Microplastic Pollution: When a Solution Becomes a Problem

• Author: Craig M. Pease
• Position: Ph.D. scientist and former law school professor based in New England
• Pages: 17-17

MAY/JUNE 2021 | 17

Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, May/June 2021.

Copyright © 2021, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

Science and the Law

Starting from almost nothing at

the end of World War II, annual

production of plastic has grown

from roughly two pounds per person

in 1950, to roughly 25 pounds in the

1970s, to nearly 100 pounds today.

Not only has plastic use grown faster

than GDP, it has outpaced consump-

tion of lumber, cement, and steel. Plas-

tics are versatile, and typically cheaper

than metal, wood, cotton, or wool. Yet,

only roughly 10 percent is recycled.

Plastic waste is everywhere, persis-

tent, and pretty much impossible to

irradicate. Plastic pollution causes di-

verse harms, including entangling sea

turtles and shore birds, and aesthetic

degradation of landscapes. Microplas-

tics in the ocean clog lter-feeding

zooplankton and invertebrate larvae.

Nanoplastic particles the size of PM.

are found in many human tissues.

Plastic is manufac-

tured from oil. e

chemistry used re-

quires small amounts

of various additives,

for example Bisphe-

nol A. ose addi-

tives are responsible

for many of its desirable properties,

including rigidity, color, slipperiness,

and durability. Yet these additives also

leach out of plastic, and are often toxic.

Additionally, many toxics not used in

the manufacture of plastic, like PCBs

and DDT, hitch a ride on this durable

material as it moves through ecosys-

tems and tissues.

Scientic knowledge about plastic

pollution is highest for large pieces,

getting progressively worse as particle

size decreases. Concern about plastic

littering highways goes back to the

1960s and Lady Bird Johnson. Yet

only the relatively recent 2011 semi-

nal review by Matthew Cole and col-

leagues ignited concern about micro-

plastics. As is typical, scientic knowl-

edge lagged the problem, with said

review being published decades after

the exponential increase in plastic use

commenced.

e scientic literature on nano-

plastic toxicity is limited and incipi-

ent. I am not sanguine. Chan-Wei

Lu of the National Taiwan University

and his colleagues show in a 2021 ar-

ticle that laboratory exposure of the

worm C. elegans to nanoplastics causes

harm four generations later. Recent

work spearheaded by Charlie Rolsky,

director of science at Plastic Oceans

International, shows plastic chemical

components in diverse human tissues.

In a recent paper, Antonio Ragusa, an

obstetrician at an Italian hospital, and

his colleagues, show extremely worry-

ing presence of nanoplastics in human

placentas.

All this screams for the precaution-

ary principle. Only a grotesquely im-

moral society would accept risk of a

widespread pollutant’s

harming developing

human babies, in ways

that may well persist

for generations.

Eorts to control

plastic waste are as di-

verse as the problem

itself. Internationally, UN Environ-

ment’s Ad Hoc Open-Ended Expert

Group on Marine Litter and Micro-

plastics held its nal meeting last year,

and issued a report. e February

2021 session of the UN Environmen-

tal Assembly considered that report.

In some quarters, there is support for

a new international treaty to control

oceanic microplastic.

ere is a role for science. But it is

limited. e UN microplastics inquiry

is at its core a legislative process. e

expert group report does make refer-

ence to science. Yet what I nd most

prominent is the care and eort that

report takes to carefully state the nu-

anced and diverse views of the various

members of the group — positions

largely grounded in cultures, politics,

and economics, not science. is is an

unavoidable and inevitable part of any

international negotiation. Neverthe-

less, the science gets lost in an amal-

gam.

Science getting short shrift is not

the real problem. e scientist is in

some ways an oracle, communicating

to legislators and politicians underly-

ing truths about the real world. When

legislative and political processes dis-

count science, solutions get adopted

that, in critical ways, are inconsistent

with the real world, causing them to

eventually and inevitably fail.

Deceptive communication of tech-

nology and science exacerbates these

diculties. See for example, comments

of Larry omas, former president of

the Society of the Plastics Industry, as

reported in an NPR investigation de-

scribing industry eorts going back

decades to deceptively communicate

the potential of plastic recycling.

Recycling plastic is an uphill battle

against economics and chemistry. e

chemical reactions that produce plas-

tic from oil are eectively irreversible

— it is a one-way street. Moreover,

plastics are chemically diverse and are

used in diverse applications, creating

a high cost of collection and sorting.

By contrast, oil is uniform, cheap,

and readily available, and thus a bet-

ter starting substrate to manufacture

plastic.

e core problem here is not plastic

waste. Rather it is deception, fossil fu-

els, and the immense demand for plas-

tics from a global population of nearly

8 billion.

Microplastic Pollution: When

a Solution Becomes a Problem

Plastic pollution can

be found in nearly

every ecostystem

and in human tissues

Craig M. Pease is a Ph. D. scien-

tist and former law school professor

based in New Eng land. Email him at:

pease.craig@ gmail.com.