Earth Day 2024 And The Atmosphere Is Raining Microplastic

April 22, 2024

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The first Earth Day happened in 1970. Today is the 54th and the planet is in worse shape than when we started paying attention to the environment through this annual ritual. I remember shutting lights in our home and turning off the television for an Earth hour that first day. I continued to do this for many years hoping that others were doing the same and that we would read about a dip in electricity demand in the papers the next day. But after the first year, fewer people were paying attention.

Today on Earth Day the newspapers have headlines about plastic in the air we breathe. My wife and I recycle religiously – paper, metal, plastic, anything marked recyclable. Our building has a garbage chute that streams recyclables, organic waste and garbage. When we walk through the neighbourhood, homes have green and blue bins out on recycling and garbage days. Much of what is streamed is contaminated by stuff that shouldn’t be in the recycling and organic waste bins. Municipal governments publish materials to educate the public and in our walks, you can see that the effort by many is there. But the result so far is poor.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists responsible for The Doomsday Clock isn’t writing about a pending nuclear holocaust today. Instead, its State of the Earth message is about plastic and the environmental disaster unfolding before our eyes, in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we ingest.

The Bulletin notes the following:

“The plastics industry is expected to double or triple production by 2050 unless global leaders intervene. Even if the rate of plastic production holds steady, the emissions from the plastic sector could account for a fifth of the remaining carbon budget by mid-century.”

The Bulletin isn’t pulling numbers out of a hat. The analysis of plastic and its growing impact comes from a study done at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Plastic is a manifestation of our fossil fuel addiction. We create it from cracking oil and turn it into packaging from water bottles to beverage containers, clam shells and wrapping materials. The greenhouse gas (GHG) impact of producing all this plastic is enormous. Plastic’s role in the planetary climate change crisis, biodiversity loss and growing pollution is largely underappreciated.

In the Executive summary of the Lawrence Berkeley study it states:

“Proposed efforts to reduce plastic pollution do not yet include any explicit consideration of climate impacts.”

Yet we know that more plastic means more GHGs, the principal cause of atmospheric temperature rise.

The report has been published on the eve of an upcoming meeting of the United Nations’ 4th Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC4) for a global plastics treaty. It starts next week in Canada’s capital, Ottawa.

This report is science-based, technically neutral, and provides information to those attending the meeting to help them formulate a global plastic treaty. It notes the following:

The plastic industry is experiencing exponential growth with expectations that it will double or triple by 2050.
In 2019:
- The manufacture of plastic generated 2.24 Gigatons of pollution, equivalent to the total output of 600 coal-fired thermal power plants.
- Plastic production accounted for 5% of all global carbon emissions.
- Plastic production consumed 12% of all the oil and 8.5% of all the natural gas from sources
Exponential growth from double to triple the amount produced in 2019 means plastic production by 2050 will generate 6.78 Gigatons of pollution or the equivalent of GHG emissions from 1,700 coal-burning thermal power plants.

Describing plastic as a wrecking ball for the planet, therefore, is no understatement.

The Bulletin’s Earth Day message includes some startling facts about global heat.

It notes:

As of March 2024, the planet had experienced 10 consecutive months of new global heat records.
The average global surface air temperature hit 14.14 Celsius (57.2 Fahrenheit).
These new temperature highs are 0.73 Celsius (1.31 Fahrenheit) above the average of the previous 30 years.
These new highs are 1.58 Celsius (2.84 Fahrenheit) more than the pre-Industrial average measure between the years 1850 and 1900.
These temperatures exceed the lower threshold of the Paris Climate Agreement with its 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) target.

To stop all this global heating the solution is to reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere. The two greatest GHG industrial sectors are power generation and transportation. With the presence of plastic production, even if we were to fully decarbonize both of these GHG contributing sectors, it would still not stop global heating. As a result, even if we achieve carbon-free energy and transportation by mid-century, plastic would contribute 5.13 gigatons of GHGs fuelling global heating. If the growth curve was to continue until the end of the century, plastic would become the largest contributor of GHGs.

So what to do? The mathematics is simple but the political will is less so because only if plastic production begins to decrease at a significant rate can we keep temperatures within the lower parameters of the Paris Climate Agreement. One study proposes a decrease of 12% per year.

In a front page article in the Toronto Star today, an article describes another point brought up by the Bulletin. Micro and nanoplastics in the environment resulting from the breakdown of plastic can linger for centuries contaminating the air, the oceans, lakes, rivers, and us. Nanoplastic is in our food and drink. It is in our blood, intestines and even is getting past the blood-brain barrier.

The Star cites work involving Dr. Marcus Garcia, a pharmacist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico who participated in a mouse study involving micro and nanoplastic pollution. He states:

“It’s currently estimated that…humans consume about five grams of microplastics per week, the equivalent of a credit card. We’re in a kind of rough situation where almost everything that we consume, there’s some type of microplastics present.”

The university study ground plastic to micro and nanoscale and put it in the food and water of mice test subjects. Later the study found large concentrations of plastic in the liver and brains and to a lesser extent in the kidneys. The microscopic plastic had crossed the blood-brain barrier that often stops toxins, bacteria, and viruses from entering. One can question the level of exposure based on the study’s methodology, but it follows other research that has shown microplastics found in hearts and human placentas.

Finding micro and nanoplastic in our bodies shouldn’t automatically assume the presence is harmful. Unfortunately, where microplastic and nanoplastic have been found in organs there are associated metabolic changes. Over time these changes are linked to chronic illnesses like diabetes, liver and heart disease. The presence of micro and nanoplastics accumulating in the brain over time may contribute to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

So on this Earth Day, the Bulletin’s warning about the growing amount of plastic leading to another tipping point should not remain unheeded. Let’s hope those gathering in Ottawa this coming week recognize the urgency of the task of putting an international plastics treaty in place.