Microplastics

You start your morning, you wake up, get out of bed, get dressed, maybe have a piece of fruit, brush your teeth, and fill up a water bottle on your way out the door. It sounds like a pretty normal morning, but what you might not realize is that you have already been exposed to hazardous plastic chemicals several times. From the moment you wake up to the time you leave for work, you've already consumed up to an estimated 140 to 300 microplastic particles. In fact, research suggests that the average human consumes about five grams of plastic every week, the equivalent weight of a credit card. 

But if that seems hard to swallow, the long term timeline is even more disturbing: Every month each person ingests about 21 grams of plastic, enough to make up a double AA battery. Every six months, we consume roughly 125 grams, which is about the weight of an iphone. Over a lifetime, the average person will unconsciously swallow more than forty pounds of plastic weighing more than two large standard recycling bins combined. “We need to do something in order to reduce the microplastics in the environment,” NHS Junior Ryan Houde said. 

 Plastic really is everywhere. It can be found in food packaging, water bottles, clothing, toys, personal care products and many of the items people use every day. According to a recent report, more than 90% of chemicals used in plastics are considered hazardous to human health. The problem is Nearly 80% of the 3,552 chemicals in plastics people often use lacked sufficient data to determine toxicity or exposure risks.  

“In 2024, a group of international scientists created PlastChem, a database of all known chemicals in plastics. Of the 16,000 chemicals the researchers could identify, 4,200 were considered ‘highly hazardous’to human health and the environment. Another 10,000-plus had no available data at all,” CNN Health reporters stated. 

When you swallow microplastics through food, water, or dust, the particles enter your digestive tract. The smallest particles (nanoplastics) are small enough to cross the intestinal wall and enter the lymphatic system and bloodstream. 

Once inside the bloodstream, these foreign particles are carried to nearly every corner of the body. Nanoplastics can even puncture or slip directly inside individual cells, disrupting normal metabolic processes and cellular communication. 

Microplastics have been detected in human blood, lung tissue, breast milk, placentas, liver, kidneys, and brain tissue. This can eventually lead to heart attacks, strokes, organ damage, cancer, along with brain and immune dysfunction. 

“I think it's very scary, I had no idea that people even consumed microplastics. But now that I know I will be more cautious,” NHS junior Kylie Biekert said. 

Additionally many chemicals found in plastic are also endocrine disruptors, which are natural or man made chemicals that can interfere with the body’s hormones and contribute to obesity, low birth weight, gestational diabetes, birth defects and neurodevelopmental disorders. 

The over use of plastic is a major issue that has been ongoing for decades, “In 1950, manufacturers made roughly 2 million metric tons of plastic annually; today, more than 430 million metric tons are created each year. Scientists project plastic production will more than double by 2050, along with 2 billion metric tons of chemical plastic additives as well.” according to CNN Health. 

Plastic originally became popular because it is cheap, versatile, lightweight, and exceptionally durable. But at the time, its true cost to human health was entirely unknown. For decades, global awareness focused almost exclusively on the environmental toll of plastic pollution, and in focusing strictly on the planet, society overlooked the threat accumulating inside the human body. 

Today, as science catches up to this overload of plastic, it is becoming increasingly clear that the plastics are now threatening our well being. Reversing this toxic trajectory will require a shift in perspective, treating plastic pollution not merely as an ecological eyesore, but as an urgent, defining crisis of public health.