Wasted food. Photo by Foerester. Wikimedia Commons
(Click on the following link to listen to an audio version of this blog …. Plastics
Deborah and I have had the same New Year’s Resolution for the past 15 years: don’t waste food! Making sure that we make meal portions that we can eat and making sure that we eat leftovers for dinner and/or lunch was essential. As little food waste as possible was our goal.
This year, in solidarity with the State of Colorado’s ban on single use plastic bags (a law that went into effect on January 1, 2024), new data on the ubiquity of plastic waste in our surroundings and disturbing news stories about how recycling centers were actually sending most “recycled” plastics to landfills, we also resolved to cut down on our use of plastics.
Bakelite bangles. Photo by Izzy. Wikimedia Commons
Plastics, as we have discussed several times in this blog space, are human manufactured materials. They were invented 117 years ago (the first plastic was “bakelite” invented by Leo Baekland in New York in 1907). Plastics are large polymers of repeating organic subunits with very high molecular weights and, depending on the specific building block subunits, a wide range of properties and uses. Most of the building blocks of plastics come from petroleum or natural gas.
Roland Geyer (University of California, Santa Barbara) in a paper published several years ago in Science Advances (July 19, 2017) estimated that since the invention of bakelite we have produced 8.3 billion tons of plastics. Since we make almost 400 million tons of new plastic every year, by now our total tonnage is probably closer to 10 billion tons! That is enough plastic to cover the entire country of Argentina more than ankle deep in plastic materials. Geyer also notes that almost all of this plastic is non-degradable and will, along with all of the rapidly accelerating yearly production of new plastics, be with us for hundreds of years.
Most plastics end up in landfills but many millions of tons a year pollute our oceans, lakes and streams, land masses, and food webs. They are even part of the pollution load in the atmosphere! We are conducting an unintentional, unregulated, global experiment in which we are covering the Earth in plastic and also feeding it to a wide range of birds, fish and mammals (even ourselves!). The world’s oceans contain 150 million tons of plastic, and it is predicted that by 2050 there will be more plastic, by weight, in the oceans than fish.
Mountain of plastic. Photo by Jar-o, Flickr.
Many species of sea birds are known to eat and accumulate plastics. A recent study, published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials (May 15, 2023) noted that sea birds (in this case the flesh-footed shearwater (Ardenna carneipes)) develop a very distinctive pattern of mucosa and submucosa scarring in their stomachs when they ingest plastics. This syndrome has even been given a name: “plasticosis.”
Plastics out in our environment can be in large, macro-sized forms (like the ocean-transported, plastic debris that I wrote about that befouls the beaches of the uninhabited Henderson Island out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (Signs of Fall 4, Sept.5 2017).
Even more insidiously, though, plastics can be suspended and transported in both freshwater and marine systems in the form of microscopic pieces. These pieces are classified as micro-plastics (“MP’s”) (which are about 2 micrometers in size) or nano-plastics (“NP’s”) (which are about 500 nanometers in size). In the water these particles get coated with algae and attract zooplankton and larger consumers (like sea birds and marine mammals). The surfaces of these plastic particles also attract and accumulate a myriad of extremely toxic pollutants (including heavy metals, dioxins, PCB’s, DDT’s, and PAH’s) which then bioaccumulate in the organisms that ingest the plastic materials.Nano-plastics also are found in our foods and beverages.
Photo by Jm51. Wikimedia Commons
I talked about the prevalence of NP’s in beer and sea salt in Signs of Fall 12 (November 22, 2018), and a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (January 8, 2024) looked at the amount of MP’s in bottled water (100,000 MP particles in every liter!). This paper also discussed some of the possible consequences of ingesting these MP’s including an increased incidence of colorectal cancers (especially in young people) and increases in Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
Another paper published last year in the Journal of Hazardous Materials (January 15, 2023) determined that humans consume about 5 grams of MP’s per week. These MP’s alter the community of colonic microorganisms (decreasing several beneficial microbes and increasing several pathogenic microbes). These MP’s are also absorbed into the body and found circulating in the blood stream and accumulating in a number of organs of the body (including the liver, spleen, lungs and placenta).
Another study published in Cell Reports (April 4, 2023) showed that NP’s in the diet triggered the activation of gut macrophages and stimulated the synthesis of an intestinal cytokine (Interleukin 1 (IL-1)). IL-1 acts to modulate the activity of the immune system and regulate inflammation. This “gut” IL-1 entered the blood stream and was detected in the brains of study animals where it stimulated microglial activity and activated the helper T-cell, Th17. Th17 produces an array of cytokines that trigger immune reactions to infectious agents (like bacteria). They also are significant immune modulators in a number of autoimmune diseases. The impact of this IL-1 and Th17 activity in the brain was a notable decline in cognitive and short-term memory.
And, a paper just published in the New England Journal of Medicine (March 7, 2024) examined the plastic content (MP’s and NP’s) of the fatty plaque removed from patients’ carotid arteries. Those patients with the highest amounts of plastics had significantly greater chances of stroke, heart attack or death from any causes during the follow-up months after the operation than those patients who had no plastic in their fatty plaque.
You don’t want plastics in your body!
Singl use plastic bages. Photo by Divotomezove. Wikimedia Commons
So, what have Deborah and I done to reduce our use of plastics?
- We now buy our orange juice as frozen concentrate instead of ready-to-drink juice in plastic jugs.
- We now only buy milk in half-gallon, cardboard containers instead of the gallon, plastic jugs.
- We only buy eggs in cardboard egg cartons.
- We stopped buying lettuce and other salad veggies pre-packaged in plastic containers. Now we buy loose produce and bring it home in our re-useable, cloth bags.
- We buy bulk kitty litter from the local pet store and fill-up our reuseable litter pail as needed.
- We buy meat and chicken etc. directly at the meat counter and get it wrapped in paper.
- We buy yogurt in as large a container as possible instead of whole slew of small containers.
- We continue to use our re-useable water bottles and also our reuseable grocery/shopping bags.
- If we have soda, we buy it in recyclable, aluminum cans instead of plastic bottles or jugs.
- Laundry soaps, dishwasher detergents, shampoos and contitioners are now available in paper packed and bar forms. No plastic bottles!
- When we go to a restaurant, we take our own, reuseable containers for any leftovers.
It is hard to completely eliminate plastics from your life, but we are working toward a more sustainable home ecosystem!
By the way, the new Colorado law banning the distribution of single use plastic bags is being widely ignored by many of the stores in our area! There are still thousands of available bags at the checkouts of our grocery stores and for delivery of take-out food from restaurants. Things change, but slowly!