How much Plastic do you eat Everyday? The Science Behind Microplastics!

Did you know you eat about a credit card's worth of plastic every week?

Plastic is in almost everything humans produce and consume these days. When plastic isn't reused, recycled, or properly disposed of it begins to break down in the environment. It breaks into tiny microscopic pieces called microplastics which can be found everywhere on the planet. They travel in rain drops, can be blown by the winds and are consumed by small organisms and biomagnify up the food chain. We are eating plastic and we don't even know it.

Want to find ways to stop contributing micro plastics into our natural environments? Consider choosing products with biodegradable packaging like he companies below!

• MarinaTex repurposes unused fish from fish processing facilities to create a compostable plastic alternative!
• Genecis converts food waste into biodegradebale plastics.
• UHaul, ULine, Staples and many more companies have an option for compostable packing peanuts.

 Consider adding one of these filters to your washing machine!

• Filtrol uses a reusable microfibre net to filter out 89% of micro plastics and other biodegradable fibers from your washing machine
• Planet Care has another reusable filter to catch micro plastic fibers coming from your home!
• Elanos has a filter that you throw in with your laundry and it filters as you wash!

Want to find your way away from other plastic in your life?
Check out companies like Little plastic Footprint who are making it easy for people to make the change!

Click here to see Dr. David Locky's Website about his research oh and click here for his second website!

Are you interested in his latest journal article that concerns microplastics detected in the waters around Edmonton Alberta? Click Here to read it!

The Aquatic Bisophere Project
The ABP is establishing a conservation Aquarium in the Prairies to help tell the Story of Water.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

David Evans: 0:25

As we look at human history, with many different ages, we have the Bronze Age, we have the Industrial Revolution, the medieval age, what do you think we would be calling today's age? There's one substance that really impacted almost everything in all of our lives. A human made product, extremely cheap to produce extremely durable and useful in so many different products. Yeah, you saw it in the title, we're talking about plastic. Now look around right now. Wherever you are, whatever you're listening to this podcast with, I bet you that you can see a lot of plastic, whether it's the headphones that you're listening to the speakers in your car, or whatever is actually playing this podcast loud, probably has plastic in it. That's because plastic is the miracle substance, we can use it for so many different purposes. It's also because of all these really beneficial properties that leads to all of the problems, we're starting to understand now. 40% of all of the plastic that we make, is used only once and then tossed away, we don't really know how long plastic even takes to break down. Every plastic is a little bit different. Some experts believe it'll take 450 years for that plastic to disintegrate. Whereas some don't even believe that'll be enough, they might never actually degrade. Today, we're talking about what happens after we toss some of this plastic away, how it does start to degrade. But once it breaks down into a small enough piece, it will actually begin to circulate in our ecosystems in our waterways. It'll get into our food and even into our bodies. You heard that correctly. We're eating plastic that we have thrown away. Today, we're going to talk to Dr. David Luckey from MacEwan University, all about the scary topic of microplastics in our environment. Water we doing? And how can we do better? your one stop shop for everything water related from discussing water to use and the organisms that depend on it for all the global issues that you really never knew all had to do with water. I'm your host, David Evans from the aquatic biosphere project. And I just want to ask you something. What are we doing? How can we do better. As of 2015, we've created more than 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic, and only about 9% of that was actually recycled. 12% of that was incinerated, and about 79% of that is either sitting in a landfill, or it's floating around in the environment somewhere that accounts for about 6.3 billion tonnes of plastic. To help put that into perspective. It's the same amount of weight as over 48,450 CN towers, that's a lot of plastic. Every year, we seem to be creating more and more plastic it's so useful for so many different purposes. In 1950, we created 2.1 million tonnes jump ahead 40 years to 1993 147 million tonnes then 20 years later, in 2015 406 million tonnes of plastic was produced. So we keep ramping up production. But we're not ramping up reusing. It's just going into a landfill or into our environment and sitting there. Now as I previously mentioned, plastics do break down in the environment, but they more break apart rather than break down as we might think of it, they break into smaller and smaller pieces, but they never really go away. So you can think of it as different levels, macro plastics, or anything above five millimeters. So think of a plastic bag a plastic water bottle. But any tiny little piece of plastic that's between five millimeters and 100 nanometers is considered a microplastic. And any piece of plastic that's smaller than 100 nanometers is considered a nano plastic. Now I had to look this up. It's been a while since I've learned anything about nanoscale stuff. So the width of a human hair is 400 times bigger than 100 nanometers. Another wild measurement is that if a nano meter was as big as a football, a doughnut would be the same size as the country of New Zealand. So we're talking real small here, people. When plastics are breaking down in the environment, they break into smaller and smaller pieces, and eventually we'll get to the nano scale. But today, we're gonna focus only on the micro plastics.

Dr. David Locky, MacEwan University: 6:10

We're interested primarily in the micro plastics, so five millimeters and down from there. The nano plastics that's a much larger question requiring much more sophisticated equipment and to be honest, we're, we're actually not there. There's there's just so much area to cover with just the microplastics In fact, microplastics as well to that, that's probably a lifetime of science right there.

David Evans: 6:36

This is Dr. David Locky from MacEwan University right here in Edmonton. Dr. Locky is a wetland ecologist, it might be strange to think for wetlands guy focusing on plastics, but it really is becoming a contaminant absolutely everywhere. To be honest, I only thought it was really a big deal in the oceans. I've seen the photos of the gyres in both the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean. But speaking with David, it really became apparent, this is a problem for everyone. everywhere in the world,

Dr. David Locky, MacEwan University: 7:06

there's probably no place on earth that they are not found. So if you want to look at the macro plastic issue, if you see a macro plastic, you know that there's a microplastic there and very likely the nano plastic level. So they're found at both poles right now they're found in the highest mountain regions. recent study in the western US national parks, suggests that up to 1000 tonnes of plastic are raining down every year. So this, of course, is coming from a number of different ways. It's everywhere. So they're found recently, various candy wrappers, I don't know the brand have been found in the Marianas Trench, you know, they're everywhere, the concentrations of microplastics are higher in the Arctic than many other places closer to urban areas. And it's very likely due to the gyres of plastic that are floating and not only the Pacific Ocean, but the Atlantic Ocean that are breaking down and being up the currents concentrating in the Arctic pretty well, every different ecosystem type that we had sampled here in the greater Edmonton region, we have found evidence of microplastics. So it's in the air, it's in the soil, and it is in the water. And there are a number of means of transport. That mean that this is now a ubiquitous, global contaminant.

David Evans: 8:24

It's crazy to think of plastic pieces so small, that they can travel with a droplet of water, they can circulate up in our clouds, they can rain down on us, they can grow inside of plants and be incorporated into structures. And they can just be basically everywhere on the planet. Now we know that some of this microplastic is just breaking down of larger plastics. But there are actually some other ways that microplastics enter our environment. And I'm sorry, but you might not like to hear these,

Dr. David Locky, MacEwan University: 8:59

you can classify them broadly into two categories, one that are manufactured to be microplastics. And those are the beads or microbeads that we often found in various cosmetics are currently banned in Canada. But you know, we have found them certainly in the North Saskatchewan River and various other sites that we've sampled in the Edmonton region. And that's probably it's a bit of an echo of the past. So there's probably products still on the shelf and people's bathrooms that they're using. And so they're getting into the system in various ways. And the other one, of course, is what you had first mentioned, and that is just basically breakdown of anything from a plastic water bottle to cellophane. And what I think is one of the more ubiquitous issues is microplastic fibers, that is probably the most common contaminant that we found is the fibers. You know, to be honest, a lot of it is from the clothing and it's in most of our clothing and in some form, right even if it's just the threat or something like that. And of course, a very high proportion of all our clothing is is 100% synthetic, which of course is plastic. A big source of them is actually washing machines. So washing machines can can concentrate the amount of plastic in the environment because it's basically going out the drain the gentle wash which uses more water than just a regular water Wash can actually highly inflate the number of microplastics that are going out your drain. So you can now purchase filters for your washing machine to capture all the microplastics, or a good proportion of them. But I think they're pretty expensive. There's something like $250. So not a lot of households will actually want to do that until maybe the price comes down or To be honest, until manufacturers start integrating these things in. So washing synthetic items in your washing machine can yield up to something like 6 million microfibers per wash. So that's huge, that's huge. And another almost another million can be added. If you're using you know, the gentle cycle, which uses more water, which is an issue, I found that very interesting.

David Evans: 11:08

It blows my mind that just the simple act of washing our clothes can transport millions of microplastics into our waterways. Now a lot of these do get filtered out through wastewater treatment facilities. But even that little bit that does get out here are gonna be around forever. times you're lucky mentions these filters that you can put into your washing machine to stop flushing all of these microplastics down the drain. Now, I'm so excited by this, I had never thought my washing machine would be creating plastic pollution. So if anyone who listens to this podcast goes out and purchases one of these filters to put in your washing machine, please let us know. So I'll link some of those in the show notes. And if you actually get any of them, please let us know. We'd love to hear about it at the show. So you can tag us on Instagram or on Facebook, we'd love to know and be able to showcase that you guys are listening and implementing some of these things as well. Now, at this point, there's lots of microplastic that's getting out into our environment. It's absolutely everywhere. And it can come from many different sources. But sure, we don't want plastic just floating around everywhere being a part of everything. But I guess, is there any negatives to health? What are the problems here that I'm not thinking about right

Dr. David Locky, MacEwan University: 12:33

now, the toxicity or let's just say the deleterious effects of microplastics on these smaller organisms is twofold. So the first is is that they double as a food source with very little nutrition. For instance, sperm whales and various others filter feeders eating a lot of plastic shorebird communities almost on the verge of collapse, because the young are being fed plastics by the parents. And of course, the parents are eating plastics, too. So that's the macro level. So poor nutrition, that's not necessarily an issue for most humans. It's the microplastics, which are the issue. So the second aspect is the fact that toxins can actually stick basically adsorb to the outside of the plastic and the organism will eat these and then of course, it will bio magnify up the food chain. So perhaps algae will filter feed some of this stuff, and then invertebrates will eat those. And then of course fish and then birds will eat those and then so on. And so you get bioaccumulation and then biomagnification of toxins that you would not normally have found a conduit through the food chain. So that is a particular concern. I've heard of the stato. David, but some recent research came out in Europe and Australia and verified at Simon Fraser University for Canada, that humans are consuming about five grams are the weight of a credit card per week in plastic, eating a better credit card a week credit card a week, it's absolutely astonishing. That's 52 credit cards per year. Wow. Yeah, and of course, these are quite small. And they found in the average bottle of beer, there may be three or four articles. Every time you crack the top heavy water bottle, there are shards that will go in there that are considered microplastics. And in particular shellfish have a high concentration because they are filter feeders, though it really depends on what your diet is and where you're getting your water from. But anyway, it's and of course it's in our feces. So that is actually means of investigating microplastics is actually looking at sewage outflows and similar to what they're doing with COVID as well. You can use sewage for all kinds of interesting scientific things. The mutton the nanoplastics those, those basically crossed cellular membranes in the effects cell function. So plastics can reside theoretically in every human tissue. And I think Recent research has shown including a newborn babies

David Evans: 15:05

let that soak in for a second. Can you imagine even just eating a credit card alone to think that we are eating enough tiny little bits of plastic every week to make up an entire credit card. That's crazy. That's terrifying. And I'm sorry for those who love shellfish out there, but I might be sticking away from those for the time being. I think what nerves me the most about this topic is that we're only looking at the microplastics. At this point, science hasn't gotten to the point where we can even start to really, fully understand the breadth and reach of the impacts that microplastics alone have on humans, before we even start to look at nanoplastics with the ability to cross the cellular membranes, and that they can be found in newborn babies, this is a huge problem that we need to start to understand right away.

Dr. David Locky, MacEwan University: 16:05

Something else I should point out, too, is there's been plenty of research via that are demonstrating the significant amounts of microplastics in the air within buildings. So for instance, a big source of them are carpeting. So carpeting is a huge issue. I mean, because those fragments are breaking off. And there's, you know, some fairly large numbers where you're actually breathing it in. So you're reading it, you're drinking it, and you're breathing it in, and I don't want to scare people per se. I mean, you know, that the human body and no, we're taking in toxins all the time, and we can handle them, but sort of that new pollutant, because it's so small, and very difficult to to assess, you know, is an issue, something to think about. So I would have to say that for several generations, or perhaps hundreds of generations, plastics will be here. Even if you stopped producing plastic right now, the amount that is out there is so significant that, you know, I hate to be too pessimistic, but it is something that we will have to deal with for the very foreseeable future. I don't know if it will ever go away. I mean, it's it's very difficult to sort of think about, I think it's almost a geological scale question. You know, it's so ubiquitous, and they can be stored for a long time and sediments and then be reintroduced through other activities. What can we do about this? This is? That's a really good question. I think that for instance, as you mentioned, we can make some smart consumer choices to more natural products, so Cotton's and wools, and things like that, but even those have environmental costs and issues and, and in fact, a lot of the fibers we found in the North Saskatchewan River were cotton. So you know, remember those candy wrappers in the Marianas Trench? Well, let's make sure that we put ours in the garbage is one thing, try to manage it as much as possible. With respect to your washing machine, perhaps that's something to consider. And of course, single use plastics in the lack of recycling opportunities for other plastics is a problem. Where will they be 100 years from now? Right, because those products probably won't last that long. The ultimate solution really remains with manufacturers and government. I think in order to get a handle on this, there has to be some kind of responsibility. But here again, because it's such a ubiquitous and useful material that can be made into literally anything. It is just it's rampant. It's it's everywhere. So it's a it's a it's a blessing, and it's a curse, if you will.

David Evans: 18:39

I couldn't have said it better myself. Plastic is here to stay. And there are many companies that are striving to make ecological friendly, single use packaging, or alternatives to plastics in all forms. Look at the new trend when it comes to beeswax wraps with bamboo toothbrushes. We're an ingenious people. And we can find a solution to this. But we have made our bed with plastic so far. And we will have to figure out how we're going to manage it moving forward, because this problem isn't going away anytime soon. If you feel strongly about plastic pollution, and want to be part of the solution, then help spread the word. I was surprised by how little I actually knew about plastic pollution. And I like to think that I'm a fairly informed person when it comes to environmental issues. That being said, this topic went far beyond that for me. So spread the word, tell someone you know about this problem. As Dr. Locky mentioned, we need to have a greater conversation about this as a population and take it up into a political level. Because this is a huge, huge issue. And it needs to be taken seriously. Just because we can't see them. microplastics are still there, and they're still affecting everyone every day. So rather than just leaving this on this sour note, let's say there are some people who are attempting to make some big solutions for this problem, or how to manage it at least. So let's finish with that. What are some of the ways that we can start to Clean this problem up, or maybe make sure that it doesn't get any worse.

Dr. David Locky, MacEwan University: 20:24

You may have heard that there was a high school student who recently came up with this very unique method of using oil and feral fluids that would basically attract microplastics, kind of like a magnet. But here again, at the wide scale that's difficult other research now is unique using these things called nano coils, which are tiny reactors, and they can actually trigger microplastic breakdown at an accelerated rate, at least at the laboratory level. You know, there's also some municipalities are putting in these nets on stormwater outflows and cities in order to collect the larger particles, wrappers, cups bottles, and then they can manage it that way. So slowly, but surely, there's promise of of this being addressed. But to what degree you know, it will take some time and organization and you know, and will from the government, I think to to help us with this.

David Evans: 21:24

Thanks so much for tuning into today's episode all about microplastics. If you want to learn more about microplastics, and the research that David Lucky's doing, I'll leave links to his website in the show notes. And I'll also leave links to many other websites that are looking into microplastics in our world, and ways that you can get involved. Also, be sure to check out all of the microplastic catching devices that you can install into your washing machine, or wherever into your house. There'll be links in the show notes. Check them out. Super cool. Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast for our full deep dive interview with Dr. David Locky, all about his research about microplastics in the Alberta region of the world, but also all about microplastics everywhere around the world. This topic I just found so fascinating. And I'm so interested to see where the science goes on this. I mean nanoplastics terrify me make sure you tune in. It'll come out on Wednesday, May 12. I'm the host and producer David Evans. And I would just like to thank the rest of the team from the aquatic biosphere project, specifically to Paula Polman, S phie Cervera and Anna betti i. Thanks for all of your help. To learn more about the aqua ic biosphere project and what we re doing here in Alberta tell ng the story of water. Check us ut at www.aquaticbiosphere.ca. nd if you have any questi ns or comments about the show we'd love to hear them. Email us at conservation@aqua icbiosphere.org. Please don t forget to like, subscribe a d leave us a review. It real y helps us out. We'll be switchi g our podcasts release schedul d to every second week now. B t don't worry. Next episode s going to be fantastic. If y u follow us on social medi, you'll have seen posts abo t locusts and deserts A while ag. And that's our next focus. We' e taking on desert locusts he p plagues of these creatures c n completely devastate enti e continents of crops. And h w does this have anything to o with water? Well, let's just s y you need some strange weathe, some strange rain to bring a l t of pain to a lot of peopl. We'll be examining the li k between water and plagues f desert locusts of biblic l proportions. Tune in you won t want to miss it. Thanks and it s been a spla