Choking on Convenience: Am I The Only One Disgusted By All This?

Earth’s Elements Now Come with A Side of Plastic

Photo by innay on Unsplash

Imagine taking a deep breath outside by the ocean or near a forest but instead of inhaling all the clean air we’re inhaling tiny fragments of plastic. Or crunching on a juicy apple, unaware it harbors microscopic bits of the same material lining your trash can. I wish this were a piece of bad fiction I was writing; it’s our 21st-century reality.

Plastic, the ubiquitous symbol of convenience, has morphed into a pervasive pollutant, weaving its way into the very fabric of our lives. From air to water to every type of food we eat, we no longer can get away from it.

Meanwhile, cancer cases, endometriosis in young women, autism, developmental challenges, and an entire slew of other life-altering conditions are on the rise.

Bottled water, once marketed as a symbol of purity, now gurgles with microplastics. A recent study found an average of 22.1 plastic particles per liter, with some brands exceeding 1,000! You might ask — what does this mean? Is this a lot?

Considering that plastics do not belong in the human body: it is outrageous!

Our seafood, the bounty of the oceans, is riddled with these microplastics, ingested by marine life and eventually landing on our plates. Vegetables, grown in soil contaminated by plastic breakdown, are no safer. Even the air we breathe carries these insidious invaders, a constant reminder of the plastic vortex we’ve created.

I say we, because we normalized them subjecting us to plastics in the name of convenience and cost. We consciously choose to “pay less” for things that we don’t need. What is the most aggravating fact about this is we pay them to poison us by buying things we don’t need — just because it’s cheap.

It’s not.

We’re now paying the actual cost with the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat.

The scale of this contamination is staggering. Estimates suggest we ingest tens of thousands of microplastic particles annually. The long-term health consequences are still unknown. Meanwhile, plastic-laden food has been linked to gut inflammation, endocrine…