We 'ingest and inhale microplastics' constantly - but experts believe there's still hope

It was in a convention centre in the South Korean city of Busan at the start of December that representatives from more than 170 UN countries were meant to agree on a treaty to end plastic pollution. They had, after all, committed back in March 2022 to develop an international, legally binding agreement by the end of the year – but that didn’t happen.

“Negotiators have reached a greater degree of convergence on the structure and elements of the treaty text, as well as a better understanding of country positions and shared challenges,” said Inger Andersen, the United Nations Environment Programme’s executive director, “but it is clear there is persisting divergence in critical areas and more time is needed for these areas to be addressed.”

With the negotiations pushed into 2025, Dr Cressida Bowyer, the deputy director of the University of Portsmouth’s Revolution Plastics Institute who was present at the discussions alongside colleague Professor Stephen Fletcher, explains to indy100 what’s holding up international agreement on the issue.

“The process is by consensus,” she says, “so for anything to be included in the final treaty text, everyone has to agree that. So you’ve got countries with really diverse economic, social and political interests – ranging, for instance, from countries that are very heavily dependent on fossil fuel for their economies like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and Russia, through to... small island developing states like Tonga, for instance – who are really interested by plastic pollution, but don’t really see many of the benefits, if you like, of the plastics economy.”

There are, Dr Bowyer goes on to add, around 95 countries who are calling for a “highly ambitious” treaty, plus around 30 “like-minded countries” who have “certain things they don’t want to see”.

Even then, the researcher concedes, it is “highly unlikely” specific, measurable targets will appear in the final treaty text, with it being “more likely” that countries will settle on an “agreement to agree”.

“There is pretty much agreement that there needs to be improved waste management, especially in low and middle income countries, where waste management infrastructure can be really super minimal, slash, non-existent,” she continues. “You get an awful of plastic waste [which] ends up just in the environment one way in the environment one way or another.

“And there’s a bit agreement around product design and how product design, that part of the treaty should focus on product design and how product design can help minimise pollution, so like design for recyclability, design for reuse, design for refill – designed for a circular economy, really.

“But the real area of disagreement is around production caps,” says Dr Bowyer. “Some will argue that you can’t deal with the amount of plastic pollution that’s entering the environment without turning down the tap of plastic production.”

Case in point, only 10 per cent of plastic waste globally is recycled. Around half of the plastic produced every year is single-use, with 40 per cent of that ending up polluting the environment. Recycling, says Dr Bowyer, with noticeable exasperation in her voice, isn’t working.

“We really need to make sure that the recycling system is preserved so that it can manage those … better uses of plastics,” she says, giving examples such as its use in renewable energy technologies and in healthcare provision. “We really need to look at where we can eliminate unnecessary plastic products and unnecessary waste and eliminate pollution."

In addition to detailing the latest delays to agreeing a plastics treaty, Dr Bowyer’s article in the British Medical Journal earlier this month – co-authored with Professor Fletcher – is rather bleak when it comes to the prevalence of microplastics. “We ingest, inhale, and absorb microplastics when we eat, drink and breathe,” the pair write.

Ominous, right? And when faced with the idea that microplastics are everywhere – and, in studies cited in the Portsmouth researchers’ article, linked to DNA damage, immune system disruption and potentially dementia – it feels pretty overwhelming.

And it’s a real thing, with researchers and mental health charities already writing extensively about the concept of “climate anxiety”. How do we avoid such despair on the issue of microplastics?

“I wish I knew the answer to that question,” admits Dr Bowyer. “It’s incredibly problematic, isn’t it? We know that, with climate change, that actually the impacts of climate change at the moment are so big, that it’s kind of putting people off taking actions to reduce emissions and things like that, because it’s just like, ‘whoa, it’s completely out of control’.

“It’s super difficult to get back microplastics that have leaked into the environment, but what we can do is stop more plastics leaking into the environment,” she explains. “I suppose that’s what I try and say to myself, my colleagues: that’s our mission, to try and stop it getting any worse. Yes, there’s a lot of stuff out there, but that shouldn’t be an excuse for not taking more action.”

Our conversation over Zoom takes place amid the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, which have killed 25 people and decimated tens of thousands of acres at the time of writing.

Plastics and climate change are linked, with Dr Bowyer stating the former contributes to the latter in two particular ways.

“Firstly, the production, the mining of the fossil fuels, the manufacture, the transportation of plastics, and when plastics are disposed into the environment - even if they're landfill or incinerated or whatever,” she says. “Anytime you're getting rid of plastics, they're going to give off greenhouse gasses.

“And also, when plastics are burnt - which they often are, especially in poor countries, to deal with their presence as waste materials - they don't only give off the greenhouse gasses and carbon dioxide, they give off methane, which has a far higher greenhouse gas effect than carbon dioxide.

“Then we've got the indirect contributions and the exacerbations,” she continues. “So let's imagine you've got a drainage channel in a slum in Kenya, that's choked by plastics, and then that that channel is flooded - and that's likely to happen because of climate change, and the presence of the plastics - that means that flooding is really pretty serious, and actually then those plastics then get washed into sea by the flooding as well.

“So again, the presence of the plastic pollution exacerbates the impacts of climate change,” concludes Dr Bowyer. “It's pretty complex, I don't think it's recognized enough.”

Evidently, a plastics treaty is needed to address these challenges. As Dr Bowyer and Professor Stephen Fletcher write in the BMJ article: “The treaty to end plastic pollution represents a historic opportunity to protect human health.”

“The need for decisive international action to tackle plastic pollution,” they write, “has never been more urgent.”

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