Plastic People co-director Ziya Tong surrounded by microplastics from the Great Lakes.Peter Bregg
Rick Smith is the co-author of two books on the human health effects of pollution and an executive producer of the new documentary Plastic People: The Hidden Crisis of Microplastics. He is also the president of the Canadian Climate Institute.
Consider the bread bag tag: that square, toothed little clip that holds the mouth of the bag together, thereby ensuring the freshness of our country’s baked goods.
I’d never really thought about bread bag tags until some time last year, I noticed that they weren’t made out of plastic any longer. This led me to some online sleuthing and it turns out that Bimbo Canada, the largest commercial baker in the country – the parent company of beloved brands such as Vachon, Dempster’s and POM – had ditched its plastic tags in favour of cardboard compostable ones. Though tiny, these single-use plastic pieces add up to a big deal: The company has calculated this simple act will avert an incredible 200 tonnes of single-use plastic waste annually.
The tale of the bread bag tag is the story of the fight against plastics pollution in miniature. The aggregate effect of these sorts of totally doable, surprisingly impactful measures has the potential to turn the tide against the wave of plastic waste that threatens to swamp our environment and health.
In July, 2020, I worked with The Globe and Mail on a feature story on the rapidly growing plastic pollution crisis. The story outlined what was then brand-new science showing that plastic has become so prevalent that tiny shards (called “microplastics”) are increasingly being found in the human body. As a way of telling the story, I teamed up with researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology to test my own body for microplastics, and found a wide range of these tiny pollutants inside me, including polyester fibres from clothing and fragments of plastic packaging.
In the four years since, there have been many developments in the plastics pollution story: many bad, but some good.
Unfortunately, the last line of my 2020 article turned out to be prophetic: “Though I’m one of the first people in the world to find plastic in me, I’m afraid I won’t be the last.” A flurry of new scientific evidence has found microplastics in every part of the human body where scientists have looked, including blood, liver, lung, placenta, kidney, spleen and gut. Increasingly, scientists are sounding the alarm about the significant negative health effects this may be driving, largely as a result of the toxic chemicals that plastics are made from. For instance, in a study last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, a majority of patients examined were found to have polyethylene and vinyl microplastic particles embedded in the walls of their arteries. Patients with higher levels are at greater risk of cardiac arrest, strokes and death.
Plastic pollution has become so bad, it’s literally clogging our blood vessels.
Other stunning new research points to possible behavioural effects, such as dementia, as a result of plastic particles making their way to the human brain. And a recent study of the placentas of women in Hawaii provides the first evidence that plastic levels in the human body may be increasing over time, which is not surprising given the continuing exponential increase of plastic production and usage. An incredible 50 per cent of all plastics ever produced have been made in the past 15 years.
But if the worrisome dimensions of the plastics problem we’ve created for ourselves are increasingly clear, so is the scale of ambition of the potential solutions on offer.
Despite the staunch opposition of the plastics industry, countries around the world – including Canada – are banning unnecessary single-use plastic items that together account for a whopping 40 per cent of plastic production. Manufacturing and retail companies, which have significant exposure to consumers increasingly demanding action on plastic pollution, are banding together to reduce the amount of plastic packaging used and moving to greater reuse.
Most significantly, in 2022 the United Nations launched a process to negotiate a new international treaty to finally get the plastics pollution problem under control. Called the “biggest green deal since the Paris climate change agreement,” the process aims to deliver a legally binding instrument to address the full life cycle of plastics.
The next critical round of this treaty-making will be in Ottawa next week, and a new documentary inspired by that 2020 Globe and Mail feature will be shown to the assembled delegates. The goal is to ink a deal on the Plastics Treaty by the end of the year.
A recurring pattern of human history is the creation of new pollutants that have to subsequently be reined in once their effects on human health become obvious. The smog of the Industrial Revolution, poisonous pesticides such as DDT, and ozone-destroying chemicals were all banned once their damaging effects became clear.
It’s our generation’s turn to bring the latest pollution crisis – plastics – to heel. The evidence of the urgent threat to human health is impossible to ignore. If we do our job right, and seize the significant opportunity the Plastics Treaty negotiations offer, this will be the year the tide turns.