads or the rise in plastics, here are a few links to get you started:
· One of the first alarms about plastics, and microbeads in particular, showing up in the Great Lakes, published in 2013: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0025326X13006097
· The rise in ocean plastics evidenced from a 60-year time-series: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09506-1
· This article says sort of the same thing as the one above, but with more accessible language: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2363320-scientists-warn-of-alarming-rise-in-ocean-microplastic-pollution/
On the other hand, there is still magic in this world. This post from “Leslie’s Farming with Nature” reminded me of the time, eleven years ago, when my extended family convened in rural Virginia to mourn the loss of someone dear to us. The evening before the memorial service, as we reunited under the oaks, my then 4-year-old niece - who lived in Santa Barbara at the time and had never seen fireflies - saw the tiny lights flickering above the grass, twinkling among the branches. In the most honest sense of wonder I’ve ever heard she turned to my sister and said “Mommy! REAL fairies!”.
There are real fairies, but they are at risk. Leslie’s farm is a good reminder that we have the power to keep them among us. Fireflies and soil health - Leslie's Farming with Nature
Image by Szabolcs Molnar from Pixabay