Knowledge Shot: Are you eating plastic
All right, real quick. Oh, plastics.
Exactly. How do you mean there's a great future in plastics.
Think about it. Will you think about it?
This exchange comes from the movie, the graduate where Mr mcguire played by Walter Brook, gives a young Benjamin Braddock played by Dustin Hoffman advice about his future.
The graduate was released in 1967 and that line has proven to be prophetic many times over. Nowadays, we're surrounded by plastics and that's not surprising given that they're cheap to produce lightweight, easily shaped, waterproof, strong, versatile and durable plastics are made from organic polymers which are basically huge molecules that are created by linking together a small molecular unit over and over again.
For example, the material used in plastic bags is called polyethylene, which is created by linking thousands of ethylene molecules together into long chains.
Different polymers have different properties. Polyethylene, terephthalate or P et otherwise known as polyester is a highly recyclable material that's used in water bottles and fabric.
Polyvinyl chloride or PVC is a strong, rigid plastic, often used in plumbing. Polypropylene is flexible and really simple to manufacture.
So it's used in various consumer goods like the hinged lids on Tupperware or shampoo bottles. Now, the problem with most plastics is that they aren't biodegradable.
So they persist in the environment long after they've been tossed out. For example, the plastic litter that winds up in the ocean doesn't decompose and instead it gets trapped in the center of circular ocean currents called Gyres.
One really large collection of plastic trash is called the Eastern garbage patch, which is found in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii.
As the plastic sits in the ocean, it gets baked by the sun and breaks into tinier and tinier pieces. A process called photodegradation, plastic fragments that are smaller than five millimeters or about half the width of a fingernail are called microplastics.
Microplastics can get down to the size of glitter. And if you know anything about glitter, you know, it can get anywhere everywhere and stick to absolutely everything.
Microplastics wind up on the sea floor, the soil and in the air. That means they wind up in our food studies have shown that store bought sea salts can contain several 100 microplastics particles per pound of salt.
Other studies have found microplastics in bottled water beer and seafood. Microplastics get consumed by various creatures and can linger in their digestive tracts.
So, seafood that's eaten whole like Mussels and oysters are especially a concern. So since microplastics are in our environment, the food we eat and the water we drink, it makes sense that they're inside of us too.
This just hasn't been shown directly until now. In a recent pilot study, researchers showed that microplastics were present in stool samples from eight out of eight individuals.
And that the microplastics represented nine out of 10 common plastics that they were looking for. The particles varied in size but went down to about 50 microns, which is roughly the diameter of human hair.
The significance of microplastics on human health is unknown. On one hand, it is promising that the human body is handling plastics down to 50 microns by eliminating them in poop.
But what isn't known is if microplastics are getting absorbed into the body and into the bloodstream and if it has an effect on our physiology, it's worrisome to think that chemicals from these plastics may be leaching into our systems.
All right, quick little recap. We have steadily introduced more and more plastics into our environment over the past few decades and it's gotten into our food, our water and into ourselves.
The impact this has on our health remains to be seen and needs to be explored since plastics aren't going
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