PLASTIC MEASURES

The synthetic stuff in our brains, oceans, and politics

- JACKIE FLYNN MOGENSEN

MICROPLASTICS ARE, quite literally, everywhere—in rivers and lakes, clouds and soil, the depths of the ocean, the heights of Mount Everest. They have shown up in meat, seafood, fruits and vegetables, salt, sugar, and seemingly every corporeal realm scientists have checked, including our lungs, saliva, feces, blood, testicles, and breast milk. Earlier this year, a study published in Nature Medicine suggested there may be up to 7 grams of microplastics in the average human brain—about the weight of a plastic spoon. And our exposure is likely to only get worse; plastic production, UN researchers estimated in 2021, is set to double by 2040.

The public isn't too thrilled about that. About a third of Americans polled by PBS, NPR, and Marist University in 2024 said they've actively tried to cut back on plastic use. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaigned for president in part on the promise of breaking this dependency: Plastic production, he wrote in 2023, has "created a crisis for human health and the environment." He vowed to "address the plastic crisis with the sense of urgency it deserves." And he was right. While there's much we don't know about the health effects of plastics, experts tell me, there's enough evidence to do something about it.

“It’s time to act now,” says Tracey Woodruff, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies reproductive and developmental health and environmental pollutants. “If we don't,” she warned during a March webinar, “we're going to end up with a problem that will be very difficult to correct.”