How can cleaning up the ocean improve human life?

Last year, I came up with the idea to pick up at least one piece of trash outside each day. I did it for 70 days and picked up 128 pieces of trash. It wasn’t a lot, I learned that an average American produces 4-5 pounds of trash a day and I estimated that I picked up two pounds of garbage which was only half of what one American produces in one day. The more I picked up the more I saw, plastic is littered in every nook and cranny on earth, in our streets, waterways, backyards, forests and now in our food. This is a hard fact to evade now. We are eating and drinking plastics every day. It is estimated that we eat 5 grams of microplastics a week, the size of a credit card.

The microplastics are sneaky and everywhere in our food and water. Microplastic is any plastic that is 5 mm or less (Usman, Sunsi, et al., 2020). The invention of plastic was massive for the consumer and industry as we know it. It is easy to produce, lightweight, durable and cheap, this was the major attraction when it became widely adopted by manufacturers in the 1950s (American Chemistry).

Visualization of the amount of plastic we eat.

How does eating plastic affect humans?

To put it simply, it is not good. A term we all learned in biology is bioaccumulation, which is when an animal gradually consumes substances such as fertilizers or microplastics in this case in large amounts. Over time this accumulation is passed down and can compromise the entire food web. For example, this is why humans should be careful when eating big game such as tuna, which is known for having amounts of mercury in it (Ferreira-Filipe, Diogo A., et al., 2021). The main culprits of plastics are the additives Bisphenol A (BPA), Polybrominated Diphenyl Ether (PBDE), and Phthalates. BPA which is most commonly consumed through drinking bottled water, it is leached into the water then we consume it (Kumar, 2018). In the cycle of plastic, these consumed water bottles are then disposed of in the wrong manner, and 90% of plastics end up in landfills or water systems.

The biggest effect that these plastics have are on the endocrine system. For humans, phthalates that are often found in shampoos are reproductive toxicants that reduce semen quality and alter male genital development. In addition, they are reducing testosterone production at critical developmental ages (Kumar, 2018). These microplastics easily cross the epithelial barrier which can infiltrate the cell and cause DNA damage (Vethaak, A. Dick, and Juliette Legler, 2021). Plastic intake has become so prevalent, that It has become difficult to conduct studies on a person who consumes BPA and Phthalates versus a person that doesn’t. It is nearly impossible to not ingest microplastics somehow on a daily basis. The picture below depicts how the cycle of consumption is continued.

How plastic gets to humans through the food chain.

How is the ocean being cleaned up?

We need to clean up our ocean and at the same time also prevent any further pollution from entering the ocean. A young entrepreneur from the Netherlands, Boyan Slat, is a man I admire a lot, he is not only an environmental activist more importantly he is offering solutions to the problem instead of talking about the problem. His mission is to rid 90% of the world’s plastic out of the ocean by 2040. His goal is to attack the great Pacific Garbage patch which spans the size of three Texas combined. New data coming out from the Ocean Cleanup estimates that 1000 rivers are responsible for 80% of the world’s plastic pollution into the ocean. These rivers are responsible for .8 to 2.7 million metric tonnes of plastic into the ocean per year. The main significance of this allows the Ocean Cleanup to target these rivers with interceptors to remove the trash before it reaches the ocean (Meijer, Lourens j., et al., 2021).

The Ocean Cleanup is one aspect of cleaning our oceans, however, it only addresses macro plastics at the surface level. Basically, a large net is dragged across the garbage patch and picks up all plastic five meters deep and higher. This will prevent any larger plastics from decomposing into smaller microplastics that are eaten by marine life.

Conclusion

There is no longer any question as to if ingesting plastic is harmful to humans. It most certainly is, and we are ingesting it at an alarming rate. At this point, plastic mitigation strategies are the most prominent thing humans can do. Not only do we need to prevent plastic from entering our oceans and reduce our usage of plastics but also look into plastic alternatives. An issue with plastic is that it can take hundreds of years to decompose and as it is decomposing it is being leached into the environment. A biodegradable alternative is the direction we need to go, for example switching to a bamboo toothbrush is a good start. However, the bigger change needs to happen on an industry and manufacturing level, looking at the cost and environmental outcomes (Nikiema, Josiane, Zipporah, 2022).

References

Chaudhry, Akshay Kumar, and Payal Sachdeva. “Microplastics’ Origin, Distribution, and Rising Hazard to Aquatic Organisms and Human Health: Socio-Economic Insinuations and Management Solutions.” Regional Studies in Marine Science, vol. 48, 2021, p. 102018., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rsma.2021.102018.

Ferreira-Filipe, Diogo A., et al. “Are Biobased Plastics Green Alternatives?—a Critical Review.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, vol. 18, no. 15, 2021, p. 7729., https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18157729.

Kumar, Pramod. “Role of Plastics on Human Health.” The Indian Journal of Pediatrics, vol. 85, no. 5, 2018, pp. 384–389., https://doi.org/10.1007/s12098-017-2595-7.

“Life Cycle of a Plastic Product.” American Chemistry, https://web.archive.org/web/20100317004747/http://www.americanchemistry.com/s_plastics/doc.asp?CID=1571&DID=5972.

Meijer, Lourens J., et al. “More than 1000 Rivers Account for 80% of Global Riverine Plastic Emissions into the Ocean.” Science Advances, vol. 7, no. 18, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5803.

Nikiema, Josiane, and Zipporah Asiedu. “A Review of the Cost and Effectiveness of Solutions to Address Plastic Pollution.” Environmental Science and Pollution Research, vol. 29, no. 17, 2022, pp. 24547–24573., https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-18038-5.

“Revealed: Plastic Ingestion by People Could Be Equating to a Credit Card a Week.” WWF, https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?348337%2FRevealed-plastic-ingestion-by-people-could-be-equating-to-a-credit-card-a-week.

Rohrlich, Justin. “How You Eat a Credit Card's Worth of Plastic Each Week.” Quartz, Quartz, https://qz.com/1644802/you-eat-5-grams-of-plastic-per-week/.

Scarr, Simon. “A Plateful of Plastic.” Reuters, Thomson Reuters, https://graphics.reuters.com/ENVIRONMENT-PLASTIC/0100B4TF2MQ/index.html.

Usman, Sunusi, et al. “Microplastics Pollution as an Invisible Potential Threat to Food Safety and Security, Policy Challenges and the Way Forward.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, vol. 17, no. 24, 2020, p. 9591., https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17249591.

Vethaak, A. Dick, and Juliette Legler. “Microplastics and Human Health.” Science, vol. 371, no. 6530, 2021, pp. 672–674., https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe5041.