Zoë Chardon and Amelia Chardon / 2025-3-30
How on earth do we have so much plastic inside of us?
On various occasions, studies have proven that microplastics are everywhere: Antarctic ice, air, food, and for the first time, inside us humans. Studies have indicated that we all have around a credit card's worth of plastic inside of us. How did that happen?
Plastics
Synthetic Plastics were originally invented in 1907, by a belgian-american alchemist named Leo Baekeland. Baekeland was looking for a way to make money. He experimented with phenol and formaldehyde to create bakelite, which was a durable, heat-resistant plastic. It was the world's first synthetic plastic, synthetic meaning that it doesn’t contain any molecules found in nature. This invention would change the course of our world entirely.
Over the course of the next (roughly) fifty years, the prevalence of plastic would increase tremendously. During the 1920’s, cellulose acetate and urea-formaldehyde were invented. During the 1930’s and 1940’s, new polymers like polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyethylene, and nylon were created. By the 50’s, melamine-formaldehyde resins, polyester and nylon were invented, and plastic was all the rage.
Plastics have become a necessity in our daily life: many materials in our clothes, menstrual products, water bottles, chewing gum, and several chairs that we sit on. I mean, where would we be without it?
But recent studies have found that not only does plastic exist in almost every day-to-day object we own, but microplastics exist inside of us.
Microplastics
Microplastics are the extremely small pieces of plastic less than five mm long, that are found everywhere in the world. Microplastics were first discovered in 2004, by one Professor Richard Thompson, who was a marine biologist at the University of Plymouth, and was documenting microplastics in the ocean. Not only have they been found in the ocean, but also in food, air and the water that we drink, so we are constantly and inadvertently ingesting microplastics every day.
From 2018 to today, however, many studies have been conducted to come to the same conclusion: plastic is also inside almost every part of the human body. So far, data reveals that there are microplastics in our blood, lungs, placenta, breast milk, urine, bone marrow, and brain tissue.
While we are still unaware of the full and long-term effects of microplastics on our health, health professionals have found that microplastics damage human cells, increase the risk of inflammatory diseases, and cardiovascular problems. In addition to this, scientists infer that some potential long-term effects of microplastics could be decreased fertility rates, neurological disorders such as depression, and cardiovascular health issues.
So the next time you want to donate to charity, consider donating to an organisation that will help get rid of microplastics!