OPINION:
As part of President Trump’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for action to protect our health from the scourge of plastic pollution.
Alarming quantities of seemingly innocuous “microplastics” or even smaller “nanoplastics” are making a macro impact on American lives by infiltrating homes, food, water and human bodies.
Microplastics “don’t only end up on our food, they also contaminate our soil, our water, our oceans, and from there they reenter the food supply,” Mr. Kennedy told business leaders, scientists and policymakers at an April conference on chemicals and plastics.
Nowadays, plastic is everywhere and in almost everything. Although some of it ends up in durable products, such as cars and home appliances, a large percentage comprises single-use products such as grocery bags, straws and polystyrene packaging (better known under the brand name Styrofoam). All told, Americans generated more than 35 million tons of plastic in 2018, the most recent full year for which the Environmental Protection Agency has statistics.
That’s enough plastic trash to fill 565 NFL Dallas Cowboys-sized stadiums. Less than 10% of plastic gets recycled. About 12% of plastic waste gets incinerated, and the rest, about 79%, ends up in landfills or littering roads, rivers and oceans. (See an organization I support, The Ocean Cleanup, for more on that last one.)
An estimated 10 trillion microplastic pellets, the raw materials used to make new plastic items, are dumped or accidentally spilled into our oceans yearly. Given that plastics are generally made from fossil fuels, it’s like an oil spill, only it’s solid instead of liquid. This might be worse. Animals don’t accidentally mistake oil spill liquid for food, but they do eat these tiny plastic pellets, thinking they are part of the food chain.
Plastics can litter the air and land during waste disposal and end up in landfills or incinerators. Our plastic-based clothing generates harmful particulates, as do tire particles created from driving a vehicle. The burning of plastic can spew microplastic particles into the air.
Tiny pellets can be swept far across land, contaminating roads, lawns, fields and forests. No matter where plastic settles, it will eventually break down into microplastics that pollute our water and soil.
Plastics, and therefore microplastics, are made with various toxic chemicals. Many of them, including phthalates, PFAS, heavy metals and flame retardants, are known to be hazardous to human health. These chemicals leach from plastics into the environment and sometimes into our food and beverages.
It’s no surprise, then, that researchers have found microplastics in our food, bottled water, tea, beer, salt and plenty of other places. Recent studies also reveal an alarming amount of microplastics showing up throughout human bodies, including in placentas, blood and the tissues of vital organs, including hearts, livers and brains. Not even human private parts are private enough to avoid these tiny toxic threats.
Although the long-term health effects of exposure to all these microplastics are not fully known, they are cause for concern. Recent studies have linked microplastics to inflammation, organ damage, hormonal disruption, dementia, fertility issues and cancer.
Based on that research, one of the best ways to make America healthy again is to protect Americans from microplastics. In an exciting development, Mr. Kennedy announced that the Food and Drug Administration will consider major changes in how food packaging is regulated so we can make sure that chemicals from plastics aren’t seeping into our food.
This would be a great first step. We should also require nutrition labels to include the number of microplastics and nanoplastics per serving for foods and beverages packaged in plastic and labels that tell consumers which toxic chemicals they consume from the plastic packaging. Consumers have the right to know all the things products are putting into their bodies.
Although all Americans can reduce their plastic usage and prioritize health over convenience, no individual can make the impact that a big company can. As Mr. Kennedy said, “The societal costs [of microplastics in the environment and in our bodies] are borne by the public rather than the producers. … This is a market failure.” So, plastic manufacturers must be held accountable for their pollution, including the spilling and dumping of dangerous microplastic pellets into America’s waterways.
To truly make America healthy again, Americans must stand together to demand more transparency, safer products and policies that put the health of families first. That means minimizing the threat of microplastics, including by producing and using less single-use plastic that immediately gets thrown away. The health of the nation and its birth rate depend on it.
• Joe Gebbia is a co-founder of Airbnb and Samara.
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