Our health in a plastic-wrapped world

Friday, 12 July 2019

Plastic particles from food packaging are everywhere - even in your teabags.

EDITORIAL: It's not her best line but Joan Rivers, who was no stranger to the attentions of the plastic surgeon, once predicted that when she died they'd donate her body to Tupperware.

More nastily, Jennifer Saunders's Edina in Absolutely Fabulous, gleefully envisaged cosmetically endowed actresses being laid to rest.

'The flesh will rot away but the bumps will still be there,' she cackled. 'Little coffins full of bones and bumps . . .'

Much has been made of the permanence of plastic, and the impermanence of people.

* Alarming discovery of microplastics in humans for the first time

* US-based study finds microplastics in popular brands of bottled water**

But people don't improve prospects for their longevity, let alone health, by actually ingesting plastic. Which we're now told we unintentionally do.

The shudder-inducing imagery is that we are so surrounded by the stuff that each week we eat and drink little particles amounting to the size of a credit card.

Here's a good illustration that 'environment' stories aren't necessarily about significant but external concerns like veracity of our picture-postcard tourism ads, the wellbeing of turtles and - as some still regrettably trivialise it - the niceness of our weather.

This particular story is something we need to take very personally indeed. Plastics, and the further chemical treatments we add to them, leach into nature, and then into us. These little devils are showing up in our vital organs.

Reports that microplastics had been found in humans for the first time came after Austrian scientists analysed stool samples of people from eight countries and found every one contained microplastics - in some cases nine different types in a single sample.

When plastics reach the human gut it's not just a passing problem. As dietary types are fond of reminding us, the gut has strong physical and chemical connections to our brain.

These particles can get into our respiratory organs too. In fact so diligent is the body in its attempts to process what we eat and drink that earlier studies in animals have found that the smallest microplastic particles can enter the bloodstream, and lymphatic system and may reach the liver.

Nobody seems to be saying that we can keep our innards entirely plastic-free anytime soon, but the practical advice the story provides for consumers is valuable. Stainless steel refillable bottles are a good alternative to plastic drink bottles. Better to microwave glass containers than plastic ones. Check out tin cans for BPAs and teabags for plastics. Bring a keep cup for your takeaway coffee rather than accepting one with a plastic lid.

Specific measures such as these, and many others, are good only as far as they go.

So assailed are we by plastics, useful as they so often are, but essential as they so often aren't, and so troubling the health implications, that for our own wellbeing we should heed the encouragements of University of Canterbury Associate Professor Sally Gaw, who says New Zealanders will need to decide what appropriate uses of plastics are and when it would be preferable to use less permanent alternatives.

Some of those decisions are necessarily to be made at an individual level. But some should inform our expectations as voters at national and local government level.