Did you know baby poo is loaded with microplastics?
What this all means for human health — and, more urgently, for infant health — scientists are now racing to find out. Photo by Mahesh Patel / Pixabay
By Matt Simon
Whenever a plastic bag or bottle degrades, it breaks into ever smaller pieces that work their way into nooks in the environment.
When you wash synthetic fabrics, tiny plastic fibres break loose and flow out to sea. When you drive, plastic bits fly off your tires and brakes. That’s why literally everywhere scientists look, they’re finding microplastics — specks of synthetic material that measure less than five millimetres long. They’re on the most remote mountaintops and in the deepest oceans. They’re blowing vast distances in the wind to sully once-pristine regions like the Arctic. In 11 protected areas in the western U.S., the equivalent of 120 million ground-up plastic bottles are falling out of the sky each year.
And now, microplastics are coming out of babies. In a recently published pilot study, scientists describe sifting through infants’ dirty diapers and finding an average of 36,000 nanograms of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) per gram of feces, 10 times the amount they found in adult feces. They even found it in newborns' first feces. 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.
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