Invisibles

It is everywhere: the most enduring, insidious, and intimate product in the world.

Plastic wraps our meals and streamlines our cars. It clothes hipsters downtown and climbers on Mount Everest. It exfoliates and insulates. It transports sewage and delivers human blood.

Look around your home – your closet, your refrigerator, your bathroom, and bedside – and count the plastic articles. How high did you reach before giving up?

That’s just the stuff you can see.

Beyond the packaging and the pill boxes, the bags and baby bottles, is a realm of invisible plastic: tiny fibers, fragments, and chemical byproducts that infiltrate every aspect of daily life.

Plastic is in the air around you, right now.

It floats like pollen in sunlight. It’s thick in the rivers and oceans. It’s in seafood, and salt, and in millions of wild animals.

And, according to exclusive research by Orb Media, plastic has contaminated tap water samples from around the world.

Microscopic plastic fibers are pouring out of faucets from New York to New Delhi for consumption by people, pets, and livestock.

“This should knock us into our senses,” Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of Grameen Bank, told Orb. “We knew that this plastic is coming back to us through our food chain. Now we see it is coming back to us through our drinking water. Do we have a way out?”

This previously unknown contamination defies wealth and geography: The number of plastic fibers found in tap water at the Trump Grill, at Trump Tower in Manhattan, was no different from that found in samples from Beirut, Lebanon; and Kampala, Uganda.

Orb even found plastic fibers in bottled water from leading U.S. brands, and in homes that use reverse-osmosis filters. Based on our results, a person who drinks two liters of water a day, or beverages like coffee, tea, and soda, might ingest eight plastic fibers – more than 2,900 each year*.

The findings come as polls indicate hefty distrust in the safety of drinking water by consumers around the world, and as microplastic pollution is gaining prominence among the public and policymakers.

“We see the noose is getting tighter around our neck,” said Yunus, who plans an initiative against plastic waste later this year. “We have been warned before that plastic is a threat to life and the planet. But I did not realize how imperiled our lives are until these new research findings were presented.”

Scientists suspect plastic can leach toxins once inside the human body. In animal studies, “it became clear very early on that the plastic would release those chemicals and that actually, the conditions in the gut would facilitate really quite rapid release,” Richard Thompson, an associate dean for research at Plymouth University, in the United Kingdom, said in an interview.

“When we think about plastics,” Thompson said, “the benefit they bring is completely decoupled from all of the harm.”

Invisible plastic is inside our bodies. Inside our babies.

Inside the Queen of England.

“Elizabeth has probably got her fair share of plastic, as does [Prince] Charles, and all sorts of people,” said Mark Browne, an eco-toxicologist at the University of New South Wales, in Australia. “Whatever material we put on the market I'm sure finds its way into humans and wildlife — and that's the problem.”

The problem is that plastic dominates our world. We keep making more, and we keep disposing of it badly.

There’s ample evidence that plastic qualifies as hazardous waste, and that it’s a threat to wildlife. Chemicals used in plastic have been linked to a roster of illnesses, including cancer.

Plastic fibers join a disturbing list of pollutants threatening the world’s water supplies, including endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

But governments haven’t examined what plastic in drinking water, food, and the air might mean for human wellness.

“You can’t make a determination that this is a real problem until you understand how this impacts the human organism,” Albert Appleton, a former New York City water commissioner, said in an interview. “Does it bio-accumulate? Does it impact cell formation? Is it a vector for transmitting harmful pathogens? If it breaks down, what are its break-down products?”

Orb’s research “raises more questions than it answers,” Appleton said. The U.S. doesn’t regulate plastic particles in drinking water. The European Union requires member states to protect tap water against all sources of pollution.

“The research on human health is in its infancy,” said Lincoln Fok, an environmental scientist at the Education University of Hong Kong.

Sherri Ann Mason, a pioneer in microplastics research, supervised Orb’s study, which included more than 150 tap water samples from five continents. Researcher Mary Kosuth tested the samples at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.

“We have enough data from looking at wildlife and the impacts that it's having on wildlife” to be concerned, said Mason, chair of the department of geology and environmental science at the State University of New York in Fredonia. “If it's impacting them, then how do we think that it's not going to somehow impact us?”

Fibers in tap water, then, are both a discovery and a marker — a visceral sign of how far plastic and plastic-related chemicals have penetrated human life and human anatomy. We can't see the long-chain molecules of pervasive toxins like polyfluoroalkyl chemicals, even if they do reside in more than 98 percent of the U.S. population. But when plastic fibers are filtered in a lab and enlarged by microscope, their contamination is made real.

There are various routes that you could be exposed to plastics or plastics-associated chemicals,” Tamara Galloway, an eco-toxicologist at the University of Exeter, in the United Kingdom, said. “The main route would be through food or water.”

“What we don't know is what implication that might have for human health.”

***

It’s an auspicious day at a breeze-block squatter settlement outside the Muara Angke port in Indonesia. The village has been blessed with a new baby; a feast of chicken, prawns, and rice bubbles on the fire. The swaddled day-old girl was delivered in a taxi racing to the hospital; the mother jokes they may name her “Mercedes.”

Today’s celebration is courtesy of the newborn’s grandmother, Kaniyah, a 50-year-old entrepreneur who’s gone from shucking mollusks 20 years ago to selling bushels of cooked shellfish to local restaurants. Men steam the mussels in metal drums as they come off the boats; then they’re dumped hot onto tarpaulins for a half-dozen workers to shuck amid a savory mist.

“Mussels have given us a way to eat,” Kaniyah says, watching as a batch is prepared outside her comfortable tin-roofed home. But her back stiffens when the subject turns to microplastics.

“I have been here for so long, and I have never heard of mussels eating plastic,” Kaniyah, who uses only one name, says. “Can a person die from it? It is worrisome.”

Eight thousand kilometers west across the Indian Ocean, fisherman James Nsereko, 60, pulls a small living from the waters of Lake Victoria in Uganda.

The Equatorial wind and ocean-like swells make for rough paddling, and the nets drag with as much rubbish as tilapia on most nights. “Twenty years back there were no plastic materials like today,” he says. “Nowadays it is too much.”

But plastic in fish? Plastic in drinking water?

“We have never found anything like that,” he says. Two hundred feet away, outside a weathered steel Quonset hut, stands a spigot fed by a lakeside plant supplying chlorine-treated water to 7,000 people.

Orb’s half liter sample from that tap, the first stop for water from the nearby pumping station, yielded four plastic fibers.

In this, the village could have done worse.

A sample from the U.S. Capitol complex, home to both houses of Congress, yielded 16 fibers, as did one from the headquarters of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Tap water from New York City Hall had 10 fibers; a sample from Trump Tower, flagship property of U.S. President Donald Trump, contained two. Water collected at the private Sloane Club, in London, had six fibers.

* * *

We are left with 159 drinking water samples from around the world, 83 percent of which tested positive for synthetic fibers, a wealth of research showing the extent and hazards of plastic waste — and a riot of unknowns.

What happens to inhaled fibers?
Do your lungs clear them away like other foreign matter?
What about the hundreds of millions of people who suffer chronic respiratory illness?
Do sick people expel plastic fibers as easily as healthy people do?
Can inhaled fibers complicate chronic illness?

If synthetic fibers are in tap water, they’re also in food – breads and doughs, pasta, soup, baby formula – from your kitchen and from store shelves. (Your local bistro might also be seasoning your meals with airborne fibers in addition to those in the water. And studies show fibers are prevalent in sea salt as well.)

Do plastic fibers accumulate in the human gut, or do they pass with the ease of an apple seed? Researchers believe some plastic particles consumed with oysters and other shellfish do remain in the human body. If fibers accumulate, are they harmful? Plastic fibers might contribute to inflammation, migrate to other organs, or leach toxins in ways that burden your health — or in ways that don’t.

And how would you even know?

“It's not just that you're exposed to plastic,” Mason said. “From the moment a child is born nowadays, it's already been exposed to 300 synthetic chemicals. Any human health effects that you're going to experience as you get older, to tease out what the ultimate source of those was — there's no way to tease it out.”

How does plastic in food and water relate to other plastic-related threats, like endocrine-disrupting chemicals – substances that alter your hormonal system – in food packaging, fire retardants, and pesticides?

A recent article in the journal Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology estimated that endocrine-disruptors cost the U.S. $340 billion, 2.33 percent of gross domestic product, in 2010 over factors including the intellectual disabilities of 43,000 children exposed to these chemicals; 33,000 cases of juvenile obesity; and 3,600 incidents of testicular cancer. They cost the European Union $217 billion, or 1.28 percent of GDP.

“Chemical regulation in the United States is not a many-splendored thing,” said Appleton, the former water commissioner.

How great is the danger if, for example, plastic fibers the Ganges River absorb endocrine disruptors before they infiltrate New Delhi’s drinking water?

“We've never really considered that risk before,” said Tamara Galloway, the Exeter University researcher.

It’s a time of growing awareness, and growing unease.

“It's bad; one hears so many things about cancer,” Mercedes Noroña, 61, said after learning a sample from her home south of Quito held plastic fibers. “Maybe I'm exaggerating, but I'm afraid of the things that come in the water.”

Many people are. A recent Gallup poll found 63 percent of Americans worried “a great deal” about polluted drinking water, the most since 2001.

While scientists go about the methodical work of weighing the health risks of microscopic plastic pollution, others are working to choke off the flow of plastic into the environment and into our bodies.

The front line isn’t pretty, but it thrums with energy.

* * *

It should be another stunning afternoon here on the Dagupan beachfront, 100 miles north of Manila in the Philippines. The beach has a timeless island quality — blue skies, distant clouds, lilting palms — the kind of setting they use to film beer commercials. But today the town dump is on fire.

And the dump is on the beach. Has been for 50 years. It’s quite big now.

Most of the biodegradable waste has long since turned to muck and methane gas; what’s left is a 42,000 -ton mountain that conveys a regular supply of plastic into the ocean. Clans of waste-pickers scramble across the smoking, seven-acre pile.

This apocalyptic scene may soon come to an end. The mayor, Belen Fernandez, has teamed with a U.S. company to build a plant that will turn the city’s waste into fuel for Dagupan’s fishing fleet and its motorcycle taxis.

The process is called “pyrolysis.” Plastic is super-heated in a sealed chamber, where it breaks down into hydrocarbon-rich gases that are condensed into liquid diesel fuel. It’s an anaerobic reaction; no smoke escapes.

“At first we didn't want to do it, to be honest with you,” said Jill Boughton, the garbage maven whose Waste to Worth Innovations will build the plant. “Dagupan only takes in about 30 tons of trash a day, which isn't much. Very hard to make the economics work.”

But Fernandez, who has staked her mayoralty on removing the dump, kept at Boughton, and she relented. “We realized that Waste to Worth was not just about big cities and big trash,” Boughton said. “Dagupan is our prototype of the small city. If we can get it to work here, I can tell you we can get it to work anywhere.” (Some environmental organizations maintain that waste-to-energy solutions like pyrolysis risk creating a market for plastic waste that would work against efforts to increase recycling and reduce plastic consumption.)

If Dagupan at first appeared too small for waste-to-energy investors, consider the backyard reactors designed by Noble Banadda.

Smoke-free they’re not.

Banadda, chair of the department of agricultural and bio-systems engineering at Makerere University in Kampala, has developed an inexpensive wood-fired reactor made from steel drums to convert plastic into low-sulphur diesel. “Our aim was to design stoves, small-scale stoves, so that people in urban centers, especially the urban poor, can begin businesses where they collect plastics, [and] melt them,” he said. “The process of making plastics will reverse it to go back to the diesel.”

Some may quibble with using trees to make diesel, but wood is cheaper than electricity in Uganda, and trees are renewable. Banadda’s reactor is just getting started; during a demonstration at a rural workshop, the internal temperature wasn’t a steady 550 degrees Centigrade: As a result, most of the test plastic was turned to paraffin wax, with just an ounce of diesel. The reactor is both a mark of grassroots ingenuity, and of how far there is to go.

Kampala does its part, and Davos does too. At the World Economic Forum this year, participants promoted initiatives like the “Circular Economy” that prod designers and manufacturers to reduce the number of different plastics used in packaging and labels, thus increasing the likelihood they will be recycled and turned to profit.

If it seems the emphasis is on reducing new plastic waste, rather than removing the millions of tons already in the environment, that’s because plans to do that are, so far, small-scale and subject to disagreement among engineers and advocates. They focus on plastic waste at the ocean surface, but don’t yet address plastic on the ocean floor.

* * *

No one expects household goods to leave plastic or plastic-related chemicals in their body. No brand or manufacturer ever seeks permission to put them there. Regulators, industry, and independent researchers make slow and often contradictory calls over how much of a given pollutant might be safe. The delay can be costly: By the time the U.S. phased out use of the fire retardant PDBE in electronics, baby clothes, and furniture, exposure to the chemical had chopped 11 million IQ points off the intellectual abilities of tens of thousands of children, at a cost of $266 billion and immeasurable heartache.

The first studies into the health effects of microscopic plastics on humans are only just now beginning; there’s no telling when governments might establish a safe threshold. Even farther away are studies of human exposure to nano-scale plastic particles, plastic measured in the millionths of a millimeter.

In 1986, K. Eric Drexler, a visionary in the field of nanotechnology, posited the “Grey Goo Problem,” a future scenario in which tiny robots self-replicate so quickly, and consume so many resources, that they snuff most life on Earth. Drexler’s hypothetical was given new fire in a well-known 2000 essay by the computer scientist Bill Joy that described the danger of runaway research into genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.

But what if we don’t need supercomputers and self-breeding robots to wreck the planet? The twin plagues of plastic contamination and climate change show that all it might take is cheap oil, successful chemistry, rising living standards, and marvelous profits. The story of the Plastic Age doesn’t end well.

“Since the problem of plastic was created exclusively by human beings through our indifference, it can be solved by human beings by paying attention to it,” Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace laureate, said. “Now what we need is a determination to get it done before it gets us.” 

*The study on which this story was based has now been published in Plos One, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which means that a group of outside experts has found its methods and conclusions to be sound. The Plos One article broadens its description of the fibers found in global tap water samples to include plastic and other man-made substances. In her May 16, 2017, lab report to Orb Media, principal investigator Mary Kosuth had identified the fibers as “plastic,” a synthetic polymer. However, in Plos One, Kosuth and co-authors Sherri Mason and Elizabeth Wattenberg use the term “anthropogenic,” or man-made, to describe these fibers. The authors say they opted for this distinction in Plos One because the fibers Kosuth found in global tap water samples were not confirmed as plastic with an infrared spectroscope. Since the Rose Bengal stain used in the study binds only to natural substances, they write, “it is logical to assume that the particles found are at least synthetic and most likely could be classified as microplastics, but as spectroscopic analyses such as Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) are required in order to confirm this assumption, we use the more general term throughout this report.”