Leaded gasoline lowered the IQ scores of Americans who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s by nearly six points on average. Lead from tailpipe emissions permeated the air for most of the 20th century, and its health repercussions, including cardiac problems and increased stroke risk, have killed millions.
Lead’s harms were already well-known when leaded gas was introduced, but its producers—DuPont, General Motors, and Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon Mobil)—downplayed its dangers for decades. Widespread use of leaded gasoline rivals global warming as the most harmful global-scale chemistry experiment ever conducted. However, another Big Oil experiment— replacing everyday materials with plastic alternatives—is an emerging contender. Unlike the established harms of lead or carbon emissions, the dangers of plastic and microplastics (the particles plastic breaks down into over time) are only now becoming known.
Global plastic production has more than doubled over the past two decades. Microplastics in human brains have outpaced even this rapid growth, increasing by 50% over the past eight years. PFAS, a carcinogenic type of synthetic chemical shown to leach from plastics and other materials, has contaminated nearly all bodies of water on the planet.
For the 300,000-year span of Homo Sapien existence that preceded the 20th century, man could reliably drink rainwater. In less than fifty years, oil and chemical companies ruined this so that we could have plastic milk jugs and non-stick pans. Barring some miraculous invention capable of cleaning “forever chemical” PFAS from all water on Earth, nature’s water will never be potable again.
Beside you, perhaps, a hot drink melts the plastic lining from your Starbucks cup into your morning coffee. Maybe you prefer “natural springs” bottled water, which we now know contains up to 100 times as many plastic fragments as was believed just last year. Maybe to avoid plastic you drink tap water, which luckily only contains PFAS.
All stages of our lives are imbued with plastic; from pacifiers to hearing aids. Plastic’s ubiquity makes its hazards easy to trivialize: “If everyone uses it, how dangerous can it be?” Of course, the same was said of leaded gasoline. Plastic saturation has personal health ramifications.
Plastic additives, like leaded gasoline, cause cardiac and behavioral issues. The long-term harms of microplastics are less well-known, though increased heart attack and stroke risk have been suggested. Thus far the research has primarily produced correlational findings. For example, people with dementia have up to 10 times as much plastic in their brains as the average person.
Long-term studies on humans have not yet been carried out. However, animals with long-term microplastic exposure are dumber, smaller, die of awful cancers more frequently, have heart, liver, and kidney problems, and are often infertile. We don’t understand how microplastics harm us because scientists cannot experiment on humans. But oil and chemical companies can.
Chemical giants DuPont and 3M realized the dangers of PFAS in the 1970s but hid their knowledge until the 1990s. Also in the 70s, oil companies recognized that plastic recycling was not viable, yet have since spent millions promoting it. The plastic-recyclability lie deluded the public into believing that large-scale plastic pollution is avoidable without limiting plastic production. Shifting blame for this pollution onto the public is another perk.
I am a college student, meaning that the entire span of my young life—when my brain is most vulnerable to neurotoxins like plastic—has fallen within the period of largely unregulated plastic production. I worry that by the time plastics are adequately regulated, their incredible plenitude in my body will have indelibly marked me for dementia or some other terrible ailment. It is difficult to find consolation from this worry; nobody knows what the future holds for such a plastic-ridden mind as mine, or yours.
Whatever the health effects of microplastics turn out to be, blame for them lies squarely with their oil and chemical producers. However, these companies’ storied indifference to public health puts the burden of pushing for regulation on the public. Presently, there is little pushback against this steady injection of plastic into our blood and brains.
Respite is unlikely to come from Washington. U.S. plastic regulation efforts lag behind much of the developed world. Last month, President Trump stated on Truth Social that he would halt Biden’s executive order phasing out plastic straws, taking the U.S. “BACK TO PLASTIC”.
If you don’t care about politics, politics won’t care about you. Leaded gasoline remained unregulated for 50 years in the U.S. because no serious public resistance to it coalesced. Of 62 placentas analyzed in a UNM study, microplastics were found in 62. A study of 23 human testes found microplastics in all of them. Whatever microplastic’s health consequences turn out to be, you will suffer them too.
Photo via Wikicommons
