Life in plastic — not fantastic?

Much of our modern world is made of plastic, but as more signs point to its dangers to human health, what can we even do about it? Guest: Annie Lowrey, Atlantic writer and author of I fought plastic. Plastic won. For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:13Speaker 02

  I could not tell you when I first encountered it. I was born in the 80s, I was mostly raised in the 90s, and it was everywhere. It was like electricity or the internet that it went from nothing to everything quite quickly. The invention of this stuff was in 1907, so that's not too much earlier than my grandmother was born. I certainly remember as a kid, it wasn't a substance that anybody in my family avoided. And it's amazing stuff. It has made the food supply much safer.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  It is massively, massively important for like medical purposes because it's much lighter and it's much cheaper than, you know, a glass bottle or a cloth toy. But yeah, I couldn't tell you like my history with it because it was just always there. And I kind of paid no attention to it, like I think probably most people do.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  It's kind of a funny thing. We are the generation, I guess, that like doesn't remember a time before it. And now, I don't know, I guess we're beginning to reckon with it?

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  Atlantic writer Annie Lowry recently reexamined her relationship with a material that's so ubiquitous, it's kind of like the air we all breathe or the water we're all swimming in. We use it to transport food, medicine, and all kinds of consumer goods. ICUs use it to keep very sick people alive. And it's literally in our air and in our water. So yeah, you're not usually a science writer. Why the interest in plastic?

• 3:01Speaker 02

  It came from the sense that every story I read about plastics seemed terrifying.

• 3:11Speaker 04

  Something known as Teflon flu is on the rise. The official diagnosis is polymer fume fever, and the most common cause of the condition is using non-stick pans.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  If you use a non-stick pan, if you leave it on the stove on high heat and you kind of forget about it, it can create toxic fumes.

• 3:31Speaker 05

  Symptoms can include fever, headache, trouble breathing, chest tightness, and cough. And it seems to resolve within two to three days, but we don't yet know the long-term effects.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Which are normally not super problematic if you're a human, but they kill birds. There's like 50 years of stories of people killing their own pet birds accidentally.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  And I'm like, the pan that you're making your breakfast burrito in can kill your pet? Like with no contact? I'm not saying that this is a common occurrence because you do have to really heat the pan up. But who among us hasn't forgotten a pan on the stove for a bit?

• 4:08Speaker 03

  That is wild. I had not heard that. That is crazy. Talk about the canary in the coal mine.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  And I was like, that's it. I'm done. If it can kill a bird, what is it doing to you?

• 4:19Speaker 03

  So writer Annie Lowry embarked on a quest.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  I threw out our nonstick pans over my husband's objection. And then I became slowly more and more obsessed with it and getting rid of more and more things in the house.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  A quixotic quest for a life without plastic.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  I would read something or hear something terrifying.

• 4:42Speaker 06

  Is your spatula going to kill you?

• 4:44Speaker 02

  And not quite know what to do.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  We've been getting a lot of messages about the dangers of our plastic household items.

• 4:53Speaker 06

  A study recently published reported black plastic household items are exposing us to dangerous chemicals.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  We're told, "Throw out all your black spatulas."

• 5:03Speaker 06

  The study was just found to have a math error.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  Or maybe, "Don't throw them out." It's all very confusing. The science on this is early and it's evolving. I think it's fair to say, at this point, we have more questions than we have answers.

• 5:18Speaker 07

  As much press has already happened on this topic, I absolutely believe this is tip of the iceberg kind of stuff.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  I'm Julia Longoria, and today on Unexplainable, how bad is plastic for us, really? And in the absence of real answers, what can we do about it?

• 5:53Speaker 03

  In the face of scary but vague information about plastics, Annie Lowry was moved to try and do something about it.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Although I would say I was not doing this in any kind of intelligent or systemic way. I was doing it in the way that I think a lot of people, when they have some anxiety about something, was doing, which was basically just acting randomly in probably ways that were completely not evidence-based and probably pretty silly a lot of the time. And so I thought, all right, I'm gonna like wake up in the morning and see how far I can get without using plastics.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  That morning, Annie got out of bed.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  My sheets are a linen and cotton blend, so those do not have plastic in them.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  So far, so good.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so far, so good. And then I couldn't drink my iced coffee, which was in a plastic bottle. I would note that my refrigerator is partially metal, but largely plastic. I don't know how you would get a plastic-free refrigerator, if that's even possible. Then I came back into my bedroom to sort of get ready for the day. I couldn't brush my teeth because my toothbrush is plastic. And you can imagine, right? Like, that's rubbing your teeth inside your mouth. The tube of toothpaste itself was plastic.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  Wow, I'm never gonna brush my teeth in the same way. I never thought of that.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Right, you were rubbing, rubbing your teeth with a soft plastic that degrades. Normally, I use soap that's in a plastic bottle to wash my face in the morning. My moisturizer, my sunscreen, my deodorant, all of those were plastic. I couldn't floss. My hair clips and my hairbrush, all plastic. Couldn't use any makeup. I went to get dressed, and all of my underwear, they all have at least a little bit of stretch in them. And so even my cotton underwear is not actually completely cotton. But I could put on like this kind of capacious sack dress with no underwear.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  I had no shoes that didn't have plastic. And so I couldn't leave my house.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  So it was like less than 20 minutes after I woke up that I was like, well, here I am, and I'm defeated. I did not make it far. I did not make it far at all. And I cannot imagine what it would take to have a truly plastic-free house. I don't know how you would manage to get things like lamps, electronic components. Paint is virtually all plastic. I mean, it would be, you would be like living in a... You'd have to be living in like a historical recreation, I think.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, could you imagine or would we even want a life without plastic, you know, in our modern times?

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's worth noting how important this stuff is. Not saying that there aren't harms, obviously, I think that there are. But plastic has made the food supply much safer. It is massively, massively important for like medical purposes. So it's a really important substance. And so, no, I absolutely don't think we want a world without plastic. I think we probably want a better understanding of the risks and the harms. Because I think that we're, we're dealing with this sort of like miasma where we don't know how we could be better protecting ourselves.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Even though Annie couldn't and probably wouldn't even want to totally escape plastic, she ventured to try and get rid of what she thought might be the more dangerous plastic.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  I started really with the kitchen. And I remember reading something about how soft plastic, so like plastic wraps, Saran Wrap, is more problematic than rigid plastic.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  So I threw out the plastic wrap. I got rid of our plastic storage containers, Tupperware type things. And I replaced them with the glass ones, which is quite annoying because they're much heavier. I have two little kids. And so I got rid of all of their plastic baby spoons and forks. And I replaced them with small metal ones. And then I started just wherever I saw it. I got rid of all of our plastic cooking implements. So like those I just used metal or I used wood. And then I also began to kind of implement rules in the household. So a big one was no microwaving plastic.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  And so it was hundreds of these little changes that I made around the house. And again, this is not, this is not how somebody with a lot of scientific knowledge would do it. This was just how I was doing it in a kind of silly, you know, in a haphazard fashion.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Besides annoying the bejesus out of her husband, Annie wondered what the effect of her neurotic behavior was. What was it actually accomplishing? So several years into her quest, she put on her journalist hat and turned to the experts for answers, who told her that a lot of what she'd been doing wasn't really accomplishing much.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  None of this was bad to do, I would say. But there's, there's this kind of broad problem, which is that this stuff is everywhere, absolutely everywhere. It is in dust. It is all over your house. It is in your clothes. It is in the literal food you are eating and the liquids that you are drinking. And so that means that on the one hand, there's lots of ways to try to modulate your exposure. But it also means you're not going to bring it down to zero. It's just not possible. You would have to stop breathing air, right? Or drinking water. So there's that issue.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  When plastic degrades, say when you reuse it a bunch of times, microwave it, wash it, recycle it, let it sit for decades in the ocean, it releases tiny particles of plastic that we've begun to call microplastics and nanoplastics.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  So we're talking about everything from like the size of a pencil eraser down to stuff that you absolutely cannot see with the human eye, right? Like tiny, minuscule bits that you could be breathing in, even bits that are so small, they can be absorbed through your skin, which is wild. But when it comes to microplastics and nanoplastics, we don't actually know a lot about what happens to them when they're in your body.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  Scientists have found micro and nanoplastics in almost every organ and tissue in the human body. They found microplastics in placenta.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  Scientists studied the deceased bodies of patients with dementia and found that they had up to 10 times as much plastic in their brains as those without dementia.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Scientists are doing a tremendous amount of research on this. But at this point, almost all of the research is correlative, not causative. And some of this science can be really difficult. One of the ways in which it's difficult is that there's no controls. Because all of us have been exposed to this stuff for so long. None of us, none of us are like pure. You would need to raise somebody in a plastic-free environment, like on the moon or something. And they can't do that.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  That's so wild.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  So, that said, with a very large caveat, scientists do feel like they have the beginning of an understanding of what you can do at an individual level to reduce your exposure and the ways in which it might be important.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Some science-based things you can do after the break.

• 14:01Speaker 00

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• 17:18Speaker 02

  The critical thing to know here is that ambient being around plastic is not a problem. It has to be inside you to hurt you. And so that means that there's only a couple of routes. So you can get it through your skin. You can breathe it in, which is, you know, through dust and through fibers, that kind of thing. And then you can eat it and drink it. You know, the transdermal exposure I know less about, nobody seemed to think that that was like a big, huge problem. It's really about breathing and eating and drinking. Like if you eat a broccoli, it possibly has micro and nanoplastics in it.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Wild.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Because it is soaking up water that has microplastics and nanoplastics. It's in soil that has microplastics and nanoplastics.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  If you think about it, most of the world's plastic ends up in landfills. That stuff gets into our groundwater and can get into agricultural soil. That's how it can end up in our broccoli and in the meat we eat. There's not great data out there at this point, but scientists have started to observe that meat tends to have higher levels of nanoplastics and the chemicals that plastic releases. Limiting meat intake might be a great way to limit your nanoplastic intake. Or limiting more processed foods, which scientists are beginning to warn, could have more plastic contamination from the way they're prepared.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  One thing that I found that it turned out I was actually kind of right about is that, yeah, then the kitchen and how you're cooking is kind of important because again, you're going to eat that and you're going to drink that. One other thing for people to check, so I live in New York. New York City tests its tap water and the tap water does not have microplastics or nanoplastics in it. But you might want to check in your local community, that might not be true. And there are water filters that can get it out for you. And then the kind of second big category that folks pointed to actually has to do with clothing and fibers. And the issue here is that clothing and fibers, they degrade, right? So we wash them, and when we wash them, microplastics and nanoplastics come out of them.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Or, you know, your rug gets all beat up, or maybe your dog chews on it or something. And then you can breathe that in, or eat it, right? Like through your mouth because of the fibers. And so mopping, wiping things down, you know, getting the grease off of your stove, taking your shoes off in the house, washing your hands before you eat, all of those kinds of things, probably pretty easy to do, and those would help. If you can switch to natural fibers, if you can hang dry things instead of putting them in the clothes dryer, that probably helps. And then just getting rid of all the dust in your house, so using like a vacuum with a HEPA filter.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  As you point out, though, the HEPA filter is made of plastic, right?

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, our HEPA filters, I'm looking at mine right now, and it's a, it's a plastic box. And it's right next to a blanket that I'm pretty sure has plastic in it.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  And to be clear, like, it's not, it's not clear that, like, all of these, this plastic is bad for us, right? Like, they're still, kind of, the jury's still a little bit out on, like, the effect on, of some of this stuff.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So some things are much worse than others. Nobody seemed to think that sort of solid, non-degraded, plastic objects that you might be touching and interacting with, so like that HEPA filter, like a computer, nobody seemed to think that that was a problem. Or, you know, the light switch on your lamp, the fact that that's plastic. The way in which it might be a problem is that when you throw it out, it goes into a landfill, microplastics and nanoplastics leach into the water supply. Or, you know, God forbid, it ends up in the ocean, degrades, and then you contribute to microplastics in the ocean. But yeah, there's definitely gradations of harm here. And so it was in this process of talking to people that I really built out my understanding

• 21:15Speaker 02

  of the enemy here, and then also what I should be doing beyond this kind of silly stuff I was doing.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  A big issue that I heard about in the emerging field of micro and nanoplastics is how do we even measure how much plastic is in our bodies? Some of the studies I came across looked at deceased patients because scientists devised a process they likened to Breaking Bad, where they digest all of the biological components of the organs that they're looking at until only synthetic material, the plastic, is left.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  The other thing is that there's now a bunch of companies that will test your blood. You can pay. It's like direct to consumer testing for microplastics and for PFAS. I was kind of just like, all right, like, let's see, let's see what we can dig up here. There isn't like a, like a strong scientific basis or a lot of history for them. I took the PFAS test because it was available at a Quest Diagnostics.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  PFAS, perinpoliphloralalkyl substances, are part of a class of chemicals called forever chemicals that are known to be released by plastics. Plastics aren't the only place they come from, though. We seem to know a little bit more about the negative effects of PFAS on our bodies than we know about micro and nanoplastics. We've been studying PFAS longer, since about the 50s, and there are strong associations between exposures to PFAS and cancers. But the Quest diagnostic blood test for PFAS is very recent. It came out in 2024.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  It was $357. And so I went, I took the test, the phlebotomist was looking at it, and she was like, I've never seen anybody get this. And I was like, well, here we go. So, you know, it's a venipuncture, they like, you know, do it in the arm, and it came back fairly quickly. It tested for, I believe, seven or eight PFAS chemicals. I went and I Googled each of them individually, and I can't tell you the names because they're these, like, they're these like 20 syllable long chemical names, like something, something, something, something, something, something acid, right? A bunch of them were plastic-related chemicals.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  And it said that I had an intermediate exposure, which may indicate health issues, may. And so I was like, well, what the heck does that mean? And like which health issues?

• 23:54Speaker 02

  As part of the test, they basically give you a physician to talk to who's kind of contracted to explain what your test results are. And I think maybe a lot of people don't follow up with this option. So I set up the appointment. I talked to this doctor who was like, yeah, look, there's just a bunch of this stuff out there. You should get a breast cancer screening, which I have to anyway. And also, you know, there's just these chemicals are everywhere and you got to avoid exposure. But frankly, they're just everywhere. And so I was like, well, this is pointless. You know, like every doctor who I talked to about those tests was like, you shouldn't do that. And that's pretty pointless. Like you can get that number and it's not telling you anything.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  And I thought this was so interesting was they're like, look, that's going to tell you the volume of a certain number of chemicals in your blood serum. But we're pretty sure that in the case of microplastics and nanoplastics, the issue is that it's accumulating in your organs. So if it's in your lungs or in your liver, in your gut, in your GI system someplace.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  In your brain.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, your brain, right? Testing your blood isn't going to tell you that. It's just telling you about your blood. And we actually don't have enough data about safe levels, variation within the population. You know, if you test it one day, is that number going to be the same two, three months from now? So every doctor I talked to about this was like, they're just taking your money. You're just getting fleeced, which I thought was funny.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  I mean, at the end of this journey, like, you know, it still feels like there's the stuff we don't know about plastic and its effect on us, like totally dwarfs what we know at this point. We know so little. And I'm curious, like, did you, did you come across like why or reflect on why we know so little about this stuff that that is like, it's like the air we breathe, basically?

• 25:56Speaker 02

  It is.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  I think it is obvious that there are health harms. And I think it will take a long time and a lot of really great researchers, physicians, scientists, biologists, chemists, oh my goodness, all different types of people looking into the harms until we kind of start to pin this down. And, you know, I just, I think about, we never really proved that smoking causes lung cancer. It was really evident to doctors that that was exactly what was happening.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  And there was a tremendous amount of research in the 20th century supporting this obvious conclusion, like exposure studies, animal studies, lab studies. But there wasn't like that randomized control trial that absolutely proved it, pinned it down.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  It was always just like correlation over causation.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was correlation. And at some point, this was considered so important that scientists kind of came together and they said, like, here's all of this evidence that is so strong that even if in some sense it's not proven, we can't not act because this is obvious the case. We're considering it proved. We would be doing tremendous harm by not letting people know this and by not regulating these substances because we know, we know, right? Ideally, our public health officials and our scientists would begin acting, even if

• 27:45Speaker 02

  things are not 100% pinned down, because, you know, we might have a lot of people get sick while we're waiting to know everything. Because this is a hard thing to study, a really hard thing to study. And certainly in the case of microplastics and nanoplastics, we're at the beginning of studying it. And it's the sort of thing that, you know, if, if, if the exposure that you're getting in childhood might lead to you getting An autoimmune condition or a cancer 50 years from now, right? Like, we can't wait for that. And that doesn't mean that we all need to panic and get rid of all forms of plastic. But it does mean that I wish that we would have scientific authorities and public health authorities that would start moving in the direction of protecting people.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  We don't need to know everything in advance. This is all about risk reduction. And we're talking about individualized risk reduction because the government has done essentially nothing to protect individuals from this and to create rules around this. I think in the next, you know, 10, 20 years, we're going to get a lot better sense of what we should be worried about when it comes to micro nano plastics. Because definitely those of us with more anxious imaginations, we're really letting them run wild in the moment. And I just, I get that sneaking suspicion that 30 years from now, we might have wished that we did some things differently.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  I'm curious, like, what's the last piece of plastic you bought or used?

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Man, I ate takeout last night. And takeout, it's coming in those black plastic containers.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  And it's also because you heat it because the food is hot when they put the food into it. Like, it's, it's bad. It's bad. But literally, last night, I ate takeout. So there's no avoiding it. I am wearing, though, I'm wearing like a cotton dress. So I'm at least, I'm, but my underwear, I am wearing underwear for what it's worth. So no, I've, I've reduced, but I'm nowhere near zero. This, this house is still covered in plastic.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  This episode was produced by me, Julia Longoria, with editing from Meredith Hadina, who also runs the show. Mixing by Christian Ayala and music by Noam Hasenfeld. Fact checking by Melissa Hirsch. Jorge Just is our editorial director. And Bird Pinkerton watched as the platypuses stepped back, encircling her and Aaron Bird. A short squat bird came out of the crowd, holding a small wooden chest. Choose your weapon.

• 30:28Speaker 03

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