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 widely covered 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’s not wrong. 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.”
Part of the challenge is that microplastics are an expansive category, generally defined as any plastic particle less than 5 millimeters across, with a multitude of shapes that might influence their health effects. They’re also made of different fossil fuel–derived polymers—such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) from water bottles, polypropylene (PP) from yogurt tubs, and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from piping. Not to mention the more than 13,000 chemicals thrown in to make plastics flexible, stretchy, flame resistant, or otherwise useful. Most of these chemicals haven’t been safety tested, and manufacturers aren’t required to do so. But several are known toxicants—suspected carcinogens including PFAS (“forever chemicals”) and hormone disrupters such as bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates.
“All plastic becomes microplastic sooner or later.”
We consume these additive-laden plastic bits in food and beverages contaminated by storage containers, bottles, and plastic wrap; inhale them as airborne dust and particulates; and absorb them via skin products. In the environment, plastics can take hundreds of years to break down, and as they do, they leach into the surrounding land and water. “All plastic becomes microplastic sooner or later,” says Megan Wolff, the executive director of the Physician and Scientist Network Addressing Plastics and Health, or P-SNAP, a nonpartisan advocacy group. It’s difficult to estimate just how much of that plastic ends up in us, but according to one unsettling 2023 study, the average adult may take in tens of thousands of microplastic particles per day.
While plastics are ubiquitous now, it wasn’t always that way. During World War II, the US government relied on synthetic materials like nylon for parachutes, polyethylene to coat radar cables, or Teflon to prevent corrosion in uranium enrichment, explains journalist Mariah Blake, author of They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals. But after the war, manufacturers had to find a new market. Suddenly, plastics and their additives appeared in everything from surgery equipment to shower curtains and punch bowls. “The rise of the US chemical industry and the synthetic materials that pervade our daily lives,” Blake says, “is really a product of the military industrial complex.”
Today, a growing collection of data points to worrying outcomes of that legacy. In an influential study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, for instance, scientists followed about 250 patients who’d had plaque removed from their arteries. Those whose plaque contained traces of plastic—about 58 percent—saw a 450 percent higher risk of heart attack, stroke, or death over three years compared with the other subjects, a concerning correlation. Microplastics and their additives have also been linked to inflammatory bowel disease, preterm birth, respiratory conditions, and other ailments. (Researchers emphasize that these results should be interpreted with caution; As Matthew Campen, an author on the Nature Medicine brain study, said over email, “[T]here is uncertainty in every publication, our work has not yet been replicated, and the science is far from settled.”)
“The administration’s explicit goal to unleash the fossil fuel industry will also unleash plastic pollution.”
The Trump administration is broadly aware of the problem. Its “Make America Healthy Again” report, though riddled with fake citations, recognized bisphenols, microplastics, PFAS, and phthalates as pollutants posing a risk to children’s health. Yet the administration rolled back some Biden-era regulations intended to limit PFAS in drinking water; proposed eliminating much of the budget for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development, which compiles data on toxic chemicals; and cut billions of dollars in funding for scientific work—including research on microplastics—supported by the EPA and the National Institutes of Health. In February, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to end the government’s purchase of paper straws, writing on Truth Social, “BACK TO PLASTIC!”
What’s baffling about all this, as Liza Featherstone noted in the New Republic in March, is that microplastics were, once upon a time, a top priority for Kennedy. Even as new research backs up his concerns, Featherstone writes, Kennedy is “part of an administration that is doing more than any in history to dismantle every mechanism that we could use to address this problem.” (One researcher, in fact, told NPR that she’d had a federal grant canceled on the very same day RFK Jr. had favorably cited her work on microplastics in seafood in a speech.)
When reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services noted in an email that its “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy” report, released earlier this month, “emphasizes the need for continued research on microplastics” and recommends HHS, NIH, and EPA “assess the risks and exposures associated with microplastics and synthetic materials in everyday products.” “President Trump and Secretary Kennedy stand united in their commitment to protecting the health of the American people from toxic environmental exposures,” the spokesperson wrote.
Addressing the plastics supply is another story. In August, negotiations over the UN’s global plastics treaty, an effort originally envisioned to “end plastic pollution,” came to a standstill. Last fall, the Biden administration shocked environmentalists by backpedaling on full support for the treaty, including a cap on production. The Trump administration not only opposes such a cap, but has also embraced fossil fuel producers and plastics manufacturers amid Trump’s promise to “drill, baby, drill.” “The administration’s explicit goal to unleash the fossil fuel industry,” Woodruff says, “will also unleash plastic pollution.”
The local outlook is slightly more promising. About a third of states have adopted policies to limit microplastic pollution, reduce packaging, or address chemicals in plastics, according to environmental group Safer States.
At home, you might try to avoid single-use plastic and takeout food, use a HEPA air filter, wash your hands often, buy clothes made of natural fibers, and definitely not microwave food in plastics. But experts I spoke with emphasize that fossil fuel producers and governments bear the greatest responsibility for curbing plastic use. The producers, after all, are the reason for this (literal) mess. As RFK Jr. put it in 2023, “The people who are causing the problem are not being forced to pay to clean it up.” This, he said at the time, was a “market failure.” By now, it’s looking more and more like a government failure.
From Mother Jones via this RSS feed