Babies Pooping Plastic

 

In anticipation of Children’s Environmental Health Day on Thursday, October 14, The PediaBlog will focus this week on environmental impacts to children’s health and well-being.

 

Someday in the far-distant future, archeologists seeking knowledge about our modern culture will chip away at Earth’s crust and find the magic fingerprint which defines our time. They won’t have to dig far before finding plastic in dwellings where we live, work, learn, and play. Practically every item they identify as a modern convenience will have plastic parts, or be made entirely of plastic. And although the passage of time will have transformed the landscape above the buried treasure into something completely unrecognizable to those living today, the plastic tools, utensils, and tchotchkes (trinkets) collected by the human (or alien?) scavengers will remain essentially unchanged.

The story of plastic begins at an oil or natural gas well head, where fracking for hydrocarbons like ethane poses the first of many threats to children’s health during its lifecycle. The creation of polyethylene pellets called “nurdles” at ginormous ethane “cracker” factories (like the one nearing completion in Beaver County, PA, one of the largest built anywhere) and the production of popular consumer products — most of which are designed for single use — compound the dangers. Until we decide one day that we’re done with it and dump plastic and its toxic components into landfills and streams and oceans, into our air and water and food, and, eventually, into you and me.

Science is quickly learning that the toxic emissions and chemicals associated with the production, use, and disposal of plastic are harmful to our health throughout OUR lifecycle. Many are highly irritating to our skin, our gastrointestinal tract, and our lungs. Many affect the outcome of pregnancies and interfere with fetal and infant growth and brain development. We now understand how some toxics act in tiny concentrations as endocrine disrupting chemicals, affecting human reproduction and infant and child development. Some weaken the immune system, some increase the risk of chronic inflammatory diseases, some damage end organs directly — especially the brain, liver, and kidneys. And dozens of chemicals appearing in the life of plastic are linked to cancers in adults and children, including 55 individual chemicals used in fracking

Plastic is strong. It’s durable. It’s cheap. But these same properties that make plastic so useful to our society — strength, durability, affordability — make plastic so dangerous when we throw it away. Once in the environment, plastic breaks down and erodes into smaller units, eventually becoming tiny particles called microplastics that can be carried by winds and currents to near and distant places. As this happens, the chemicals added to plastic separate and enter the environment, contaminating the air, water, and soil, and the food chain we and our children depend on.

Microplastics have been found everywhere from remote, uninhabited mountaintops to the deepest ocean trenches on Earth. It literally rains down on us; in 11 protected areas and national parks in the western U.S., it’s estimated that the equivalent of 120 million ground-up plastic bottles fall from the sky every year. A 2020 study conducted by PennEnvironment found microplastics in 100% of samples taken from the state’s lakes, rivers, and streams. They are found in our food and our drinking water. They are found in our bodies — in lungs and guts and human placentas. And now we learn in a new study that if you look for it, microplastics can be found in baby poop. The sample size was small, explains Elizabeth Gamillo, involving ten adults, six infants, and the very first bowel movement from three newborns (again proving the point that babies are being born pre-polluted):

Within the fecal matter, researchers were looking for traces of two commonly found plastics: polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polycarbonate. To ensure that the plastic found in infant poop was not from their diaper, researchers ruled out traces of polypropylene, a polymer commonly found in diapers […] Within all collected samples of poop, researchers found at least one type of plastic. Traces of plastic were also found in the newborn’s first bowel movement, suggesting that the plastic was already in their systems.

 

The amount of plastic, which was detected in every stool sample analyzed, was ten times greater in infants compared to adults. Matt Simon has some ideas why:

PET is an extremely common polymer that’s known as polyester when it’s used in clothing, and it is also used to make plastic bottles. The finding comes a year after another team of researchers calculated that preparing hot formula in plastic bottles severely erodes the material, which could dose babies with several million microplastic particles a day, and perhaps nearly a billion a year.

Although adults are bigger, scientists think that in some ways infants have more exposure. In addition to drinking from bottles, babies could be ingesting microplastics in a dizzying number of ways. They have a habit of putting everything in their mouths—plastic toys of all kinds, but they’ll also chew on fabrics. (Microplastics that shed from synthetic textiles are known more specifically as microfibers, but they’re plastic all the same.) Babies’ foods are wrapped in single-use plastics. Children drink from plastic sippy cups and eat off plastic plates. The carpets they crawl on are often made of polyester. Even hardwood floors are coated in polymers that shed microplastics. Any of this could generate tiny particles that children breathe or swallow.

Indoor dust is also emerging as a major route of microplastic exposure, especially for infants. (In general, indoor air is absolutely lousy with them; each year you could be inhaling tens of thousands of particles.)

 

Gamillo describes the mechanisms causing harm when microplastics gain access into our bloodstream and cells:

A 2019 study published in Chemosphere also found that pieces of plastic could break down small enough to pass through cell membranes and make their way into the body’s circulatory system […] Microplastics in blood could lead to cell death and inflammation. Plastics also contain hormone-disrupting chemicals that could affect reproductive, metabolic, and neurological health. The new study’s finding of microplastics in infant feces is alarming because babies are more prone to negative health effects during development.

 

Ingesting indigestible and indestructible plastic could be contributing to a long list of chronic health conditions in children influenced by environmental degradation and pollution, from developmental anomalies and mental illness to obesity and cancer. Breathing polluted air appears to compound those risks. We’ll talk about that tomorrow on The PediaBlog.

 

(Google Images)

 

source http://www.thepediablog.com/2021/10/11/babies-pooping-plastic/