One of the things that's now clear is the most,
the most serious pollutants that we encounter in our daily lives, the the
toxic chemicals that are most closely linked to
human disease, are not chemicals that are you know, kind of out there in the
environment floating around. They're chemicals that
get into our own bodies. So i've been interested in this question of plastics
and plastic pollutants for a long time.
I've spent over 10 years researching and looking at different aspects of pollution.
I've written two books on toxic
chemicals where where my co-author and I actually experimented on ourselves to
see to what extent toxic chemicals are absorbed into our
own bodies. And i've been wondering for the last
year whether microplastic particles might be absorbed into the human body,
might actually be tiny point sources of pollution that
we're carrying around with us every day.
About a year ago i started trying to figure out how to test myself.
[toilet flushes]
You know i'll spare you the more gruesome details
but basically i took a sample of my stool.
First two samples were from days when i was just living my life normally.
The samples from the last four days, i modified my diet and i modified my behaviours.
The other thing I did in those four days is I tried to wear
clothing that had a high polyester and acrylic content.
One of the main sources of microplastic
particles in the environment, in our homes, is the is the plastic in the
clothing that we increasingly wear. T hat that then sheds as we wear it or as
we wash it in the washing machine that goes down the drain and into the local
lake and then comes back at us in in our drinking water.
And the biggest looming question over all of this: do humans have
these tiny microplastic particles in them,
and if so what are the health implications of that?
If it's in the water it's in us. If it's in the water it's in
other organisms. If it's in the water it's in our food because we use that
water to grow our food. And there was just a study that came out earlier this
week showing that plastic is moving from the
soil into plants. But it also means that if i was a meat
eater it's going to be in the meat because
animals eat plants, and then we eat the animals right, and so
this stuff is moving throughout the entire ecosystem.
That's just the reality, and and we find it everywhere so everywhere we've looked
we find plastic, you know, and it's generally
these microplastics and we're even seeing them down to the
nano size range.
[toilet flushing]
There's your very positive identification of polystyrene that just went through your system.
So that could have been one of the food containers.
We found three different types of plastic:
the polyester and acrylic particles probably came from
my clothing, and the polystyrene particle probably came from food packaging.
It feels kind of weird to be one of the only people in the world,
and the first in North America to be able to say yes i have microplastic
in me. The next question is, what are the health implications of this and that
that is truly scary.
It's so difficult i think for people to
appreciate that you have these small pieces of plastic that you can't
even see, so what is the importance of them? Well, when you get down
below 100 microns which for the record is
width of a human hair, so you take a human hair, if you're looking at a piece of
plastic that's smaller than that, that plastic can actually make its way
across the gastrointestinal tract. It can be
carried through our blood and therefore it ends up being
lodged within all of the organs that then clean out the blood. So your liver
your kidney and it could even make its way across the blood-brain barrier and
end up in our brain, and so then the question is well what kind of
implications does that have for human health?
We know that there are a lot of chemicals that are used in the
manufacture of plastics. We also know that as plastics are out in
the environment, chemicals will stick to the outside.
Each one of those pieces of plastic is is like a
little poison pill, and it's bringing those chemicals into us.
We know that those chemicals are endocrine disruptors, that means that
they mimic hormones and can affect us in terms of you know,
causing cancer, causing increases in ADHD and autism,
and you know a wide variety of human health impacts.
The question that we kind of maybe don't know quite as well
is what about the plastic itself?
That polymer that makes up the plastic, what is the impact of that, and that i think is
the question that was still out there, so that's kind of the
the more pressing or the forefront of the
the area of research right now is kind of understanding those health implications.
This is kind of thing that drives me crazy,
I mean it wasn't that long ago that ketchup came in glass bottles.
Over the course of my experiment as I used more plastic
products, levels of microplastics in me increased.
So one thing that we clearly need to do here is to limit
the amount of plastic in the environment and in our surroundings.
Nearly one half of all the plastics produced every day go into single-use
things, and a lot of that stuff can be dialled back and would result in less
plastic in the environment and less plastic in us.