From Beach to Bloodstream

There's no escaping these tiny, manmade invaders.

They are found in the deepest part of the ocean floor, at the top of Mount Everest, on remote tropical islands, in Antarctica.

They are in the air we breathe, the food we eat, the soil beneath our feet. Nothing in our surrounding environment is untouched by the contamination of microplastics and their even tinier version, nanoplastics.

The plastic ps are found in more than 1,000 animal species, ranging from whales to polar bears to camels. In humans, they are found in blood, heart tissue, lung tissue, placentas, testicles and other organs.

Research on the consequences they will have for our environment and our health is just beginning.

Plastic pollution and its detrimental impacts on the world we live in, environmentally and economically, have been written about for decades. The focus has mostly been on single-use plastics, like grocery bags cups, eating utensils, candy wrappers, fast food packaging. Studies say they make up at least 40% to two-thirds of plastic waste.

But plastic is the pollutant that keeps on giving.

We know plastic is not biodegradable. But it does break down, made brittle and fragmenting from the impact of the sun. Plastic items continue breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces over time until they become microplastics, five millimeters or less in size. Then they break down even further to nanoplastics, less than a micrometer. Suffice it to say nanoplastics can't be seen by the naked eye and are barely visible even under advanced microscopes.

"We're learning more and more about the impacts of microplastics, not only to our environment and our oceans, but on human health," said Hunter Miller, Florida field campaigns manager for Oceana, an international advocacy organization dedicated to ocean conservation. "And I think it's really alarming for a lot of people. I'm even seeing it with decision-makers and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle."

Part of Miller's job is to educate and work to help pass governmental policies that reduce the production of plastic and its impacts.

"I think it's catching the attention of folks that are tasked with protecting us from threats like this, that this is becoming a problem that we cannot ignore," he said. "And there's a lot of really alarming science to back up some of these concerns."

Miller spoke of going to the beach recently with his daughter and finding "hundreds of tiny circular foam balls. They were probably like a millimeter or two," scattered in a 20-foot by 20-foot area, he said. Miller and his daughter tried to pick up the debris, but to no avail.

"We were using our fingers and trying to scoop them into a cup," he said. "And it was impossible. We had to give up."

It was a microcosm example of the massive challenge faced in attempting to remove microplastics from our environment.

As you walk the beach in Florida, if you start to look down and look closely, especially in the wrack lines and the seaweeds, it's not hard to spot microplastics, Miller said. "So we see them a lot."

Florida has 8,436 miles of coastline with white sand beaches beckoning tourists. But plastics and microplastics don't exactly figure into the beachy experience.

About 99 percent of plastics are made from fossil fuels. Only about 9% are recycled. Some are incinerated but the vast majority just become waste in the environment. On average, the world is producing 430 million tons of plastic per year, according to the United Nations Environment Program website.

"Every day, the equivalent of over 2,000 garbage trucks full of plastic are dumped into our oceans, rivers and lakes. As a result, plastic pollution is set to triple by 2060 if no action is taken," Miller said.

If that isn't tough enough to wrap your head around, consider that a 2023 study published by a team of international scientists in the journal Plos One estimated that more than 170 trillion microplastics were afloat in the world's oceans.

Erica Cirino has scooped some of those microplastics out of the ocean with her own hands. The communications manager for the Plastic Pollution Coalition, a global alliance working toward a world free of plastic pollution, spent a decade traveling, investigating and writing about plastics. In 2021, she wrote a book, "Thicker than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis."

She has sailed 3,000 nautical miles from Los Angeles to Honolulu, including through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest accumulation of ocean plastic debris in the world, about twice the size of Texas. She has also sailed from Hawaii to French Polynesia, and around the north and west coasts of Iceland, among other microplastic research quests.

The "Patch" was more like a soup of plastic, Cirino said. An item would float by like a bucket, then a dustpan, she said. "I saw a shampoo bottle, some Styrofoam, and then it would be like a bunch of microplastic floating around that you could see on the surface. And then it really was when we put our nets in the water that we collected really significant amounts of this plastic."

"It was very disturbing," she said. "You know, it's a place that shouldn't exist. I didn't really understand, I think, the depth of the problem until I went out there."

The problem is not only the plastic itself, it is the toxic additives to plastic, she said. "There are more than 16,000 chemicals added into plastics. Of those 16,000 chemicals, already 4,200 of them are known to be toxic to people in the environment."

Some of the chemicals can impact female reproductive issues, she said. "You know, it sounds like a bad sci-fi movie, but it's our reality at this point."

Nora Demers, associate professor of biology at Florida Gulf Coast University, does research on endocrine disruptors.

"I've also been teaching a course on environmental endocrine disruptors for almost 27 years at FGCU," she said. Microplastics and nanoplastics are some of the main endocrine disruptors, she said. "They may mimic any number of different hormones that are involved in growth, reproduction, development, behavior."

She said the same chemical might have very different effects depending on its potency, the age of the person receiving it and the tissue being examined. Plastics as an environmental exposure could also be related to causing cancer, she said.

The Endocrine Society and IPEN (International Pollutants Elimination Network) also reviewed 20 years of research showing that plastics contain a host of hazardous, endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that leach and contaminate humans and the environment. The report catalogs EDCs in plastics and describes pathways of contamination and the biological effects of the plastic chemicals.

Charles Rolsky, executive director of the Shaw Institute, a scientific research organization based in Maine, has developed a method for detecting plastic ps in human organs and tissue. His research has been covered extensively in the media, including The New York Times, BBC, Forbes, PBS and others. Rolsky also partners with scientific, environmental and educational institutions worldwide. In an interview, he said his next research project will be a study to see if plastics have crossed the human blood-brain barrier into the brain.

"So we're collaborating with researchers at Arizona State University who specialize in neurodegenerative diseases," he said. "And the first question they had is, can (plastics) pass through the barrier? The second is, if they do, how are they impacting people battling dementia and Alzheimer's?"

If you want to consider how much nanoplastics we inhale or eat, consider the common credit card as a reference point.

The Plastic Pollution Coalition refers to a 2023 study in the journal Physics of Fluids called "How microplastics are transported and deposited in realistic upper airways?" authored by eight scientists, which states: "Research shows humans might inhale about 16.2 bits of plastic every hour, which is equivalent to plastics used to make a credit card in an entire week."

Meanwhile, a World Wildlife Federation analysis assessing plastic ingestion from nature to people points to a study by the University of Newcastle in Australia, which estimates the average person may be ingesting about five grams of plastic every week. That's a credit card's worth of microplastics.

Perhaps you might want to avoid plastics in the water by drinking bottled water. You would be wrong. Not only do the bottles add massively to plastic waste, the water itself contains plastic ps, according to a recent study cited by the National Institutes of Health.

A research team led by Drs. Wei Min and Beizhan Yan of Columbia University found that, on average, a liter of bottled water included about 240,000 tiny pieces of plastic. About 90% of these plastic fragments were nanoplastics. This total was 10 to 100 times more plastic ps than seen in earlier studies, which mostly focused on larger microplastics. The study was published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The easiest way to tackle the problem is also the hardest way: Just stop making or drastically curtail the production of plastics.

"Turn off the tap," Cirino said. "If your bathtub were overflowing, you wouldn't just start mopping the floor. You'd turn off the faucet first." It's the same with plastics, she said.

That would require companies involved with creating and supporting the manufacture of plastic products accepting accountability and taking action and governments to support that action. With plastic pollution on track to triple by 2060, it is not likely to happen.

Much hope is being placed on the UN Plastics Treaty, set to be finalized by the end of this year.

"There's one more negotiation negotiating session coming up," Cirino said. That's in November, in Korea. "There were four other sessions held throughout the world since 2022. And the UN mandated that we come up with something to solve this problem, like some kind of formalized global agreement, because it is such a hazardous and serious problem."

The points the Plastic Pollution Coalition and other organizations are pushing for include:

¦ Mandatory, ambitious and enforceable control measures and obligations to ensure results and accountability.

¦ Prioritize the reduction of plastic production with a rapid phase-out of the most harmful plastics and additives.

¦ Reduce plastic production by ceasing to permit new or expanded facilities and infrastructure.

Besides the treaty, federal laws are urgently needed, Miller said.

Some of the laws that Oceana has been lobbying and promoting are the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act, which would phase out unnecessary single use plastic products, put a moratorium on new and expanded plastic production facilities and hold companies accountable for their plastic waste.

Miller said the organization is also lobbying for The Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act. This would require the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to prohibit the discharge of plastic pellets into our oceans, rivers and lakes. About 250,000 tons of pea-sized plastic pellets, known as nurdles, end up in the oceans every year. They are the building blocks of most plastic products and shipped around the world to be melted and molded into new plastic items. Unfortunately, the plastic industry frequently spills the pellets during production and transportation.

There are some positive steps. The Biden-Harris Administration announced in July that it will phase out single-use plastics across the federal government by 2035 and from food service operations, events, and packaging by 2027.

The problem is too big for consumers to solve alone, but they can take action individually, collectively and incrementally. One simple way to start is to stop using single-use plastics.

"It's taken us a long time to get in this position, and we're not going to get out of it easily," Rolsky said. "You know, it's said that that we failed plastic more than plastic failed people. And it's pretty accurate. We created an incredible material. But now it's kind of biting us in the rear. And we're having to understand what the impact is and how we can get away from it."

If enough people call for the tap to be turned off, maybe it will, or at least be reduced to a trickle. "The more consumers become aware of what products they purchase and make decisions to reduce their exposure, then the industry that's using them will get the message and stop making them because they're not going to make them if we don't buy it," Demers said.

"There's probably nobody or no organism on the planet that doesn't have some of this (plastic) in them, but you can certainly reduce your exposure dramatically by your consumption choices."

"I think it is important to be alarmed and I hope that that causes people to take actions both on their individual decisions when they buy products, but even more importantly, to pressure the industry and our legislators to change the way business is done in this country."