Microplastics are everywhere. What can we do about it?
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 June 2024
⏱️ 21 minutes
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Summary
With every breath you take, you could be inhaling microplastics. Today, we talk about where they come from, how they impact our health and what we can do to avoid them in our daily lives.
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For years, scientists on the hunt for microplastics have found them almost everywhere. First, they spotted tiny pieces of plastic in the ocean, in the bodies of fish and mussels. Then they found them in soft drinks, in tap water, in vegetables and fruits, in burgers.
Now researchers are discovering that microplastics are floating around us, suspended in the air on city streets and inside homes. One study found that people inhale or ingest on average 74,000 to 121,000 microplastic particles per year through breathing, eating and drinking.
Today on “Post Reports,” climate reporter Shannon Osaka answers host Elahe Izadi’s questions about these plastic particles that humans are taking in in much larger quantities than previously thought. And she gives some advice on how to get microplastics out of our lives as much as possible.
Today’s show was produced by Emma Talkoff, with help from Rennie Svirnovskiy. It was edited by Ariel Plotnick and mixed by Sean Carter.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So, okay, I have some props. Yeah, this is a plastic smoothie cup that I make my |
| 0:08.9 | smoothie in another plastic smooth like a blender thing and then I put it into this and then I drink out of |
| 0:15.9 | this container and when you see what I'm holding up what do you see? What I see is |
| 0:21.2 | materials that as you're touching them as the food is or the drink is touching the inside of that material |
| 0:27.7 | They are releasing microplastics all the time. So you probably ate some microplastics today. |
| 0:33.2 | Oh my God, I'm like, I want to like drop these things and run. |
| 0:37.2 | But even if you weren't eating out of that cup or eating out of that container today, you would be inhaling microplastics. |
| 0:48.4 | This is Shannon Osaka, a climate reporter for the post, and when she came into the studio, |
| 0:53.7 | I wanted to ask her about something |
| 0:55.9 | you and I encounter every day, |
| 0:58.4 | even if we don't realize it. |
| 1:00.6 | Microplastics. |
| 1:02.0 | So microplastics are effectively just tiny pieces of plastic that have kind of disintegrated off of larger plastics. |
| 1:09.0 | And when she says tiny, she means tiny. They're invisible to the human eye, and it turns out they are in everything. |
| 1:18.8 | Scientists first found microplastics in the ocean. Then they found them in our food, but now cutting-edge research |
| 1:26.3 | has shown that they're even in the air we breathe. Shannon says microplastics and even smaller |
| 1:32.4 | nanoplastics are floating in the air because these particles shed off of everyday items. |
| 1:38.0 | They're coming from your containers, they're coming from car tires, They're coming off any synthetic clothing. |
| 1:44.7 | When you are wearing clothing that clothing is shedding microplastics and |
| 1:48.8 | nanoplastics. When you wash synthetic clothing or dry it, it is shedding microplastics and anoplastics. |
| 1:55.0 | They're in our tap water, they're in our bottled water, they're everywhere. |
| 2:00.0 | From the Newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. |
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