It feels like everyone is talking about microplastics: web search trends, scientific papers, and news headlines have steadily increased over the past decade, with a huge spike in the last two years as evidence of plastic particles in the human body mounts.
In a world awash in plastic particles, have you ever stopped to really think how these discoveries make you feel? Ambivalent? Angry? Disgusted? Nervous?
As a science communicator, I know there are some things that facts alone can’t convey. To make the connection to plastic pollution personal, I’ve turned to art: creating collage to connect us to the microplastic within.
My Plastic-Filled Journey
When I began covering the story of plastic pollution more than a decade ago, the world’s collective awareness about this global manmade crisis was shifting. Up to that point, plastic pollution had been largely depicted as a “marine debris” problem resulting from litterbugs at the beach and a dearth of recycling. Reports of a Great Pacific Garbage Patch brought to mind an isolated floating pile of trash in the Pacific Ocean.
But then researchers and documentarians like me began drawing attention to the even more disturbing reality: Plastic items and the particles they shed are rapidly saturating the world’s oceans because plastic production is out of control. Plastic does not break down like natural materials. Instead it breaks into smaller pieces — microplastics, and even smaller nanoplastics — that are forever plastic.
As a freelance photojournalist, I’ve sailed more than 10,000 nautical miles with research crews to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, South Pacific, across the Atlantic Ocean, around the north and west coast of Iceland, and beyond, documenting scientists, volunteers, and sailors collecting plastic particles on and below the seas’ surface. Seeing researchers’ equipment full of colorful, confetti-like plastic pieces was shocking up close.
Yet, having spent so much time seeing plastic out at sea, I was left wondering: How could this crisis be isolated to the oceans if plastic items — bags, beverage bottles, building materials, children’s and pets’ toys, clothing, food packaging, furniture, shoes, vehicle interiors and tires, and more — surround us on land at all times, and if Earth’s ecosystems, oceans included, are connected to one another and to all of us?
These are questions I have worked to answer in my journalism and my first book, Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis.
Sure enough, as the years passed, more evidence emerged of plastic particles’ impressive reach. Microplastics, and even smaller-sized nanoplastics, pollute the deepest ocean trenches, on the highest mountain peaks, in oceans and fresh waters, in soils, weather, indoor and outdoor air, household dust, plants and trees, food and drinking water, even in outer space.
In 2019 I visited scientists in Denmark who were using a “breathing” robot to study our potential inhalation of plastic particles. That’s when I realized there was a heretofore unexplored realm where plastic particles might be lurking: in our own bodies.
Looking Closer
Despite having all kinds of evidence of plastic particles in ecosystems, plants, and wild animals, people didn’t start looking inward for plastics until rather recently. Scientists have faced numerous hurdles in studying plastic and its effects on the human body. For one thing, it’s hard to avoid plastic even in laboratory experiments and environments, which can lead to contamination. In addition, scientists are still developing standardized practices for detecting plastic particles in the human body. There’s also the challenge of finding willing volunteers whose bodies can be examined — recent human study participants include cadaver brains, cancer tissue samples, excised tonsils, feces, and placentas.
Despite these and other challenges, research on plastics in our bodies has hurried forward as concerns over the health effects of micro- and nano-plastics grow. Scientists have determined at least some serious effects of plastic pollution on human bodies: Heart disease patients who had microplastics found in plaques in their carotid arteries also displayed inflammation elsewhere in their bodies, and had a markedly increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and death from any cause compared to patients lacking signs of microplastics moving through their bloodstreams.
Plastic particles may pose more than just a physical danger; there are also any mix of more than 16,000 different chemicals in any given piece of plastic. Plastic particles and chemicals harm the fertility and reproductive health of all people — women and men, adults and children alike. Human body cells exposed to microplastic particles undergo cell damage and death in lab experiments. Scientists are also looking at the links between microplastics and Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders.
While in the news there’s recently been some questioning about the number of particles found, researchers have without a doubt found plastic particles in people’s bloodstreams, bones, bone marrow, brains, breast milk, feces of adults and infants, hair, hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs, penises, placentas, saliva and sputum, semen, skin, spleens, stomachs, testes, throat and airways, urine, uteruses, and veins.
And plastic pollution doesn’t start and end with plastic; it encompasses all pollution to ecosystems and bodies from the moment plastic’s fossil fuel ingredients are extracted from the Earth through plastic’s production, storage, transportation, and eventual disposal in landfills, incinerators, and the environment.
Despite all of this, many people still haven’t heard of the risks or come fully to terms with the risks of plastic pollution. I was left wondering: How can we help this message to break through?
Artful Commentary
When communicating the story of plastic pollution, I have primarily worked in the mediums of writing and photography. But I’ve also tapped into my love of collage and the emotive power of art to inspire care, and action. In making a series of microplastic and watercolor collages focused on plastic particles in the human body, my goal is to juxtapose the beauty of the two mediums — the organic flow of watercolor and the artificiality of plastics.
I want people to be appropriately shocked, relating to the plastic they see as also a part of themselves.
Indeed, it is.
These pieces are made with microplastics collected by volunteers and staff at Hawai‘i Wildlife Fund, an organization that conducts cleanups at one of the most notoriously plastic polluted beaches in the United States: Kamilo Point.
Due to its location jutting out into the path of the oceanic gyre (ocean current) that carries so much plastic into what we call the Garbage Patch, its shores collect layer after layer of plastic. I remember visiting Kamilo Point in 2016 and feeling sadness and shock when I dipped my hand into ocean waves and pulled out a handful of plastic.
I’ve shared my microplastic collages with people around the world. Reactions typically follow the same trajectory: First, enjoyment of the color and beauty of these mixed media pieces; then realization that the small colorful mosaic-like pieces are plastic particles; and then disgust at the recognition that these plastic particles are in our bodies and all around us.
“Wait…these things are in our bodies?” asked one recent viewer of my plastic collages as they pointed to the particles on the paper in front of them. It’s gratifying, albeit somewhat grim, to see people making the intended connection between the plastic particles in my art to their own bodies.
From Realization to Action
While all this can feel overwhelming, the good news is that we can take action to address plastic pollution.
The change won’t come overnight. But we do have the solutions we need today: We need our leaders to require corporations to stop making so much plastic — drastically less. And we can start with replacing single-use plastics with tried-and-true reusable, refillable alternatives like ceramic, glass, stainless steel, and wood. Another step is to demand that manufacturers and retailers reduce their wasteful packaging.
We can all make changes in our lives to use less plastic, embracing the culture of change we need, whenever we can. The wider systemic shifts we need inevitably will require communities to grow more resilient and self-reliant: We need to learn how to grow, repair, and share our ways to a less wasteful world, one that exists more like our Earth — which wastes nothing. And this is good for everyone.
The whole reason I left wildlife rehabilitation to go into photojournalism was to communicate issues that Earth, people, and wildlife face so that they can be addressed and prevented; rather than continue treating symptoms of human-made problems by healing sick and injured wildlife and returning them to the same dangers they initially faced. We now know that plastic pollution affects everyone, everywhere.
But now, the story is shifting again: We have the solutions we need. Will we face the microplastic within?
I believe that’s possible. And if it means I never get to create art with plastic again, well, that’s a change I can live with.
Previously in The Revelator:
Environmental Muralist Faunagraphic Brings an Urban Oasis to the Concrete Jungle
