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Humans love plastic. We put it on the face of the world, and we are doing so in the form of microplastics.
These tiny bits of polymer infiltrate almost everywhere, and probably wrapped around the globe. And now, we're finding them in our poop. (They've probably been there, too.) Researchers at the Medical University of Vienna and the Austrian Environment Agency are the first to find microplastics in human stool samples. They plan to present their findings at United European Gastroenterology Week this week.
While the news that your poop likely contains tiny bits of plastic might seem alarming, After all, microplastics have popped up pretty much everywhere we've looked. They're in beer, shellfish, tap water, and even the air in your house. One study even suggests that you could get a large proportion of your microplastic exposure from air particles falling onto your food.
We are rapidly realizing how ubiquitous microplastics are, but we still know little else about them.
What exactly are microplastics?
The actual cited figure is microplastic: any piece smaller than five millimeters (that's 0.02 inches) in diameter. For reference, a strand of spaghetti is about two millimeters wide, and a standard round aspirin pill is about 14 millimeters across. Those figures might make you wonder why you have not noticed your food. Surely they'd be crunchy at that size. And you're right-that's the upper limit for a microplastic piece, but it's not necessarily the standard.
Again, we do not have much data about microplastic parts in the world, but a lot of the bits of nanometers-microscopic, in other words. Some of the pieces are not, though, like the beads in some exfoliating faces that have come under fire in recent years, by the millions, directly into oceans, streams, and lakes. And some of the fragments found in this most recent study did reach the millimeter mark, even though the participants probably had no idea they were swallowing that big bits.
Where are all these particles coming from?
Every time you wash synthetic fibers like fleece gold polyester, they can release microscopic plastic fibers that end up in the water supply. When you drive your car, get ready for the next rain. Microplastics even come from the unintentional breakdown of the products we use every day like straws and grocery bags and takeout containers. They come from the paint on boats and the nylon in fishing nets. Heck, some of them flushing their contact lenses down the toilet (stop doing that!).
The point is, microplastic comes from almost everywhere because we've got plastic almost everywhere. But like all things, plastic breaks down over time. Even tiny bits that chip away add up to a 7.5 billion population.
How do I end up eating them?
Because they are endemic in our water supply they can end up in beverages like beer, and because they can also be seen in the ocean, they can end up inside fish and crustaceans, which humans then eat. But as mentioned before, some microplastics also settle on your plate of the air. Researchers at Heriot-Watt University found that the average U.K. citizen might consume 10,000 particles per year from household dust.
What are they doing to me?
We really have no idea at this point. A 2017 editorial in The Lancet Planetary Health "Microplastic contamination seems more widespread than we have known, and they are regularly being ingested by people worldwide. Most concerning is how little is known about the effects of microplastic consumption on human health. "
We're only just starting to figure out how much more plastic we are going to be able to do this. Fragments could be damaged in the body or could leach chemicals. And as that editorial points out, it will be difficult to study because microplastic is so ubiquitous. We'll have to look across populations who have varying levels of exposure and try to correlate it with health effects, which will not be a problem. We would not exactly have a clinical trial where we would deliberately dose patients with tiny plastic beads.
Caution, then, is key. Plastic fragments are not likely to be good for us-at best, they'll be neutral. But it does not hurt to try to reduce our exposure.
How can I avoid microplastic?
Unfortunately, you probably can not eliminate microplastics from your diet. As we said, this stuff is literally in the air you're breathing. The best you can do is avoid some of the obvious routes of exposure. Plastic water bottles shed fragments, plastic containers and other food packaging. Reducing your use of these techniques Beyond that, vote for politicians who will advocate for better environmental regulations. Bottle deposit programs and charges for single use in the United States and in the United States of America. Measures like these could help solve the problem at its source.
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