“Microplastics are possibly the most serious type of pollutant our society has ever created.”
That’s quite an opening statement from Rick Smith, executive producer of Plastic People, a new documentary that explores how every human on earth became polluted with tiny particles of plastic and what this means for our lives.
For the unfamiliar, microplastics are tiny fragments that have shredded off bags, fabrics, tires—any plastic product you can name—and now blanket the earth: We have found them at the bottoms of the deepest oceans and the tops of the tallest mountains, from the Mariana Trench to Mount Everest.
“It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that every molecule of plastic ever created still exists somewhere on Earth in some stage of degradation, because this stuff never disappears. It just goes from being larger pieces of litter to tinier and tinier particles,” says Smith.
As the host of Discovery’s Daily Planet, journalist and Plastic People co-director Ziya Tong has followed the emerging science around microplastic pollution for two decades, ever since disturbing images of marine turtles and birds choking on plastic trash went viral.
“It was the growing ubiquity of microplastics that really made me start to worry,” says Tong, speaking from Toronto.
Now scientists find microplastics in every organ they look at: the liver, lungs, intestine—even the brain and placenta.
“In the beginning, we found it in one organ, then when we found it in the bloodstream, it was very scary because that implied it was spreading all over the body,”
