Microplastics. A buzzword that is used constantly, especially when discussing the current state of the environment, but it is not truly understood by many. Microplastics are particles smaller than 5 millimetres in size that slough off plastics as they decay. They're everywhere – from your salt to dust. They surround us constantly and pose a significant risk to ocean life, causing potentially irreversible effects on the natural environment. 

Microparticles are everywhere. They’ve been found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and the top of Mount Everest. Studies found that 94% of table salt contains microplastics, and 1/10 of cosmetic makeup brands contain them. They're in your fresh vegetables, drinking water, honey, and almost everywhere else. However, is this a big deal? Obviously, it's not good, but is it that bad? 

Microplastics only became a real problem when Belgian scientists became aware of the presence of microplastics inside the stomachs of fish and shellfish. While finding plastic in the stomach of a fish was worrying, finding it inside a shellfish was of particular concern as shellfish are eaten all in one go - stomach and all. This then became a massive worry not only for the safety of food regulation, but for the Belgian seafood lovers who could be consuming up to 11,000 particles of plastic a year.  

But who are we kidding? In our shellfish or in our seas, it's been around forever.

Plastic is well known for being one of the most used materials in the world. Plastic really set off in production slightly before 1939, most specifically being used for vehicles, and when the world went into the war in 1939, there was a dire need for inexpensive material that could be manufactured quickly. Plastic takes from 40-1000 years to decompose. Every single piece of plastic that you have used, whether to carry groceries home or to keep your wet umbrella in, is still somewhere in the world. 

Plastic decomposition takes time, but it never fully decomposes. Plastic just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, until they become thinner than a human hair, becoming airborne. A study conducted by the University of Plymouth decided to compare the amount of plastic that would be ingested by eating contaminated mussels and inhaling the air of a typical Scottish home, and found that people take in more plastic by breathing in fibres from their clothes, carpets, and chopping boards compared to eating mussels. 

However, who would’ve thought that this plastic would not only be in animals, from invertebrates to mammals, but also be in us? 

I must say, it's quite shocking to think that there's plastic inside of you. When discussing the plastic epidemic, most commonly talked about is the effect of plastic on the environment, how it destroys ecosystems, and strangles turtles. Rarely is it talked about recently, how they’re decomposing, they pose such a significant threat to us. 

One study estimated that we consume about 5g of microplastics a week- that's about a credit card's worth of plastic. In a year, we consume the weight of a phone in plastic. However, this begs the question; where is this plastic going? Does it just linger around our nose, or does it go further?

Scientists in 2022 announced that tiny plastic particles had been found deep in the lung tissue of surgical patients and in the blood of anonymous organ donors. It's everywhere. Saliva, liver, kidney, heart, lungs- they're all over the place. Most shockingly, the largest amount of micro- and nano-plastics has been found in the brain. 

So, why does this matter so much? Well, it's not just the plastic that causes harm - it's what's mixed in with the plastic, too. Plastic is used for everything - you put it in a microwave, you cook with it, you use it as a chopping board. Plastic is like an ingredient - say sugar- and different things added to it create different desserts. For example, introducing bromine or phosphorus to plastic makes it heat resistant, while altering the polymer structure to polyethylene would make the long-chain polymeric molecules stretchier. Plastic itself is bad, but there are massively toxic additives that make the whole thing worse. These are called endocrine disruptors. Our body's microplastics have been linked to heart attacks, strokes, and death. They have also been linked to infertility, with the ingestion of microplastics affecting the growth rate of organisms. 

Microplastics, while unavoidable, have been a consequence of our human actions and a lack of regard for the environment. The most common ways to “avoid” them? Well, just avoiding plastic altogether. Buying naturally, filtering water, and reducing shellfish are also ways to reduce this, but it is all around us, and there's a lot more plastic to come.

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