Plastics By Air, By Land, By Sea Accumulating In Lungs and Gills

Visiting India in 1994, I found the clash of modern and ancient cultures fascinating. In Mumbai, BMWs swerved around ox cart vendors. I wondered why there was so much plastic litter on the ground and beaches — one vendor selling street food (which I did not dare consume) told me that for thousands of years until recently people used banana leaves or other natural materials for holding food. Street food came wrapped in leaves - even today if you go to an Asian grocery look for the delicious sticky rice desert wrapped in a banana leaf. The Indian street vendor told me that when they changed to use plastic wrappers to sell food people thought the plastic would biodegrade naturally like banana leaves. He said I should not worry because the plastic wrappers are recycled.

But when I visited an area called New Mumbai for recycling, thinking modern machines did the sorting, I could not believe my eyes- children and families were picking out the trash by separating piles of tires, plastics and other trash. They used polluted water to “clean” plastic wrappers to reuse and sell back to street vendors! I felt so bad for these people trying to survive this way.

According to TheStreet article last year, “Humans have produced about 8 billion tons of plastic since 1950, and more than half of it went straight to landfills. Of all of the plastic that's no longer in use, only about 9% was actually recycled.” Major producers of plastic waste according to the article include China, U.S., and European and South American countries.

I wrote about the plight of overconsumption, especially coming from the U.S. and possible solutions. We’ve seen the tragic consequences of plastics all around us ending up in rivers and oceans and killing wildlife. However, I had no idea until last week that microplastics are getting into our lungs!

Dr. Janice Brahney with the Utah State University and her colleagues made a surprising discovery that microplastics are showing up in air samples of remote locations. She was kind enough to send me the Science article (AAAS) and she is spreading the word like in a New York Times opinion that we are likely breathing microplastics around the world.

For the AAAS article, the authors state, “The finding that microplastics are ubiquitous in the atmosphere and are transported to distant locations has widespread ecological implications…As plastics accumulate in pristine wilderness, we may anticipate shifts in community composition, possibly leading to declines in biodiversity on the basis of the different tolerances to the physical and toxicological consequences of consuming microplastics.”

In the NYT opinion piece Dr. Brahney states, “Airborne microplastics don’t care what ZIP code you live in. Preventing a landfill in your community won’t limit your exposure. And there are still many questions. If dust in the Grand Canyon contains microplastics, how many of these tiny plastic particles are in city dust? How high will airborne concentrations of microplastics get? What effect are they having on the environment? Are microplastics more toxic than other, better-understood sources of air pollution such as natural and industrial dusts?”

GlobalCitizen reports, “there are nearly 500 times more pieces of microplastic in the oceans than there are stars in our galaxy. Each minute, one garbage truck’s worth of plastic is dumped into marine ecosystems. The European Union alone releases six times as much plastic into the oceans as is found in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a roiling web of plastic twice the size of Texas”

So life consuming plastic waste is another example of the law of karma that I learned in India- what we put out in the world comes back to us. Airborne microplastics are another reason to wear a face mask not only during the Covid-19 pandemic. We need to totally change our mindset, such as listening to what scientists can tell us and what we still need to learn, for taking positive actions to restore the world’s health and environment! As academia hits the mainstream, it’s now perish or publish.