Microplastics are everywhere.
Everyday items like clothing, food packaging, cosmetics and car tires shed tiny particles of plastics, which in turn find their way into blood, baby poop, placentas and breastmilk. According to recent research, plastics are even in the intricate, delicate tissue that makes up our lungs.
We breathe in about 16 bits of microplastic every hour, the equivalent of a credit card each week, according to a recent study published in the journal Physics of Fluids.
“People never thought that we could inhale microplastic, so the data is underestimated and the result is more severe,” says Saidul Islam, lead author of the paper and professor at the University of Technology Sydney.
Those plastics can get lodged into our airways and stay there over time, researchers say. Yet, despite its ubiquity in the environment and in our bodies, scientists don’t fully understand the long-term impacts on our health.
A 2019 report published in Environmental Science & Technology found that people in the U.S. consume about 39,000 to 52,000 particles of microplastics each year through food and water. That’s the size of two giraffes in a year and the whole of the Eiffel Tower in a lifetime. According to the United Nations Environmental Program, research on the more than 13,000 chemicals associated with plastics has found that at least 3,200 of those chemicals have been shown to be hazardous to human health. Lab experiments have shown that microplastics can cause damage to human cells.
Plastic producers, such as the British Plastics Federation, have pointed to international treaties that aim to “eliminate, restrict, reduce or eliminate” persistent organic pollutants (POPs) from the environment to protect human health. In response to a recent Greenpeace report on toxic chemicals found in plastics, BPF responded that tackling plastic pollution “is essential but this cannot be done in isolation, without considering the impact of other key global environmental issues.”
Most studies tend to solely focus on the ingestion of microplastics, even though we are inhaling these plastics, too, Islam said. His study is among the first of its kind to quantify just how much we’re breathing in.
“How it is actually affecting our respiratory health is still unknown,” says Islam. Air pollution particles are known to enter the body and cause millions of early deaths a year — it’s just unclear how much of that is due to microplastics.