Editors at Issues and Insights call for a major change in common recycling practices.
Microplastic accumulation in the human body could be a serious health hazard, according to some researchers, and might be linked to cancer, heart attacks and other threatening medical conditions. We’ll never eliminate all microplastic from the environment, but we could significantly reduce the volume if we’d just shut down plastic recycling.
A Stanford Medicine article says scientists estimate that “adults ingest the equivalent of one credit card per week in microplastics,” which sounds frightening, even though only a “few studies have directly examined the impact of microplastics on human health, leaving us in the dark about how dangerous they really are.”
The fear, however, is already out there, and policymakers, particularly in California, have gone to war with all plastic, hoping to ban as much of this modern convenience as possible. …
… Recycling plastic requires the destruction of consumer products, which are shredded by industrial machinery, washed, rinsed, dried and transported. The process creates an enormous body of microplastic.
“Environmental exposure can almost double the microplastic generation during the shredding step in the recycling plant,” says Faisal Hai, head of the School of Civil, Mining, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Wollongong in Australia.
“The commercial process for plastic recycling may have been emitting microplastics since its first use nearly half a century ago.”
Other research suggests that as much as 400,000 tons, “or the equivalent of about 29,000 dump trucks of microplastics,” is produced by recycling each year in the U.S. alone, says Inside Climate News. …
… Hai and Staplevan “are strong advocates of recycling,” says the university, so rather than calling for an end to plastic recycling, they instead want increased government “regulation of the recycling industry to control and monitor the amount of microplastics being produced and released into the environment.”
But a far better idea is to bury plastic waste in landfills.
