Microplastics and human health: We have bigger things to worry about

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/sep/24/microplastics-and-human-health-we-have-bigger-thin/

We’ve all become accustomed to misinformation moving at the speed of X, but it’s especially maddening when it turns science on its head.This year’s most egregious example is a series of scary pronouncements about “microplastics” and human health.

Credible, peer-reviewed studies haven’t shown any actual health harm from microplastics. In 2020, European researchers showed that less than one-quarter of scientific papers about the tiny particles suggested even are mote possibility that consumers should care.

Meanwhile, 93% of news articles about microplastics alluded to them as apocalyptic menaces. This year’s global freak-out about minuscule plastic bits found in drinking water is the latest example of bad journalism hiding in plain sight.

One part of the problem is that garden-variety reporters write science stories without being particularly good at math. Even if they read the studies about microplastics, they don’t understand that some have been seven orders of magnitude from reality. That means some reported laboratory experiments used concentrations of particles 1 million times (or more) as high as what exists in our environment.

Bad reporting is how we ended up with news cycles about a claim that humans ingest a credit card’s weight in microplastic particles — 5grams — every week. Australian researchers promoted that conclusion heavily through the World Wide Fund for Nature, which paid for the study.

Major media outlets covered it without a hint of skepticism, the United Nations and the U.S. State Department parroted the line and now it’s conventional wisdom. It was what reporters call “too good to check.”

When a team of Dutch scientists checked the Aussies’ math, it turned out that our average weekly intake of microplastic particles was nowhere near 5 grams. It’s about 4 millionths of a gram, roughly two-thirds the weight of a grain of salt. If you still want to make a credit card from your body’s microplastics, you’d better set aside 23,402 years for the project. And that number assumes our body retains all that we breathe or ingest, which is ridiculous.

Consider the dust we breathe in all day, every day. Roughly one-thousandth of 1% of it is microplastic. The other 99.999% includes toxic chemicals such as asbestos, lead, mercury and aluminum (a potent neurotoxin). Earth is hit with over 5,000 tons of dust from meteorites and comets daily. We breathe in some of those alien particles. None of those contaminants makes the news.

Researchers are finding microplastics in drinking water, but at the rate of one-tenth of 1 part per billion. For perspective, it is roughly the equivalent of one person in the world’s population of 8 billion people.

In a study of human blood, there was no plastic in 99% of the microparticles the scientists spotted. They were mostly bits of inorganic pigments such as iron, titanium dioxide and carbon black. Human placenta samples have turned up traces of diesel exhaust, Styrofoam, the glass-polishing compound cerium oxide and zirconium oxide, the super-durable main ingredient in dental implants. In that context, microplastics are downright benign.

For those who worry about our environment, in January, a British-Swedish team published a study that looked at 16 uses for plastic across the industries that account for 90% of all of it. Plastic had a lower carbon footprint in 15 of those 16 cases than any alternative material.

There are things in our lives worth fearing — World War III and economic recession come to mind — but microscopic flecks of plastic don’t make the cut.

Rick Berman is President of RBB Strategies.