How bad are microplastics?

Microplastics are everywhere. How did they get there, and should we worry? See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:35Speaker 02

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• 1:05Speaker 03

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• 1:21Speaker 04

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• 1:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  The history of plastic is intimately tied to the history of the game of billiards. In the 1860s, the billiards industry had a problem. The game was super popular, but it was hard to keep up with the demand for high-end billiard balls because the material used to make the balls was limited. The material was elephant tusks. It took about two tusks to make a complete set of balls. A major billiard ball company offered a $10,000 reward for anyone who could come up with a sturdy alternative. John Wesley Hyatt was inspired by this call, and he came up with an alternative to tusks that became the first industrial plastic. Now, the initial prototypes had the downside

• 2:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  that they were highly flammable, and there were rumors that they would sometimes explode upon impact during a game. Or maybe that's an upside, because it would make the game a lot more exciting. But anyway, today, plastics are ubiquitous. They're in our tires, our clothes, they line our paper cups, they make disposable medical equipment, which helps protect us from transmissible diseases. And the microphone and computer that I'm using to record this episode have plastic in them, too. It's kind of hard to imagine life without plastic. We're probably all aware that plastic has downsides, too. We're not really good at disposing of it properly, for example. And there's now garbage patches in the ocean, which are spots where currents

• 3:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  have aggregated the trash we've released into the sea. And we've probably all seen images of animals like turtles and birds that have died from consuming or getting trapped by large pieces of plastic. And those are the easy-to-see problems. In the last decade or so, we've become more concerned with the plastics that are harder to see, the micro and the nanoplastics. These are bits of plastic less than 5 millimeters in length, which is about the length of an ant, and smaller, much smaller. Some of these tiny plastics are made on purpose for use in things like cosmetics, and some are just the teeny-tiny bits of bigger pieces of plastic that have broken down over time. These tiny pieces of plastic are now found around the globe.

• 3:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Even pristine environments that rarely see people will see our plastics, because super-small plastic pieces go airborne, and they move with air currents around the world. Closer to home, we've found very small pieces of plastic in human hearts, brains, testicles, and more. It's even been found in baby meconium, which is a baby's first poop. So it's working its way through our fetuses as well. How worried should we be? This is an episode of Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, so you've probably already guessed that the answer is, well, we don't really know. We haven't been studying this for very long, and as we'll discuss, it's a hard problem to study. And it's not feasible, or maybe even desirable,

• 4:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  to stop using plastics entirely. So what do we do about microplastics if we decide we should be worried? Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Plastic Universe.

• 4:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I'm a parent, so I always think we should be worried.

• 5:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I study parasites and space and I have severe anxiety. So I also always worry and actually being a parent made that a little bit worse.

• 5:15Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Well, then my question for you is, do you think worrying helps? I mean, I know this is like culture of worrying. Jewish moms send each other messages like, "Start worrying now."

• 5:27Daniel Whiteson?

  You could probably like hire a room full of Jewish moms somewhere and like worry on your behalf.

• 5:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:32Daniel Whiteson?

  $9 an hour or $99, I don't know. But do you think that worrying helps? Does it make us think deeply about all the possible issues? Does it make us better scientists? What do you think?

• 5:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think-

• 5:43Daniel Whiteson?

  What's the upside of worrying?

• 5:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  It depends.

• 5:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I think Zach doesn't worry enough. And so there have been a couple of times where I've felt like I've had to step in to get the worrying level up to the right amount so that we could take care of some problems that needed to get taken care of.

• 5:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Was that when your stove was on fire recently, for example?

• 6:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, I actually, when I opened up the stove and I looked inside and I saw the fire, which was not my food, thank you very much, it was something else. My first thought was, I should call Zach. And my second thought was, what would he do? I don't need to call Zach. And then it turned out that Zach's brother had given me a fire extinguisher.

• 6:27Daniel Whiteson?

  All right.

• 6:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  So who I needed was Zach's brother. Thank you, Marty. And I pulled out the fire extinguisher. Everything was okay. I need to change the heating element or whatever. But I think you need to worry a little, but you need to not overdo it. And I massively overdo it. Zach underdoes it. And then I think we average our worrying and we get the right amount of stuff done. But what do you think?

• 6:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I have this friend who's a neuroscientist who thinks that worrying is what makes us better scientists. Because you like wake up in the midnight, you're like, wait a second, what if this part of that paper is wrong? What if blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? How would I know for sure? And then you come up with another test to verify that. And so it really helps make your science bulletproof because you sort of put yourself in the mind of the reviewer and ask all the critical questions and you worry about being embarrassed in front of your colleagues when your results are shown to be an artifact. So I think that it is helpful in that sense, and it also helps you prepare for eventualities. Like the reason I buy insurance is because I worry about stuff, right? But I agree that it can go too far and can be unproductive for sure.

• 7:28Daniel Whiteson?

  But you know, I think on this podcast, we aim for just the right level of worrying. We aim to educate you enough to make knowledgeable choices about your life, right?

• 7:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, that's right. That's exactly right.

• 7:39Daniel Whiteson?

  And so you hear all about disgusting parasites you will probably never get and don't have to worry about. But now you know enough not to go swimming with snails in Venezuela or whatever it was.

• 7:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, and you know what questions to ask your doctor when you go see them?

• 7:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, something like that. That's our goal.

• 7:57Daniel Whiteson?

  That comes from a person who has repeatedly gone to the doctor convinced he had toe cancer.

• 8:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Toe cancer in particular. Is there something weird about your toes that, that makes you think they're cancerous?

• 8:09Daniel Whiteson?

  No, I am just a hypochondriac and am capable of convincing myself that some weird thing is probably cancer and I better go to the doctor. And I'm the kind of guy who shows up to the doctor with like a list. Here's seven reasons why I'm dying. Let's go through them.

• 8:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ah.

• 8:23Daniel Whiteson?

  And you know, a good doctor is the one that like knowledgeably, but patiently walks you through the reasons why you're not dying today.

• 8:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. So I came, I came with my own list for the same thing for the doctor. And after I went through the list, the doctor said, can I ask you some questions? Can I, can I give you the survey for anxiety? And we discovered Kelly doesn't have cancer. Kelly has severe anxiety. So thank you to that doctor for listening to what I wasn't saying.

• 8:51Daniel Whiteson?

  And so today, we're actually doing an episode about something I've been wondering about whether we need to be worried about, but I wasn't knowledgeable enough about it to know whether worrying was justified or just my anxiety.

• 9:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you know what? It's nice to get clear answers, but you're not getting that today, Daniel. So sorry.

• 9:10Daniel Whiteson?

  But at least I'm going to be brought up to the forefront of current knowledge. Right?

• 9:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. You will be.

• 9:16Daniel Whiteson?

  So I won't have to be worried that I don't know enough to worry. So there you go.

• 9:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. There you go. Well, so let's start by seeing what the general public thinks of this question, or at least what the extraordinaries, who are probably not a random subset of the general public, let's see what our extraordinaries think. So I asked, should we be worried about microplastics? Why or why not?

• 9:36Speaker 06

  Probably not. I've seen articles that microplastics are everywhere and they're going to ruin our health and the environment, but I've never seen them give a relevant context, such as what the biological effects are. I'm open to learning more, but in the meantime, I'm not too worried about it and I'll continue to worry instead about climate change and my own diet.

• 9:56Daniel Whiteson?

  I certainly believe that we should be worried about microplastics. First of all, there is a coating of plastic around the world so thick that anthropologists are considering naming our current epoch of the plasticine because it'll form a permanent layer. That doesn't even begin to show all the potential harmful effects of the microplastics.

• 10:21Speaker 07

  Our immune system simply has not evolved to remove plastics from our bodies. And the more they accumulate, then the more we can expect trouble.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  Microplastics have been discovered all over the globe, including, I believe, in Antarctica. We don't know absolutely sure of the link and mechanism to problems, but it can't be good.

• 10:44Speaker 06

  75 years, we went from there being none to now being so pervasive that they can be found in the deepest depths of the ocean and even in our brains. I would love to know what these materials can be doing to our health and the rest of the ecosystem, so we can support policies that limit its production and perhaps even help clean it up. Yes, I do think we should be worried about microplastics. We don't know how our bodies, animals and the environment are affected by these things and we should investigate more.

• 11:15Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So a lot of people out there feel like there might be something to worry about. At least it's somewhat alarming that there's plastics everywhere. We don't really understand what they might do or how they might interfere with the function of this incredibly complex Rube Goldberg machine we call our bodies.

• 11:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. And I thought it was interesting. One of one of our listeners mentioned that scientists sometimes suggest we could call this era the plasticine because if you geologically dig through, you can see a layer where plastic has essentially been accumulating as we've made it go like airborne and all over the planet.

• 11:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 11:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so I feel like, you know, if you look at human impacts, first you'll see like a layer that's a bit radioactive from all of our nuclear tests. And then you'll see a plastic layer. And, you know, we've done a lot of beautiful things, but I don't feel like geology is telling a beautiful story.

• 12:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. What a record we are leaving, huh?

• 12:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. But, but we do a lot of amazing things with plastics, right? And so one of the things that kind of frustrated me when I was, you know, I tried to see how other people have covered this topic. And there's a lot of people being like, oh, plastics, they're horrible. And like, I get it. I get it. I'm an ecologist. I worry about the environment. I worry about the impacts on animals. I worry about the impacts on us. But plastics really make our lives a lot better. Right? I like, I think you need to keep in mind the trade offs here.

• 12:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Give me a top five reasons why plastics are good for humanity.

• 12:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I mean, so we've got like all of the disposable plastic medical equipment that helps make sure that we don't transmit diseases to each other.

• 12:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 12:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's pretty great. Most of our clothes now, even clothes that are made of natural fibers, quote unquote, have some plasticky stuff in them. And, you know, I think making clothing more affordable and making it so that everybody Can afford to wear things that make them feel nice is huge and great. And in general, I don't know that I'm going to go for all five because I don't know that people really care about Kelly's top five things. But in general, I think there's, there's a lot of things that are now within the price range of the average American that wouldn't be if we had to use quote unquote, natural substances. And natural substances aren't necessarily always better for the environment. So for example, we started this episode with the story about wanting to find a different material to make billiard balls out of because we were using elephant tusks.

• 13:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, no.

• 13:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  So everything's a trade off. You know, if we were to get all of our products from nature, that would be pretty damaging to the environment also. And so I don't, I'm Kelly, so the, the message here is it's complicated. It depends. You need to look at it from a number of different angles.

• 13:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, so tell me, how long have we had plastic? I imagine it's something that like came about in the space age, like the 60s, 70s, you know, Dow Chemicals invented or something. I'm pretty fuzzy on the history here. Educate me.

• 13:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, so that billiard ball example, that was one of the first examples of someone making a plasticky substance. It was celluloid and it was a hard substance that you could bounce billiard balls off of each other without having them like sort of dent and bend in ways that would impact how they moved. They were slightly flammable, which I mentioned in the introduction. And so if they banged together, sometimes they would set on fire, which would actually make me watch a game of pool. And so, but large scale production didn't really start until the 1950s. Around the 1950s, the 1960s, like single use, you know, plastic spoons, single use, plastic, everything really became fashionable as a way to like make our lives easier and they were really cheap. They were much less expensive than a bunch of the other stuff.

• 14:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so since the 1950s, the amount of plastic in our lives has been increasing at a tremendous rate. And that's the big plastic stuff.

• 14:45Daniel Whiteson?

  And so help me understand why, like if we knew how to make this stuff for a hundred years, why did we only really begin making it in large volume in the 50s? Was this after like post world war two industrialization or something else?

• 14:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  I didn't look too much into the history of plastics, but my sense is that it did take a while to figure out the chemical. Processes. And so, you know, plastics as a category like encompasses loads of different kinds of plastics that are good for a lot of different purposes. And so I think it took us a while to figure out how to make different kinds of plastics, what they're good for, how to industrially scale up so that we could, you know, use them for lots of different stuff. How do you make injection molds for this kind of stuff? I think all of that just took a while.

• 15:25Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. And so we're talking about plastic spoons and plastic medical equipment. I know Katrina uses it for her diabetes. She has these tubes, et cetera. But nobody's manufacturing microplastics. What are microplastics exactly?

• 15:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, people are manufacturing microplastics. As I understand it, the bulk of the plastic. So the bulk of the plastics is, you know, you get a plastic bag, you get a shirt with some plastic in it and it ends up either in a landfill or it ends up in the ocean and over time it breaks down. It could be because UV radiation is breaking it down into pieces. It could be because there are just fibers on your shirt that go airborne and they end up on the floor in your carpet in your home. So they come from big plastic breaking down, but they do also come from purposefully making small pieces of plastic. So for a while, it was fashionable to have microbeads in like exfoliation stuff. So like cosmetic stuff for

• 16:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  like washing your face to help like move dead skin cells off. We now have rules in both the US and Europe against that kind of stuff, but you can still end up with microplastics in, I think you can have them like in moisturizers. They almost act like ball bearings, just making it so that things go on a little bit smoother. But let's do some definitions here. Microplastics are defined as things that are five millimeters in size or less. That's still

• 16:46Daniel Whiteson?

  That's pretty big.

• 16:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is pretty big. That's like an ant, right? That's something you could see. So anything five millimeters in size or less is a microplastic, but we also have a category called nanoplastics. And these are one micrometer in size or less. So these are probably not something you're likely to see.

• 17:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Hold on. Hold on. Microplastics are millimeter sized. Nanoplastics are micrometer sized. Why don't they line up the name with the size? Like why don't nanoplastics be? Nanometer and microplastics being micrometer. Wouldn't that make sense?

• 17:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  That would make sense. And it's a bit ironic that the physicist is complaining about naming. But I'm not going to say.

• 17:26Daniel Whiteson?

  You know what they say? Every accusation is a confession.

• 17:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. I don't know who's to blame for this naming system. But, but yes, you're right. It's not intuitive.

• 17:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Pico plastics are one nanometer in size.

• 17:40Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So we have microplastics, which are actually kind of big and nanoplastics, which is super duper small. But how much of this really is around?

• 17:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  First, I want to say it's really hard to estimate. And while I was reading, the more recent papers are estimating more and more and more. And that's because we have better and better techniques for identifying smaller and smaller pieces of nanoplastic. So it's pretty easy, like by eye, to count how many pieces of plastic fibers that are five millimeters long are in a water sample, for example. But looking at objects that are one micrometer or less is much harder.

• 18:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  But there's an estimate that 51 trillion microplastic particles are floating in our oceans.

• 18:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Trillion.

• 18:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  So.

• 18:21Daniel Whiteson?

  You said trillion.

• 18:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Trillion.

• 18:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 18:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  I said trillion. Yeah.

• 18:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 18:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  I read this book called A Poison Like No Other by Matt Simon, and it's all about microplastics. And he talks about how microplastics have been found like in invertebrates in the Marianas Trench, in the most remote, mountainous regions you can go to. And like, this has just permeated our entire world. So, you know, when we drive down the road, we kick plastics off of our tires. Some of those go airborne. They take air currents, you know, to the ocean or across the ocean. Anywhere you go and sample, there's a really good chance that you are going to find a microplastic. I feel like I should add a caveat. I do feel like that book oversells what we know about the risks a bit.

• 19:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  But if you are looking to be scared and you're looking to understand where all the microplastics are and how much of them are out there, that book is encyclopedic in its laying out of where we find these things and how they might be hurting us.

• 19:18Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm still having my mind blown by the number of 51 trillion.

• 19:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 19:23Daniel Whiteson?

  More microplastics. Plastics than there are stars in the galaxy. Like if Elon Musk wanted to buy all the microplastics for a penny each, he couldn't afford it. It's just hard to grapple with that number.

• 19:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  It is. And again, like you should consider that number to have huge error bars. But for example, like there was a study looking at how many pieces of microplastics are in a bottle of water. And you, you know, you think when you get a bottle of water, you're getting something that's nice and clean. Some bottles of water had essentially no pieces of plastic in a liter of water. Others had up to 10,000 particles of plastic in a liter of water.

• 19:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, boy, they should list that in the ingredients, including 10,000 particles of plastic.

• 20:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Well, and a lot of it probably depends on like, you know, how were those water bottles stored? Did they get like left out in the sun for a few hours? Cause that breaks it down. Now plastics are starting to come out.

• 20:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 20:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  And part of why the numbers get so big, when you're talking about how many pieces of microplastics are in the environment is that they don't break down really well. So a big plastic bag will break down into much smaller component parts. But after that, they don't break down the way something biological would. So when you've got biological stuff out there, you have decomposers that go and they eat it and they turn it into other stuff. There are some plastivores that we're discovering, some like bacteria that can break down plastic. But in general, plastic is a thing that wasn't really in our environment in super high quantities in the past. So evolution doesn't necessarily have a way to break it down. Nature doesn't really have a way to break it down. And so they tend to accumulate and they break down to like some point where they're very small.

• 20:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  And then often they appear to stop breaking down and then they just accumulate in these small sizes.

• 20:59Daniel Whiteson?

  So that's the thing I'm trying to wrap my head around is that plastic feels really stable. And you know, if you have a Coke bottle, you expect it's still going to be there in a hundred years or a thousand years or whatever. So why do they break down at all? Like, why do macroplastics turn into microplastics and then stop breaking down? I would expect they're either stable and a Coke bottle is going to be here in a million years. Or it's going to break down into like, you know, attoplastics or whatever this smallest fundamental bit of plastic is. Why do they sort of stop breaking down at the microplastic level?

• 21:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I feel like that's a chemistry question, so I'm a little angry, but.

• 21:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm kidding.

• 21:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  But, but I think what's happening is that like, you know, if you've got, and I am joking, but you've got like a big piece of plastic.

• 21:45Daniel Whiteson?

  I just like how you said, I'm angry, but you said it with a smile.

• 21:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm hard to read, too.

• 21:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  So, so, you know, so imagine you've got like a plastic bag floating on the surface of the ocean. It's getting hit by UV radiation and that's starting to like break some of the bonds and break it into small parts. Those tiny pieces eventually get so small that they sort of break away from the rest of the bag and they start to sink. And as they sink, they sort of end up out of the reach of UV radiation and they end up in the sediment or they can end up in the soil or they end up in the gut of something else. And in some cases, they probably do keep breaking down, like it's possible that our stomach acid breaks them down a little bit. But I think in general plastics, part of why they're so useful is because they are sturdy and it takes a lot to break them down. And so maybe in a million years, a five millimeter fiber, plastic piece will disintegrate into

• 22:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  its like atomic pieces, but it's going to take a while.

• 22:38Daniel Whiteson?

  I see. I'm always amazed at the power of UV radiation. You know, in my house, if you burn something on a pan, so you can't scrub it clean, you just put it outside for like a week and the sun will break it up. It's amazing what UV radiation will do. Thank you, Southern California.

• 22:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wait, wait, what is your, okay, what does your backyard look like? And how many animals have you attracted by doing that? Cause I live in a place where animals want to be and they'd be licking those plates and it would be gross.

• 23:06Daniel Whiteson?

  That's fine. That's helpful. Some squirrel wants to use their, you know, long teeth on that thing, scrape some of that burnt oatmeal off the pan, like please help us out, man.

• 23:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, all right. Some rabid raccoon wants to, okay.

• 23:18Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So we have plastics everywhere. How long has this sort of been something we've known about? Like plastics came about in large quantities, like 50, 70 years ago? Was it very soon after that that we discovered that they were everywhere?

• 23:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, I, I think when plastics started to go mainstream, it was, you know, easy to see plastics rolling down the street on a windy day or something like, I think we've been aware of macroplastics as a, as a, you know, problem for a long time. We're not very. Good at disposing of them. They tend to end up in the oceans. They tend to end up in animals. So we've known that's been a problem for a while. And it probably didn't surprise anyone when we first started talking about the fact that it breaks down into tiny pieces. But the first time attention was really brought to this issue was when a marine ecologist named Richard Thompson wrote a paper about how he was collecting samples of sediment from beaches and estuaries in the Subtlet Zone in the United Kingdom. And he found

• 24:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  microplastics in all of those places. And he looked at plankton samples. So these are like tiny little samples from the water column. And he looked at samples from the 1960s and then at various dates getting closer to the present. And he found microplastics back from the 1960s. But he also found that they were increasing over time and that even you could find them inside of the bodies of little invertebrates that live in the water. And so he noted that we don't know the environmental consequences of having this stuff in the water, but it's in the water. This problem is getting worse. But it still took about a decade before people started really digging in and particularly thinking about the impacts on human health.

• 24:50Daniel Whiteson?

  I love this example of digging through past samples collected for completely separate reasons and finding evidence or answers to a question you have later on. This is why you should always keep all of your samples and all of your notes because who knows how it's going to be useful later. This is incredible. I love that.

• 25:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is why museums are so important because they do, they keep those samples for you and they're in a location where anybody can request them. So somebody in, you know, Peru can think of a question that requires American water samples from the 1960s or something. And if a museum has them, they can get those data. So anyway, yay for archiving materials.

• 25:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Yay for record keeping. Exactly. All right. So it sort of came to the fore in the early 2000s and then has the field sort of exploded in research?

• 25:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, the last 10 to 15 years, we've become a lot more interested in what it's doing in freshwater systems, what it's doing in oceans, what it's doing in our bodies. And let's take a break. And when we get back from the break, we'll start digging into that stuff.

• 25:56Speaker 03

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• 26:27Speaker 02

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel.

• 26:45Speaker 06

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• 26:57Speaker 06

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• 27:15Speaker 06

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• 27:21Speaker 02

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• 28:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so we have already established that microplastics are like everywhere. They're kind of unavoidable. And so let's start digging into whether or not we need to worry about that. So one thing that you maybe need to worry about a little bit is that they bioaccumulate. So you might have heard this word from Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring about DDT and how as you move up the food chain, you get more and more concentrated levels of these chemicals. And so an example for microplastics is that there was a study looking at the soil in Mexico, and they found that microplastics were a bit less than one particle typically in each gram.

• 28:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  But if you pulled an earthworm out, per gram of earthworm, you would find almost 15 particles. So the earthworms were going through the soil, and as they would ingest a piece of microplastic, it was like staying in them. And then they looked at chickens that were eating the earthworms, and there were 130 particles per gram of chicken feces because chickens were eating those. And so as you go up the food chain, for the same mass, you're finding more and more of these particles.

• 29:22Daniel Whiteson?

  So why do the earthworms accumulate them? Is it because they get filtered out of the soil and they stay in the earthworms? Like, there's something inside the earthworm that's accumulating these things?

• 29:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  So if you were to take a snapshot of what's inside of that earthworm over a year of an earthworm's life, and I don't know how long earthworms live, it might not be a year, but there might be a lot of particles that they ingested, but they pooped out. But because they're going through so much soil, if you take a snapshot, they might have about 15 particles per gram of earthworm because they're just moving through tons of soil and just accumulating it as they go.

• 29:58Daniel Whiteson?

  But in order to accumulate it, they have to eat more than they poop. So they preferentially don't poop out microplastics. Otherwise, they would have the same density as the soil. Like, if you just pass a tube through the soil, it's going to have exactly the same density as the soil. Unless there's some filter in there that's like accumulating the microplastics or preferentially not pooping them out, right?

• 30:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep. Yeah, that's a great point. You're right. They're accumulating them. They might poop some of them out, but in general, they tend to be accumulating them.

• 30:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, interesting. And so then the chickens eat those and then it gets more concentrated. And eventually, when you're eating chicken, it's like half-plastic.

• 30:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, not necessarily half-plastic, but but there's a fair bit of plastic in there. But but one thing that's important to keep in mind is that not all plastic matters the same from a standpoint of ingesting it. So you can get plastics in your body either by inhaling it, because a lot of it goes airborne, or by ingesting it. And our bodies will defecate and urinate out a lot of the plastics that we consume. And if you breathe it in, our, what is it called, our mucociliary elevator or something? Basically, like, we will like hawk it up. And actually, maybe Matt wants to remove that sound effect.

• 31:11Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't think so. No, I think you should keep that. And I just wish that the audience could see the face you made.

• 31:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  I was pretty expressive there. But but so, you know, you cough it up and then you can spit it out or swallow it and then it'll end up in your feces. And anyway, all very gross. But our body has ways of getting rid of a lot of this stuff. But if you've got nanoplastics that are small enough, they can pass across our alveoli, which is a point in our lungs where our lungs are sort of interfacing with our blood. And they can get into our bloodstream, or sometimes they can move across our gut into the rest of the body. So very small pieces can end up in other parts of the body where they're not going to get removed, or they're much less likely to get removed.

• 31:52Daniel Whiteson?

  And I've heard it said that we eat like a credit card's worth or a bottle cap worth of plastics every year or every week or whatever. Is that true? Or is that people over worrying?

• 32:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  There was a study that came up with that figure, and that went like global, just like microplastics. It ended up everywhere. But but there was another study that looked at the numbers a little more critically, and they ended up deciding something like you would require 23,000 years or something like that to acquire the amount of plastic that that paper was estimated. And so that I think what most of us have heard about plastic getting in our body is pretty overblown. But that said, they have found plastic in human brains. So this was, they did autopsies. So somebody had already passed away and they looked through the brain to look for plastics and they found it. Plastics have been found in plaques in our arteries.

• 32:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  So when your arteries are getting clogged, there's some little pieces of plastic in there, too. It has been found in testicles, kidneys, livers, like anywhere you can imagine maybe not wanting plastic to be. Plastic is there and we found plastic in meconium. Daniel, do you remember? I mean, I probably said it wrong. Let's, let's just be clear. But do you remember what meconium is? This is a word I only needed to know the definition of once or twice in my life.

• 33:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, it sounds familiar. It sounds like mucus. Is it something gross inside the body?

• 33:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's your baby's first poop.

• 33:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, of course. Yes, of course. Meconium. I remember that now. It's weird looking.

• 33:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, yes. It's weird looking and it has plastic in it. And so that means it's probably microplastics or nanoplastics, probably nanoplastics are passing from mom to the fetus and the fetus is already, you know, defecating them out pretty soon. So we start our life with these microplastics with us.

• 33:42Daniel Whiteson?

  And we talked recently about water filtration systems and these amazing processes that clean up our water. Are microplastics too small to be filtered out?

• 33:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, not so about 95% of the microplastics that go into the wastewater treatment plant are removed through the various processes. There's a lot of microfibers that go to wastewater treatment plants because a bunch of the wastewater that goes to those treatment plants is from when we wash our laundry. Or from like our shampoos and body washes and stuff and our clothes every time we wash them are shedding loads of microplastics. And so lots of stuff gets to the wastewater treatment plants. About 95% of it gets removed. Sometimes the sludge that gets collected at some of these plants will get used for other purposes, like as a fertilizer. And in that case, the microplastics could get back into the environment.

• 34:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  But if they're just put in a landfill, they're probably going to be fine. But a lot of them do still get through these wastewater treatment plants. And there were some data from 2014 to 2016 that estimated that something like eight to 13 billion pieces of microbeads were being released from treatment plants into freshwater systems every day. And we're trying to use fewer microbeads, but there's still a bunch of these getting into our freshwater systems. But they also get into freshwater systems or our oceans through other routes. For example, a huge source of plastic is our tires. And so when we drive, we're wearing some of the plastic off of those tires. And that ends up either in the air or sometimes it ends up on the side of the road.

• 35:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  And then the next time it rains, it takes those little pieces of plastic into our rivers and our lakes. And then in some cases, it brings it to our oceans.

• 35:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 35:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so, yeah, those are some major sources of plastic into our aquatic systems.

• 35:29Daniel Whiteson?

  And so it's everywhere. And we found that in our bodies, including our brains and all the other important bits. Why is this an issue? Or is it an issue? Or why might it be an issue for our health?

• 35:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so we're not super clear on it. First, I want to say that we've done some experiments on fish and the fish seem to get kind of messed up. So fish end up, you know, they eat the little invertebrates that eat the microplastics. And then they accumulate it in their own body. And we found that microplastics can mess with things like how the fish move. It can damage their intestines. I think in some cases, we found that it reduces their growth. And it seems to reduce their growth because it essentially like takes up space in their gut. And they like feel like they've eaten, but they haven't eaten anything that's nutritious. And so, you know, they lose weight and that can impact their reproduction and stuff like that. So we know that there are some examples where it's been a problem in fish. But fish are swimming in this environment with loads of microplastics.

• 36:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  So that might not tell us what we need to know about people.

• 36:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 36:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  So here are some of the top issues that we worry about for microplastics. One of the main issues that we worry about is that these microplastics tend to attract and stick to other stuff in the environment. So for example, they stick to heavy metals, PCBs, which are polychlorinated by phenols, and some other kinds of toxic material. And they get what's called sorbed by the plastic.

• 36:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Not absorbed, not adsorbed, just sorbed?

• 37:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think it's sorbed.

• 37:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Is that what the kids are saying these days? Wow.

• 37:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's what the science kids are saying these days. Very generous to call us kids. But so they pick up these toxic compounds. And then when they get into your body, they could release those toxic compounds. And so while a piece of plastic on its own might not cause a problem. If it's bringing, for example, mercury into your body and then depositing the mercury, the mercury could be the problem. Does that make sense?

• 37:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, absolutely. It does. Yeah.

• 37:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Other things that tend to stick to these fibers include bacteria. And there's some concern that the way bacteria aggregate, they form like biofilms, where maybe they could be sharing like antibiotic resistant genes or something. This sounded a little bit more speculative from what I could tell. But bacteria stick to them and so do viruses. And so these pieces of plastic could be ways that bacteria and virus make it into your body.

• 37:55Daniel Whiteson?

  So basically they're dirty. They're not just weird and artificial and everywhere. They're dirty.

• 38:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  They are, but this also contributes to why they're so hard to study. Right? Because whether or not plastic is bad for you is going to depend on what the plastic saw before it went to you. So like the same kind of plastic in an environment with no mercury might do nothing. But the same kind of plastic in an environment where it can pick up mercury and then get to you could cause a lot of trouble.

• 38:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. And these things must be easier to study in the lab. And then that doesn't really answer questions about what happens in reality where most of us live.

• 38:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amen. Yes, it gets super complicated. So then another thing that makes it all complicated is that added to the plastic are chemicals that help you, for example, make plastic that are soft and are like easier to move. So for example, if you think of your water bottles, that's you can squeeze those, it bends a little bit. But then there's other chemicals that make plastic stiffer and harder. So for example, if you have a Nalgene bottle, when you squeeze that, it doesn't have much give. And so these chemicals that we add to the plastic can also cause problems in addition to the plastic. So for example, there is a class of chemicals called phthalates.

• 39:10Daniel Whiteson?

  What?

• 39:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  PH TH.

• 39:14Daniel Whiteson?

  What? PH TH? That's not allowed.

• 39:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, not in the English language. It shouldn't be. But so I'm just gonna phthalates. I'm just gonna call, I'm gonna pretend the P is silent. The PH is silent. And these tend to be used to soften plastics and they're pretty common in our bodies. So there was a survey done and eight to 10 out of the babies surveyed had phthalates in their body. And nearly all of the adults that were surveyed had them too. And this chemical is associated with reduced sperm count and motility.

• 39:46Daniel Whiteson?

  No.

• 39:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know.

• 39:47Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't like that. That's not good.

• 39:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, but the results here are mixed. So like, if you were making a million sperm and now you make 950,000 sperm, should you care? And the answer is maybe.

• 40:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Those are 50,000 of my boys we're talking about here.

• 40:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  You weren't gonna make use of all those boys anyway, Daniel.

• 40:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  So there was a study that was looking at like, people who had various amounts of exposure to this stuff and how long it took for them and their partner to get pregnant or for, you know, for the woman to get pregnant.

• 40:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 40:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  And it looked like there wasn't necessarily an association between exposure to a certain kind of phthalate and how long it took to get your partner pregnant. And so the point is maybe sperm counts are lower, but that doesn't necessarily result in infertility issues all the time.

• 40:36Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, but sperm counts I think are dropping anyway, right? And we've been talking about how there's fertility issues already. So anything that pushes sperm counts lower is definitely not going to be good for fertility, right? I think you're arguing that this is a small effect, but still a small effect on average can have some measurable impact on the number of babies born, right?

• 40:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, and there are some communities who would argue that a big part of the decline in fertility could be because of things like plastic related chemicals in our water or whatever are being ingested with the food that we eat. And so, yeah, it could play a role and it could play a role in aggregate. Maybe it's just playing a small role in that overall trend. There's some work done in lab animals like mice. That do find definitely quantifiable impacts from exposure to phthalates on the mice. And so the question is, if a mouse has infertility, does that mean that a human's going to have infertility? We don't necessarily know. And often, animals in the lab are exposed to much higher concentrations of the chemicals than we are exposed to.

• 41:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  On a day-to-day basis, for example. And so it's hard to know how to tie those things together. But there is some risk that these chemicals are having some impacts on fertility-related issues. But we don't really know how much we should be worried about this happening for humans yet.

• 41:55Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So Kelly's given us two reasons to worry so far. They can trap stuff. They can be toxic chemicals. When we come back from the break, we're going to hear about more reasons to worry, including Daniel's number one reason to worry about microplastics.

• 42:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

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• 42:49Speaker 02

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• 45:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, we're back and we're talking about all those little bits of plastic that are everywhere in the earth and in you. Right now, swimming through your body are hundreds, thousands, how many bits of microplastic are in each of our listeners, Kelly?

• 45:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I, that would be very hard to quantify. I don't know exactly how many pieces are in each of us.

• 45:51Daniel Whiteson?

  We want numbers. I want an individual list of numbers for each listener.

• 45:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, well, give me a lot more money. And also, there's going to need to be a lot of slaughter, because to get those numbers usually requires an autopsy. So, let's just say we probably all have at least a microplastic piece in us, and that's probably quite an underestimate.

• 46:08Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, but it sounds like if you really want to know, and you're willing to volunteer for an autopsy, Kelly will give you a solid answer.

• 46:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nope.

• 46:15Daniel Whiteson?

  That's a no, okay.

• 46:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's no.

• 46:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Do not ship your body to Kelly to get an answer to this question, turns out.

• 46:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nope.

• 46:22Daniel Whiteson?

  All right.

• 46:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nope. Oh, so what you said you were gonna tell us your number one fear from microplastics. So go ahead, let's hear that.

• 46:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, well, my number one reason to worry about microplastics is, we don't understand the body. It's a big, complicated system, and there's lots of things that we do to it all the time that we don't understand how it works. Like, I think Tylenol, still not fully understood, why does Tylenol work? Or why do all these psychoactive medications work? And so, there's just a lack of a mechanistic understanding of how the system, how the body works. It seems to me like, you just throw a bunch of plastic in there, you can't predict what's gonna happen. And so many weird and terrible things are happening to people all the time. It's hard to know, like, how much of this is due to eating plastic, or not eating plastic. And so, to me, the number one concern is something we can't predict, because the system is too complicated.

• 47:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I think that is absolutely spot on. Yeah, I totally agree with you. And one point that I want to go back to really quick, we were talking about phthalates, and their possible impacts on the human body. I want to be clear that we do know that at very high doses, at high exposure, these things definitely are bad. So the question isn't, phthalates, good or bad? The question is, phthalates, at very low concentrations, are they bad enough that we want to give up all of the benefits we get by having phthalates? And there's another chemical that we're, we have the same discussion, and that chemical is bisphenol A. And just like with phthalates, we don't totally understand whether we need to be worried about it, and how much we need to be worried about it. But we know that bisphenol A-

• 47:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Acts like estrogen in the body. So in some cases, it mimics estrogen, making your body think there's more estrogen. And in other cases, it will like bind to receptor where estrogen should be. And now estrogen can't get to it. And so your body should be getting a message from estrogen, and that message isn't going through.

• 48:11Daniel Whiteson?

  And so this is a great example. People are like, BPA, what could it do? It's probably fine. Oh, turns out, maybe it's not fine.

• 48:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And there was a study that found that about 93% of people have BPA in their urine. So just about all of us are exposed to it. And for all of these chemicals, you might be most worried if a fetus or a baby is being exposed when like, tons of development stuff is happening. And so there were rules saying like, hey, look, we need a lot less bisphenol A in things like baby bottles, because we're worried about what tinkering with estrogen could do. There's some evidence that it's associated with increased blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, long down the road. It also can impact the brain and the prostate gland, the feces and stuff. Lots of reasons to worry.

• 48:56Daniel Whiteson?

  You said prostate gland of feces, but I think you mean fetuses.

• 49:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  I did. I feces?

• 49:03Daniel Whiteson?

  You just got poop on the brain. I get it.

• 49:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, I do. I do. Sorry. The brain and prostate gland of fetuses, not feces. Anyway, lots of reasons to worry. So we tried to cut down on the use of bisphenol A. But the problem is that this chemical is really helpful for making plastics stiffer and harder. And so we've replaced bisphenol A with something that has a very similar shape, because we want that same shape so that we still get our nice, hard plastics. So we've replaced it with, for example, bisphenol S. And we think that actually, maybe this other thing does a lot of the same stuff to our body that bisphenol A does. So when you see a bottle that says, doesn't contain BPA, that doesn't mean that it doesn't contain a very

• 49:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  similar bisphenol thing. So yeah, it's hard to replace these things while still keeping the plastics we love doing the things that we love them to do.

• 49:56Daniel Whiteson?

  I love those indications on food that make you feel like, oh, it's healthy. Like when you look at Jolly Ranchers and they say fat-free, and you're like, yeah, that's because it's 100% sugar.

• 50:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right.

• 50:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Does it make it a health food?

• 50:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  I like things that are like cholesterol free. I'm like, well, yeah, because it it couldn't have cholesterol in it because we know where cholesterol comes from. And it's like, no rat feces in this. It's like, well, it shouldn't have rat feces. But and what does that imply about the other material? Anyway, it's a

• 50:25Daniel Whiteson?

  But I do appreciate the nuance here that you could say, let's just get rid of all of it. But you're right that plastics have improved our lives and there's positivity there. And it sounds like we're being, you know, shills for big microplastics, as ironic as that name is. But it's true that, you know, you wouldn't want to just get rid of plastics, even if there is a cost to human health, because it also saves lives, right? Having these medical supplies, et cetera, et cetera, does save lives. And so really, the question, as always, is a nuanced one. It's like, does it do more harm than good?

• 50:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And so let's dig in for a second into all the reasons why it's hard to really understand why this stuff is bad for people.

• 51:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 51:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  So one, we talked about how you can cough, sneeze, poop, or pee a lot of this stuff out. So just because you're exposed to something like bisphenol A, doesn't mean that your body isn't going to excrete it before it causes any damage, or break it down before it causes any damage. But maybe it is causing damage. And so we need to research this a lot more to figure out how we get exposed to it, how our bodies respond to it, how much of it is bad. But there does seem to be a move, for example, in Europe, to decrease the amount of allowable things like bisphenols, because we are deciding as the data comes in, oh, this is a little scary. We don't want to risk it. The other problem is that plastics come in loads of shapes and sizes. And some of them are more

• 51:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  likely to get into our bloodstream, for example, than others. And when they break down, they break down into thousands of different chemicals, many of which we haven't looked at for health impacts yet. So it could be that, like, 90% of plastics are okay, but there's 10% that break down into super toxic stuff. And that's what's causing the problem.

• 52:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 52:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or maybe all the chemicals that it breaks down into are bad. I don't want to sound like you've got me worried now that I sound like I'm a shill for big microplastic.

• 52:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  This stuff is complicated and you need to decide on your own how worried you are about it. We also don't have very good methods for counting and quantifying plastics in the human body. I mentioned that you can look at this stuff during an autopsy, but then, once you've got these micro or these nanoplastics that you've collected from an autopsy, how do you know what kind of plastics they were in particular and what about it was bad? So you know, maybe one plastic in the brain has phthalates attached to it and one has bisphenol A. And how do you quantify the like total impact of all of that on our bodies? It's very complicated when there's lots of stuff interacting. And one thing that also makes it complicated is that for things like bisphenol A, this old phrase, "The dose

• 53:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  makes the poison" doesn't really stand. So for things like mercury, probably the more mercury you ingest, the worse it is. We don't want to have a lot of that. But with a lot of hormones, they have this weird way of interacting with our body where low doses and high doses can have the biggest impact, but intermediate doses sometimes have low impact. So it's almost like the letter U if you're looking at it on a graph. And so it's not necessarily the case that more and more and more and more is worse, but having a little bit could be really bad or having a lot could be really bad. And so it just makes it even harder to figure out these associations and try to get a handle on how bad and what doses are okay for people.

• 53:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, so then give me a overview of like potential things to worry about in terms of effect on human health. I'm not going to have more kids, so I don't really need to worry about my boys swimming anymore. But beyond fertility, what concerns are there for human health?

• 53:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so again, we don't really understand the mechanism totally for some of this stuff, but one concern is that there might be earlier puberty. So for example, from the 1970s to today, I think puberty has moved up by something like a year on average. And so the question is, do having all of these chemicals that mimic estrogen in the environment, is that, for example, moving up puberty time for women?

• 54:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 54:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  And women who enter puberty earlier, I believe they have a higher risk of things like breast cancer later on. So there could be bigger implications than, oh man, I've got my period a year earlier. It could have more health impacts down the line. There's also some proposed link between obesity and microplastics. So obesity has increased in the United States, you know, roughly along the line as our increasing use of plastics. But a lot of things have changed about the United States over that amount of time, too. You know, it's probably easier to get fast food and less healthy food. So it's really hard over time to tease these things apart. But plastics could be playing a role because we have seen that some kinds of plastics

• 55:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  and the chemicals that they carry into our bodies change the way our bodies metabolize food and the way our bodies make fat cells and stuff like that. And we found that lab animals and domestic pets are more likely to be obese as well. And those are animals that are exposed to plastics a lot because of us. And so, you know, maybe we're seeing an indirect effect in our lab animals and our pets.

• 55:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Though we have to be very cautious in concluding anything from correlation studies, right? Because these things could just be random. Like, and if you've seen the correlation between ice cream and murder, right? It's very tight. Doesn't mean ice cream causes murder. It means you tend to have ice cream more in the summer and people tend to commit murders more in the summer, maybe because they're not getting enough ice cream, actually. So maybe ice cream suppresses murder. Who knows?

• 55:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Maybe we, I think we probably all need more ice cream.

• 55:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Now we're big shills for ice cream. Great.

• 55:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm OK with that. That I'm OK with.

• 55:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Microplastic-free, big ice cream. All right.

• 56:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  There you go.

• 56:03Daniel Whiteson?

  So we're worried about puberty. We're worried about obesity. What else should we be worried about?

• 56:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  There's some concern about cardiovascular issues. So for example, there was a 2024 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine where people went through surgeries to remove plaques in their arteries. So this is like removing the buildup of stuff that was clogging up the stuff in the arteries leading to the heart. And after they removed that stuff, they put it under a microscope and they looked to see if there were microplastics in there. And about half of the people that they looked at had microplastics in there. Couple of different kinds of microplastics. They tried to quantify the different kinds. But then they followed those people for 34 months after the plaque was removed. And the people who had microplastics in There were more likely to have encountered a myocardial infarction, a stroke or death.

• 56:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Essentially, their heart was likely to have some additional problems in the like year and a half or more after plaque removal, if those plaques had plastic.

• 57:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Infarction is a word. It's not just a typo for infraction.

• 57:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  An infarction is an obstruction of the blood supply to an organ or region of tissue, typically a thrombosis or embolism causing local death of the tissue. So, yes.

• 57:13Daniel Whiteson?

  It's also a word that for some reason is just hilarious. It's a word like weasel or booger. Infarction, it just sounds funny to me. I don't know. I know it's not funny when it kills you, but it's a funny word.

• 57:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. A booger is funny when it happens to you and infarction is not.

• 57:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe a booger is not funny depending on the context, but anyway, it makes me laugh. So you mentioned that a problem with observational studies is that you don't know what is causing the correlation. So for example, it could be that the people who had microplastics in their plaques are people who were more likely to, I don't know, get McDonald's that are in those like plastic wrappers and you know, something about their diet resulted in them having more microplastics. And then they didn't change that aspect of their life after the surgery and that's what led to the problems they had down the road. So it's really hard to tease apart cause and effect. And you know, what is causing this problem when you're looking at an observational study?

• 58:13Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So there's lots of reasons to worry, but we don't have a great mechanistic understanding or really an idea for what problems could be caused. So what can we do? What are your prescriptions for improving our lives?

• 58:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. So I'd say that the emerging picture is that there are reasons to potentially worry.

• 58:33Daniel Whiteson?

  There's always reasons to worry, Kelly.

• 58:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  There's always reasons to worry. I know. And so, so you can decide how concerned the information we've talked about, how concerning that is to you, but there are some things you can do in your day to day life to protect the environment. Let's start with those. So one, there are like filters that you can get that go on your laundry machine to collect some of those microfibers so that they don't go into the wastewater treatment plant and then they don't go into the ocean. You can, you know, try to buy clothes that are meant to last a little bit longer so that you're not buying as many clothes and that would result in less, you know, microplastics. You could take public transportation so that you're not wearing out your own tires. There's, there's lots of little things that you could do.

• 59:15Daniel Whiteson?

  You could invent flying cars so we don't need tires anymore.

• 59:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I think some people are working on devices to collect plastic as they get released from tires.

• 59:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 59:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  And that, that seems like it could be pretty tough. You'd maybe never get all of it. But, you know, you, you could try to work on technologies that make this stuff easier to remove from the environment. But if you're worried about your own personal risk, some things that you can do include eating from glass or metal containers instead of plastic. If you have Tupperware containers, don't wash them in your dishwasher because that gets really hot. It starts breaking down the plastics. Your, those microplastics could come off in your food. Things like vacuuming regularly are important because you're dropping plastic fibers all the time from your clothes.

• 59:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 59:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  And they end up on the floor and then they can get kicked up into the air as you're walking around. Maybe not drinking bottled water because those tend to have plastics, but there's also plastic in tap water. But if you get a reverse osmosis filter, you can take some of it out. But those are expensive. And if you remove the microplastics, you're also removing minerals and salts and stuff and you might want to add some of that stuff back in. A lot of this stuff is complicated. So you need to decide what are your most likely exposure risks and how concerned are you? Because again, there are trade offs. Maybe a lot of this stuff at doses, you know, like I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't probably breathe in a lot of tire stuff. My water comes from the ground and while groundwater

• 1:00:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  does sometimes have some plastics, my groundwater where I am probably doesn't have a lot of it.

• 1:00:45Daniel Whiteson?

  So we should all move in with you, it sounds like.

• 1:00:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, no, no, actually, because then, then it wouldn't be quite as pristine. But, but anyway, like, I'm not too worried about my exposure to plastics because I use a lot of ceramic and stainless steel stuff. So I'm not too worried. But, you know, you, you should think about the various ways you encounter plastic in your life and then decide if you are concerned or not. And if you want to make any changes, it's up to you.

• 1:01:10Daniel Whiteson?

  And as is my habit, the night before we record, I usually ask Katrina what she thinks about an episode, just to hear if she has some ideas. So I asked her what she thought we could do to reduce our microplastics. And here's what she had to say. Well, eating fiber forms a matrix that will protect you from all toxins. Think of it like a Brita filter, where it's sucking up the toxins and preventing them from being absorbed into your, into your body. So if you're eating fiber, then you've got this gel that sticks with you down to your colon. And if there's also microplastics in your food and water, it gets sucked up into that so that it doesn't get absorbed by your intestinal cells.

• 1:01:51Daniel Whiteson?

  So Katrina's big on fiber. So maybe no surprise that she prescribes fiber for everybody.

• 1:01:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask if the answer to every question in the White's and household is beans.

• 1:02:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Beans, chia seeds, beans, fiber. It's good for you. She's just rooting for the microbes inside everybody to help with the microplastics.

• 1:02:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, we could probably all use more fiber anyway. And there are some studies in mice, for example, that find that microplastics disrupt the gut microbiome. So fiber can help you in the battle against plastics in a lot of different ways. And so, you know, I want, I want to be clear throughout this episode, you know, I've tried to make sure I was including caveats about whether or not this is likely to be important. Like, I don't want people to be freaking out. There are some reasons to be concerned, but at the moment, there's just so many different places we can encounter plastics and so many different kinds of plastics and so many different contingencies that matter, like where the plastic was before it got to you, that we just don't have a very good handle on this problem yet. And this is all the more reason to invest in basic science so

• 1:02:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  we can try to understand this better. But like so many risks in life, you gotta kind of decide for yourself, how concerned am I going to be, given what we know about this?

• 1:03:01Daniel Whiteson?

  So don't worry too much. Don't worry too little. Worry just the right amount.

• 1:03:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Just the right amount. Good luck with that. And the reason we talked about microplastics today is because a listener sent us an email saying, I would love to know more about microplastics. So I sent this episode to them and let's see what they had to say.

• 1:03:20Speaker 06

  Is a wonderful material and all its different applications and all the different fields where it's an essential material. Although I do believe that we need to be more picky how we use plastic and and we need to cut some products from our lives, especially the disposable, single-use ones that are quite unnecessary, I believe. I'm deeply concerned for the effects microplastics have on smaller creatures, especially ocean creatures, as you mentioned in the episode, and and the effects that they may have on their

• 1:04:03Speaker 06

  larger food chains and ecosystems.

• 1:04:08Speaker 06

  It might sound bleak, but I'm less so concerned for the effects on human health as we are, of course, the responsible ones. But thank you, Daniel and Kelly, for the episode. It was informative and you learned some new new things. And I thank you for taking my suggestion.

• 1:04:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank you very much for that feedback. We did end up focusing a lot on human aspects of impacts of microplastics, but there's definitely evidence that microplastics in aquatic ecosystems are bad and impact a variety of different organisms in negative ways. So I think at a minimum, it would be important for all of us to think about how we can cut back on plastics in our lives, and we should think about what we're doing to organisms beside ourselves. So, yes, thank you for making that important point.

• 1:04:56Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Well, thanks, everyone, for sending in your questions and for being curious about the nature of the world, though we don't have a clear prescription about how you should live your life. At least now, you're better informed about what we do and don't know about microplastics.

• 1:05:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 1:05:20Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 1:05:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 1:05:32Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 1:05:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 1:05:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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