Babies may be exposed to microplastics from putting toys in their mouths or from plastic baby bottles, sippy cups, and pacifiers that might shed pieces of PET.

Microplastics, or tiny particles of synthetic material smaller than five millimeters, can be virtually found everywhere. When plastic bottles or plastic bags break down, they degrade into tiny pieces that can seep into the smallest nooks out in nature. When washing synthetic fibers, parts break off and flow back into our water sources. Microplastics can even be found in the world’s most remote areas like the Arctic and the deepest parts of the oceans, reports Wired’s Matt Simon.

Now, scientists have found the synthetic materials in infant poop, according to a small pilot study published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters. Based on body weight, microplastics in baby poop were ten times higher than those found in adult feces, reports Justine Calma for the Verge. Researchers collected fecal samples from ten adults and six infants from New York state, reports Ed Cara for Gizmodo. The team also sampled three newborns’ very first poop, per the Verge. Despite the study’s small sample size, the results show more research is needed to understand how microplastics affect people of all ages.

“Our data provide baseline evidence for exposure doses in infants and adults and support the need for further studies with a larger sample size to corroborate and extend our findings,” the study explains.

Within the fecal matter, researchers were looking for traces of two commonly found plastics: polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polycarbonate. To ensure that the plastic found in infant poop was not from their diaper, researchers ruled out traces of polypropylene, a polymer commonly found in diapers, per Wired. Within all collected samples of poop, researchers found at least one type of plastic. Traces of plastic were also found in the newborn’s first bowel movement, suggesting that the plastic was already in their systems.

“Babies are exposed to high levels of plastics, something needs to be done,” says study author Kurunthachalam Kannan, a professor of environmental medicine and pediatrics at the New York University School of Medicine. “Early life stages are very vulnerable.”

The findings build on previous research published this year in Pharmaceutics that has found microplastics in human placentas, Wired reports. A 2019 study published in Chemosphere also found that pieces of plastic could break down small enough to pass through cell membranes and make their way into the body’s circulatory system, the Verge reports. Microplastics in blood could lead to cell death and inflammation. Plastics also contain hormone-disrupting chemicals that could affect reproductive, metabolic, and neurological health. The new study’s finding of microplastics in infant feces is alarming because babies are more prone to negative health effects during development.

Babies may be exposed to microplastics from putting toys in their mouths or from plastic baby bottles, sippy cups, and pacifiers that might shed pieces of PET, the Verge reports. Babies that are in their crawling stage may also inhale microfibers from polyester carpeting.

PET is derived from natural gas and crude oil. PET is also the chemical name for polyester, and its fibers are added to fabrics like rayon, wool, and cotton to make them resistant to wrinkling. The stiff, lightweight synthetic fiber is molded into plastic containers used to package food, beverages and other products, including mouthwash, peanut butter, liquid hand soap, cooking oils, disposable soft drink bottles and many other products. The synthetic fiber is frequently used because it can be heated to a molten liquid and then easily molded into any shape. While PET is the most recycled type of plastic, only 20 percent of the material actually gets disposed of properly.

“This is a very interesting paper with some very worrying numbers,” Deonie Allen, a microplastics expert at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, who was not involved in the study, told Wired. “We need to look at everything a child is exposed to, not just their bottles and toys.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/study-shows-infant-poop-is-riddled-with-microplastics-180978770/

Throw away the plastic teething rings.

Bubblecar said:

Throw away the plastic teething rings.

Think you would be right car.

As if Global Warming, Covid and Over-population etc. were not enough.

Half of All Plastic That Has Ever Existed Was Made in the Past 13 Years

Plastic production is rapidly accelerating, according to an ambitious new paper—but only 9 percent of it gets recycled.

In 2014, scientists found a new kind of of “stone” on the beaches of Hawaii. It was made of sand, organic debris, volcanic rock, all swirled together with melted plastic. So they proposed the name “plastiglomerate” and they suggested that, as plastic lasts pretty much forever, these stones could be a marker of the Anthropocene in the rock record. In the future, our time might be defined by our use of plastics.

Which is not particularly hard to imagine, given the ubiquity of plastics. Now, for the first time, researchers have published a sweeping, public, and in-depth accounting of all plastic that has ever been made in the entire world. The number is so big as to defy human comprehension: 8,300 million metric tons since 1950. Of this, 6,400 million metric tons has outlived its usefulness and become waste; 79 percent of that waste is sitting in landfills or the natural environment, 12 percent has been incinerated, and just 9 percent has been recycled.

Donald Loepp, editor of the industry paper Plastics News, called the study an “impressive report.” It’s something that many people have speculated about, he says, but no one had published such a thorough accounting until now.

Perhaps the most eye-popping statistic in the study is how quickly plastic production has been accelerating in just this millennium. The world has made as much plastic in the past 13 years it did in the previous half-century. “I think the number that captures it best,” says Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an author on the study. We’re still rushing headlong into the plastic age.

Geyer and his team rely on both publicly available information and industry reports that they purchased for the study. They begin their analysis in the year 1950, when plastic started entering civilian life. During World War II, the military was starting to find uses for plastic. “The way the war disrupted trade, for example, with natural rubber supplies from southeast Asia or the silk supply out of Japan, affects how tires are made, how parachutes are made, and tread for boots,” says Rebecca Altman, a writer and environmental historian. “The stage was set for plastics to really take off after the war.”

It’s worth considering how much the rise of plastic is tied to the rise of oil and gas. Around this time, the United States began using a lot more oil. Oil is easy to make into plastic, and and it is cheap to do so. These economic forces helped create a new category of product: the disposable, single-use plastic packaging.

Packaging is now the largest plastic market, and it’s still tied to fossil fuels. In June, The Wall Street Journal reported on how the United States’ natural gas boom was translating into cheaper plastic pellets. The Dow Chemical Company wants to send its plastic pellet to places like Brazil, where it’s betting that a rising middle class will want the convenience of single-use plastic baby-food containers. Developing countries in South America and Asia account for much of the recent growth in plastics consumption.

These economic forces also govern how plastic gets recycled—or doesn’t. It’s often cheaper just to make virgin plastics, especially if you need plastic of a certain hardness or durability. Plus, there are so many different types of plastics that need to be sorted. “Plastic recycling just suffers from poor economics,” says Geyer.

It wasn’t always obvious that petroleum-based plastics would dominate. In the early 20th century, scientists experimented with plastics made from plant-derived carbon-based molecules. Henry Ford unveiled the “soybean car” in 1941. The car had a hard plastic shell, made of soybean fiber. The field of chemurgy—dedicated to turning agricultural materials into industrial products—rose and quickly fell, thanks to the ascendance of petroleum. It’s come full circle in a way. Now there are bioplastics, made out of biological materials like corn starch.

I asked Geyer if he thought we would eventually move beyond petroleum-based plastics, given a long-term move away from fossil fuels. “Unfortunately, my answer will be no,” he said. He gave two reasons. First, plastic production uses only a tiny fraction of the fossil fuel that we currently use for energy, so there will be plenty to go around for a long time. And second, he’s not convinced that bioplastics have less of an environmental impact. They aren’t necessarily more biodegradable, and they divert crops away from food. Since large-scale agriculture also relies on fossil fuels for fertilizer, there’s no way to go completely fossil fuel-free yet.

So our plastic age goes on. We will keep adding plastiglomerate to the geological record of the Anthropocene.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/07/plastic-age/533955/

so it’s actually good news that they’re shitting it out instead of incorporating it into their bodies

SCIENCE said:

so it’s actually good news that they’re shitting it out instead of incorporating it into their bodies

They absorb it too. There is a big question mark concerning the long-term effects, but it is very unlikely to be good. There are so many new things happening these days, we truly do live in interesting times.

What is so bad about microplastics?

Yes, I realise some of the plasticisers can cause issues, but wouldn’t they be volatile and well gone?

Dark Orange said:

What is so bad about microplastics?

Yes, I realise some of the plasticisers can cause issues, but wouldn’t they be volatile and well gone?

No! Read the article.

PermeateFree said:

SCIENCE said:

so it’s actually good news that they’re shitting it out instead of incorporating it into their bodies

They absorb it too. There is a big question mark concerning the long-term effects, but it is very unlikely to be good. There are so many new things happening these days, we truly do live in interesting times.

Fair rejoinder, we wouldn’t recommend eating plastics and the reasoning makes sense.

SCIENCE said:

PermeateFree said:

SCIENCE said:

so it’s actually good news that they’re shitting it out instead of incorporating it into their bodies

They absorb it too. There is a big question mark concerning the long-term effects, but it is very unlikely to be good. There are so many new things happening these days, we truly do live in interesting times.

Fair rejoinder, we wouldn’t recommend eating plastics and the reasoning makes sense.

Microplastics are so small they are absorbed into the blood and most body organs and what’s more, you don’t know you are eating them.

PermeateFree said:

Microplastics are so small they are absorbed into the blood and most body organs and what’s more, you don’t know you are eating them.

well all right then might need more convincing evidence on that one

SCIENCE said:

PermeateFree said:

Microplastics are so small they are absorbed into the blood and most body organs and what’s more, you don’t know you are eating them.

well all right then might need more convincing evidence on that one

Microplastic particles now discoverable in human organs

Microplastic and nanoplastic particles are now discoverable in human organs thanks to a new technique.

Microplastics have polluted the entire planet, from Arctic snow and Alpine soils to the deepest oceans. People are also known to consume them via food and water, and to breathe them in, but the potential impact on human health is not yet known.

The researchers expect to find the particles in human organs and have identified chemical traces of plastic in tissue. But isolating and characterising such minuscule fragments is difficult, and contamination from plastics in the air is also a challenge.

To test their technique, they added particles to 47 samples of lung, liver, spleen and kidney tissue obtained from a tissue bank established to study neurodegenerative diseases. Their results showed that the microplastics could be detected in every sample.

The scientists, whose work is being presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society on Monday, said their technique would enable other researchers to determine contamination levels in human organs around the world.

“It would be naive to believe there is plastic everywhere but just not in us,” said Rolf Halden at Arizona State University. “We are now providing a research platform that will allow us and others to look for what is invisible – these particles too small for the naked eye to see. The risk really resides in the small particles.”

The analytical method developed allows the researchers to identify dozens of types of plastic, including the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) used in plastic drinks bottles and the polyethylene used in plastic bags.

They found bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical used to make plastics, in all 47 samples. The US Environmental Protection Agency is concerned about BPA because “it is a reproductive, developmental and systemic toxicant in animal studies”. The researchers examined lung, liver, spleen and kidney tissue as these organs are likely to be exposed to microplastics or collect them.

“We never want to be alarmist, but it is concerning that these non-biodegradable materials that are present everywhere enter and accumulate in human tissues, and we don’t know the possible health effects,” said Varun Kelkar of Arizona State University, part of the research team.

“Once we get a better idea of what’s in the tissues, we can conduct epidemiological studies to assess human health outcomes,” he said. “That way, we can start to understand the potential health risks, if any.”

Charles Rolsky, another member of the team, said: “In a few short decades, we’ve gone from seeing plastic as a wonderful benefit to considering it a threat.”

Microplastics are those less than 5mm in diameter and nanoplastics have a diameter of less than 0.001mm. Both form largely from the abrasion of larger pieces of plastic dumped into the environment. Research in wildlife and laboratory animals has linked exposure to tiny plastics to infertility, inflammation and cancer.

The researchers are now testing tissues to find microplastics that accumulated during donors’ lifetimes. Donors to tissue banks often provide information on their lifestyles, diets and occupations, so this may help future work to determine the main ways in which people are exposed to microplastics.

The new methodology developed by the team to extract plastics from the tissues and analyse them will be shared online so other researchers can report their results in a standardised way. “This shared resource will help build a plastic exposure database so that we can compare exposures in organs and groups of people over time and geographic space,” said Halden.

Previous studies have shown people eat and breathe in at least 50,000 particles of microplastic a year and that microplastic pollution is raining down on city dwellers, with London, UK, having the highest level of four cities analysed last year. The particles can harbour toxic chemicals and harmful microbes and are known to harm some marine creatures.

Other work has shown different kinds of nanoparticles from air pollution are present in human hearts and brains, and have been linked to brain cancer.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/17/microplastic-particles-discovered-in-human-organs

Just Google “Microplastics in Humans” plenty more there.

I had an epiphany yesterday. I thought going back to glass for baby bottles could be part of the solution and then thought about what some barriers to switching back to glass baby bottles would be.

The obvious barrier being the glass breakage risk….

It then occurred to me … that a simple and universal solution to that problem could be to produce silicone based stretchy pull on covers for baby bottles. All age groups could start to think about swapping out plastic for glass and use silicone covers to reduce vibration risks and thus prevent breakages if dropped. I understand the insulation properties are good for silicone and the availability of this resource is abundant as well. Glass can be recycled and has multiple uses in everyday life and is really worthwhile revisiting. A quick search informs me that food grade silicone is a safer consideration. “Is it safe to store food in food grade silicone?”

“Food-grade silicone is made without petroleum-based chemicals, BPA, BPS, or fillers. It’s safe to store food, put in the microwave, freezer, oven, and dishwasher.”

Not that easy to recycle though. Hmmm…