Plastic is likely in your saliva and blood as well as heart, kidney and other organs. It is found in breast milk and both sides of placentas. Plastic buildup inside brain tissue has grown substantially and a recent New York Times article says there may be the equivalent of a full plastic spoon by weight inside your skull. According to the Times, “The penetrationappears so complete that some researchers have begun to worry that their methods, too, are compromised by ambient contamination and plastic materials in the lab.”
Why are we in this mess? Because for 21st-century capitalism the more disposable the better. Human health and ocean life be damned.
Last week The Lancet published a report from 27 health experts concluding that the common product caused extensive disease “at every stage of the plastics life cycle and at every stage of human life”. Director of the Global Observatory on Planetary Health at Boston College, Philip Landrigan, explained, “The impact of plastics on human health has been a sleeper issue compared to climate change and air pollution, but evidence is now emerging to show how serious it is.”
It’s been known for some time that plastics harm human health. In 2014, Mother Jones published an expose titled “Areany plastics safe?” The story drew a parallel between the plastic and tobacco industries.
The Canadian Environmental Protection Act provides the federal government with a tool to restrict toxic substances while Environment Canada operates a scientific review to test for possible harm. Yet few plastic products have been outlawed.
Alongside its toll on human health, plastics wreak havoc on the environment particularly ocean fauna. Plastic is found in Antarctic snow, stalks of plants, clouds and ice on Mount Everest.
There is plastic in salty sea foam from crashing waves, in the breath of dolphins and the deepest (explored) depths of the ocean.
There are currently around a hundred million tonnes of plastic debris floating in the world’s oceans. Most of it takes centuries to break down. Thousands of large animals — such as turtles and birds — die every year from indigestible plastic debris in the ocean. Millions of other sea creatures suffer when they consume plastic.
The world’s oceans are set to have more plastic than fish by 2050. At the current rate of production and disposal the net weight of plastic in the oceans will be greater than that of fish in three decades.
The Canada-U.S. Great Lakes — the largest freshwater ecosystem in the world — have also accumulated large amounts of plastic. Microplastics in the lakes “act like sponges for certain pollutants and are easily ingested by aquatic organisms, including fish and shellfish, which may ultimately end up on our plates.”
During the second half of the 20th century, plastic production rose 20-fold. Then more plastic was produced during the first decade of the 21st century than in all the 20th. Over the next three decades global plastic production is on pace to triple.
Approximately half of plastic is for single use. Over 100 billion plastic bottles and one trillion plastic bags are produced every year globally. But the first disposable plastic pop bottle was only produced in 1975 and the first plastic grocery bag was introduced a few years earlier.
The toxins in plastics must be better regulated. Plastics can also be made less damaging by producing them from waste products and improving their decomposition. Additionally, measures to promote recycling are necessary. To that end activists have pressed universities to stop selling plastic bottles and for cities to restrict free plastic bags. While helpful, these efforts are overwhelmed by an economic system enthralled to wasteful consumption.
Based on externalizing costs and privatizing profits, 21st-century capitalism is turning our seas into a plastic blob.
If we want to fix our environmental problems we need to fix our economic system.
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