New Study: Alarming Levels of Plastic and Dangerous Associated Chemicals in Children's Bodies

Surfing on our waste (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

We recently wrote about the astonishing amount of microplastic — microscopic pieces of ordinary plastic, byproducts of the breakdown of the residue of our trash — in both our environment and our bodies (see "It's Raining Plastic, From the Pyrenees to the Rockies to the Arctic"). As we noted there, environmental microplastic so ubiquitous, it's even falling from the sky onto the ice floes of the Arctic.

A recent German study has more information, finding that plastics and associated products have been discovered "in 97-100% of blood and urine samples from 2,500 children tested between 2014 and 2017." That's an astonishingly high percentage.

The study also refutes the defense that the presence of plastics in human bodies is relatively harmless since plastic is inert. Even if the plastic is inert (there's no evidence that it is), some associated products that enter our bodies with it are decidedly dangerous.

From a Common Dreams piece on the study (translation from the German by the authors):

Der Spiegel, the German weekly magazine, published the findings Saturday, which were part of a federal study focused on "human biomonitoring" of 3 to 17-year-olds. Traces from 11 out of 15 plastic ingredients were found in the test samples.

"Our study clearly shows that plastic ingredients, which are rising in production, are also showing up more and more in the body. It is really worrying that the youngest children are most affected as the most sensitive group," Marike Kolossa-Gehring, one of the study's authors, told the magazine.

Researchers said that they were especially concerned about high levels of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) that were found in the study. PFOA is an extremely persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic chemical frequently used in non-stick cookware and in waterproof clothing.

In 20 percent of those examined, they were above the limit, in the younger children, the proportion was even higher. The study also showed children from poorer families had more plastic residue in their bodies than children from higher-income families, according to German public broadcaster ARD

While PFOA is not itself a plastic, it's used in the manufacture or treatment of a number of materials, like Teflon and carpeting, and despite claims to the contrary, it persists in those products:

A study of workers living near a DuPont Teflon plant found an association between PFOA exposure and two kinds of cancer as well as four other diseases. A positive exposure-response trend for kidney cancer is supported by many studies. PFOA has been detected in the blood of more than 98% of the general US population in the low and sub-parts per billion (ppb) range, and levels are higher in chemical plant employees and surrounding subpopulations. How general populations are exposed to PFOA is not completely understood. PFOA has been detected in industrial waste, stain-resistant carpets, carpet-cleaning liquids, house dust, microwave popcorn bags, water, food, some cookware and Teflon (PTFE) products. (emphasis added)

The study also notes an increase in exposure to substitutes for previously banned chemicals.

As Madge might have said in the famous commercials, "We're soaking in it."

We're also eating, breathing, drinking, swimming and drowning in it. Not a good sign. If those whom we let control us get their way, I fear it will be with us till it kills us.
  

It's Raining Plastic, From the Pyrenees to the Rockies to the Arctic

Rainwater samples collected across Colorado and analyzed under a microscope contained a rainbow of plastic fibers. Photograph: USGS (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

I often worry whether we aren't one of those species that self-eliminates, that commits "ecological suicide" as many bacteria do when they turn their environment too acid to live in. It's certain we're polluting the air with CO2 in a way that will change the climate from habitable to very inhospitable.

But we're doing this in other ways as well — according to the latest news, surprisingly, with plastic. To be more exact, the microplastic that results from the breakdown of our trash, which as you likely know if you look at your garbage, is filled with plastic.

Microplastics are fibers that can be seen only with a microscope. The latest reports show that microplastic is not only present in abundance in the ocean, where much of our bulk plastic resides, but also in the air and, via the same settling effect that drops soot and dust to the surface of the earth, on the ground we walk across.

Day after day, year after year, minute after minute, a film of microplastic particles is raining on the earth. The more we produce it, the more we will live in it. If in a thousand years we revert as a species to Stone Age life, reduced in numbers and struggling to survive, we'll find the ground, not rich in minerals as it was when our ancestors first walked on it, but rich in the indestructible garbage our descendants' ancestors — us — cast off on the way to their own self-caused demise.

One report from April of this year in Science reveals the amount of plastic descending on the Pyrenees in France:

Prior studies have shown that microplastics, which can be ingested and inhaled by humans—and which may lead to reproductive issues in some marine mollusks—can rise up into the atmosphere and drop back to solid ground in the cities they come from. But scientists thought these plastics couldn’t travel very far from their urban sources.

To find out just how far they can go, the researchers collected particles falling from the sky in dust, rain, and snow for 5 months at the Bernadouze meteorological station in the Pyrenees mountains in southwestern France—100 kilometers from the nearest city.

To their horror, the authors found plastics, predominantly the kind from the single-use packaging used in shipping. From their sample, they determined that each day, an average of 365 plastic particles sifted down from above into the square meter surface of the collection device. If comparable quantities of airborne microplastic fall across the rest of the country, the researchers estimate roughly 2000 tons of plastic blanket France each year, they report today in Nature Geoscience.

Another report in the Guardian says this about plastic falling on the Rockies:

Plastic was the furthest thing from Gregory Wetherbee’s mind when he began analyzing rainwater samples collected from the Rocky Mountains. “I guess I expected to see mostly soil and mineral particles,” said the US Geological Survey researcher. Instead, he found multicolored microscopic plastic fibers.

The discovery, published in a recent study (pdf) titled “It is raining plastic”, raises new questions about the amount of plastic waste permeating the air, water, and soil virtually everywhere on Earth. ...

Rainwater samples collected across Colorado and analyzed under a microscope contained a rainbow of plastic fibers, as well as beads and shards. The findings shocked Wetherbee, who had been collecting the samples in order to study nitrogen pollution.

There's even plastic landing on the ice floes of the Arctic. According to the UPI in April: "New research published on Wednesday in Science Advances shows that even the remote ice floes of the Arctic have measurable amounts of microplastics and microfibers gracing their surfaces."

We eat it, we drink it, we breathe it. Does it hurt us? Hard to imagine it doesn't, though the subject is just now coming under scrutiny, as this study published in Science Direct notes:

Microplastics have recently been detected in atmospheric fallout in Greater Paris. Due to their small size, they can be inhaled and may induce lesions in the respiratory system dependent on individual susceptibility and particle properties. Even though airborne microplastics are a new topic, several observational studies have reported the inhalation of plastic fibers and particles, especially in exposed workers, often coursing with dyspnea caused by airway and interstitial inflammatory responses.

While the authors notes that inhaled microplastic can cause respiratory lesions, dispnea (shortness of breath) and inflammation, they don't mention the relationship of chronic inflammation with cancer.

I'm frankly not sure we can address the problem of plastic, for the same reason we can't address the problem of fossil fuel as a source of atmospheric CO2. Both are too embedded in the way our species lives.

As a result, both will be embedded in the way we die as well.
 

Which Would Be Harder to Ban, Single-Use Plastic or Money-Bought Government?

Credit: Chris Jordan

by Gaius Publius

From the Dept. of What We're Up Against:

Texas Supreme Court Rules Cities Cannot Ban Plastic Bags

The Texas Supreme Court struck down the city of Laredo's plastic bag ban—a decision that will likely overturn similar bans in about a dozen other cities, including Austin, Fort Stockton and Port Aransas.

The court ruled Friday that only the state has the authority to regulate solid waste disposal in Texas. In the 19-page opinion, Chief Justice Nathan Hecht wrote that the Texas Constitution prohibits city ordinances from conflicting with state law.

"Both sides of the debate ... assert public-policy arguments raising economic, environmental and uniformity concerns," Hecht said. "We must take statutes as they are written, and the one before us is written quite clearly. Its limitation on local control encompasses the ordinance."

Twenty Texas state senators and representatives plus the state's attorney general backed the Laredo Merchants Association in their bid to overturn the ban.

The case was correctly decided, by the way. The problem is a state law that prevents cities from "going rogue" and allows conservative and pro-corporate policies to be enacted at the state level. This means only state legislators have to be bribed — one-stop shopping — while cities are forced by law to follow.

More Plastic Than Fish

In a related piece EcoWatch notes, "More than 8.3 billion metric tons of new plastics have been generated, distributed and discarded as of 2017. Much of that material ends up in our oceans. Every year humans send an estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic out to sea. If plastic consumption continues at this rate, we are on pace to fill oceans with more plastic than there are fish by 2050."

More plastic than fish in the ocean is a lot of plastic. Most or all of this plastic is single-use. You touch it for five minutes — drink your slurpee, drain your sugery coke, carry your groceries to the kitchen — then throw it away. Five minutes on the finger tips, a thousand years on the hips of an already over-burdened planet.

There's so much plastic in the ocean that mussels are now so riddled with it they should not be eaten:

Shellfish are the natural filter systems of our seas, mechanisms of purity. So, to discover in a report released on World Oceans Day that mussels bought from UK supermarkets were infested with microplastic seems like a final irony in the terrible story of the plasticisation of the sea. According to the study by the University of Hull and Brunel University London, 70 particles of microplastic were found in every 100 grams of mussels.

We feed plastic to the ocean, and it feeds plastic to us. Our modern life, "consumed with that which it was nourished by," eaten by what we eat.

Cassandra Spoken Here

But this is a political piece, from the Dept. of What We're Up Against. The one-use plastics industry has to die or it will kill us. Yet consider what's in the way. If you thought "Texas Republicans" you'd be wrong. We're up against Money.

The plastics industry is the third largest in the U.S. It's expected to be worth over $650 billion worldwide by 2020. How do you make an industry this big shrivel and die without a revolution that first destroying money's dominance of government? 

And the single-use plastics industry is just a start. The fossil fuel industry has to die soon as well — collapse and rot in the ground in less than a generation. How does that happen, with billionaire-dominated government in the way?

Cassandra, about to not be doing so well.

There are half a dozen industries like these, lucrative destroyers, insulated by money-bought government from populist slings and arrows. Maybe I should have sent this from the Dept. of Cassandra Spoken Here.

GP