Marching blindly into the unknown

Microplastics. 

It's something new to worry about, as if nuclear war, climate change, pandemics, and Donald Trump weren't enough.

Maybe we have opened Pandora's Box.

The prudent course of action, when facing some new situation with significant potential danger, is to stop. Investigate. Feel our way. Look before we leap.

Too late for that.

Plastics have been around for a century. I am now learning that the most worrisome isn't plastic litter. The bad stuff is plastic too small to see. 

Humanity had plunged headlong into the unknown. I asked for an answer from college classmate Matt Naitove, who had a long career writing about the plastics industry. Should we be worried? A simple, clear, satisfying answer wouldn't be accurate. An accurate answer is unsatisfying. That is the point of the Pandora story. The box is opened before we know what's in it.

Naitove

Guest Post by Matt Naitove

Is It Too Soon – or Too Late – to Panic About Microplastics?

 

Classmate Peter Sage asked me to jump into the debate on microplastics. It is a timely, important and meme-worthy topic, and there is a lot of ill-informed chatter in the news about their presence in our bodies, in the ocean, everywhere.

 

In the spirit of full disclosure, I recently retired from 51 years as an editor (29 of them as chief editor) of Plastics Technology magazine, a trade magazine. I was never a shill for the plastics industry. My work didn’t promote the use of plastics. Instead, the magazine informed manufacturers on how to use plastics more efficiently, productively,and safely. In later years I added the goal of attempting to help plastics manufacturers do so more sustainably.

 

Plus, I am a resident of the planet and hope to live a long and healthy life without despoiling my environment.

 

There are a lot of web references to microplastics accessible from even a cursory search, among them the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and even a Wikipedia page on the topic. One website I consider fair-minded is www.acsh.org, the American Council for Science and Health. They are a pro-science group that took on the tobacco industry for its junk science defense of tobacco, but they also critique alarmist junk science that attacks the drug and chemical industries. 

 

ACSH defines microplastics as particles sized from five millimeters (the size of a grain of rice) down to less than 100 nanometers, which is smaller than the HIV virus.

 

I recently sampled a number of web sources and found widespread agreement on a few points: 

            • Microplastics are everywhere – in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and in our own bodies (one study found them in carotid arterial plaque). They reportedly have been found in freshly fallen snow in Antarctica.

            • There are various sources of microplastics. One is gradual environmental breakdown of plastics trash on land and in oceans. Some sources suggest that everyday use of plastics in the home and in industry causes microparticles to be shed, presumably, by simple abrasion. There’s also the deliberate creation of plastic microparticles as exfoliants in cosmetics – a use that was banned in the U.S. in 2015. And, it is generally agreed that a large component is “microfibers” shed by all sorts of synthetic fibers used in clothing, carpets, furniture upholstery and cigarette filters.

            • They might cause harm. We don’t know. NOAA concludes, as do most responsible sources: “As an emerging field of study, not a lot is known about microplastics and their impacts yet.” The only research pointing to such harm involves exposing cells or test animals to unrealistically high levels of exposure. What relevance such testing has to real-world exposure is, again, unknown.

            ACSH says they might be harmful by causing inflammation, by leaching of chemicals, by causing reproductive and developmental harm, or by being a pathway for other dangerous pathogens to enter our bodies.

 

But the key word is might; we simply do not know. 

Encouraging people to avoid microplastics by avoiding plastics is deficient on the grounds of both practicality and effectiveness. It won’t make much difference to your overall exposure to reheat your dinner leftovers in a glass rather than microwavable plastic container. 

 

Peter may have hoped a career expert on plastics would have some conclusive advice on what we can do about microplastics, and whether they are dangerous, how to reduce them – in short, some plan of action. I can’t do that. I can caution you to adopt a prudent skepticism whenever you hear or read about microplastics. Consider the source. Beware of “junk science.” Beware of political or other self-serving agendas. Some people just want to scare you but have no realistic solutions.

 

The bottom line is that we don’t know if microplastics harm us. Whatever the risks they may pose, we are stuck with them. They are already inside us and all around us. Plastics and synthetic fibers as commercial raw materials are not going away.

 

So, it’s both too soon and too late to panic about microplastics. 

 

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