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Microplastics Now up to One 200th of Our Brains. What We Can Do
How to fight plastic pollution in ourselves and our environment
I read a highly distressing article a few days ago, spurred by nothing other than a poem: “Your Brain May Have a Spoon’s Worth of Microplastics.”
The poem is about a man who struggles with dementia and about how little control we have on what we remember — and, ultimately, on what happens in the brain. The author, Greg Hughes, also makes an analogy between discarded plastics and discarded memories, as if our brains, too, get to be recycled by some banished angels who have more use for some of our cherished reminiscences than we do.
A mind-bending consideration — just like the fact that we may have a spoonful of microplastics inside our brains.
In a 2024 study conducted at the University of New Mexico and published on Feb. 3 this year in Nature Medicine, autopsies on individuals who died in 2016 and 2024 revealed 7 to 30 times more specks of plastic in the brain samples than in the kidneys and livers of those bodies. These tiny shards are called microplastics (less than 5 millimeters in diameter) and nanoplastics (1 nanometer to 1 micrometer, that is 0.000001 millimeter to 0.001 millimeter).
