I just want to say one word to you.  Are you listening? Microplastics.

Starting in the 1950s, plastics  got into everything. They were  

this wonder material. Useful for its  flexibility and flame resistance.

Then gradually we started using them  for convenience. For the experience  

of using them once and then throwing them away.

But what happens to that plastic after  that? Where does it go? In the 1960s,  

we began to find out. In today's video,  a brief look at ocean microplastics.

## Beginnings

Mass industrial plastic production  began in the 1930s with the first  

big wave of thermoplastics like Polyvinyl  Chloride or PVC, Polystyrene, and Nylon.

The PVC material itself has actually  been around since the mid-1800s. Maybe  

even as early as the late 1700s. But it  wasn’t then useful. In its pure form,  

PVC is a hard and glassy resin  with little use in industry.

It was the 1930s-era discovery  of these special additives called  

plasticizers that turned PVC into a  flexible, workable miracle material.

These plastics' durability, insulation, and  flame resistance drove wide adoption. PVC for  

instance began first with shock absorber  seals and tank linings before spreading  

into flame resistant coatings,  raincoats and shower curtains.

Then in the 1950s, the rise of single-use,  

throwaway cutlery and packaging heralded a  new type of consumption in the United States.  

These are made from a different  thermoplastic called polystyrene.

LIFE magazine famously ran a cover in 1955  titled "Throwaway Living" - heralding a Golden  

Age of time savings for the housewife  thanks to these disposable items.

Rising societal adoption drove global  plastic production volumes. In 1950,  

the world produced 1.5 million  tons. By the decade's end,  

that had grown to 5 million per  year. It only went up from there.

## Finding the Plastic

There have been reports of ocean  trash or debris since time immemorial.

Jules Verne's 1870 book "Twenty Thousand Leagues  Under the Sea" has a passage discussing how the  

ocean currents will bring together seaweed and  shipwreck debris into patches. Maybe wood stuff.

In 1947, there was a visual report of  a seagull entangled in a 15-foot long  

piece of string and chunk of wood. Though it  is not clear what that string was made of.

So the first, undisputed report of  plastic trash in the ocean comes  

to us from the 1960s thanks to a device  called the Continuous Plankton Recorder.

Dating back to the 1930s, the Recorder  is the world's longest-running marine  

biological recording program. Shaped like a  metal torpedo, the CPR is towed by various  

ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Its  job is to measure plankton in the ocean.

Significant events like entanglement  are recorded. In 1957, the Recorder  

got entangled in what is described as "trawl  twine" off the east coast of Iceland. This  

twine might have been made from natural fibers,  but plastic nets were coming into vogue then.

In 1965, the Recorder was logged to be  entangled in a plastic bag-like thing off  

the coast of Northwest Ireland. Often cited as  the first instance of ocean plastic pollution.  

More plastic entanglements have been  recorded in the years thereafter.

Also near the end of this decade, we get the  first published observations of seabirds eating  

plastic trinkets like bottle caps alongside  natural stuff like floating pumice rocks.

## Fibers in the Water

As global plastic production  scaled up in the 1970s,  

scientists start finding  it more of it in the ocean.

In 1971, JB Buchanan of the Dove  Marine Laboratory in the United  

Kingdom makes the first widely published  report of tiny plastics in the ocean.

During a routine inspection of suspended matter  in the waters off the south Northumberland coast,  

he comes across synthetic fibers.  These fibers are colored red,  

blue, and orange and found at all depths.

Buchanan concludes that these fibers must be from  

fishing nets - citing prior records of  natural net fibers in the literature.

But those fibers were made  from tree stuff like manila or  

jute and are expected to go away. The  synthetic stuff seemed different. He wrote:

> The synthetic fibers however create a  more serious problem ... and apart from  

mechanical breakdown it seems probable that  they may constitute a growing and cumulative  

constituent of low specific gravity material  in the suspended matter of inshore marine areas

## A Growing Realization That same year, Kenneth Smith and Edward J

Carpenter of the Woods Hole  Oceanographic Institute

are studying ocean communities of  brown algae called Sargassum in  

what is called the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic.

During this, Carpenter recalled towing a  special net called a neuston net. You run  

it alongside a boat, and it captures  organisms from the ocean surface.

After a few runs, he realizes that the nets were  pulling up a lot of plastic particles about 0.25  

to 0.5 centimeters in diameter. This plastic was  brittle, indicating that its plasticizers - the  

aforementioned chemical that made chemo  plastics flexible - had leached away.

Carpenter recalled being confused because  the Sargasso Sea was quite far from land.  

Where did these small plastics come  from? Dumped waste from cities,  

fishing boats or passenger boats  perhaps? They were not sure.

So he and Smith write up their  findings and publish it in the  

magazine Science in 1972. And  in their abstract, they write:

> Increasing production of plastics, combined  with present waste-disposal practices,  

will undoubtedly lead to increases in  the concentration of these particles

The article got written up in the New York Times,  

which noted some of the possible risks.  One risk being that the plastics might  

release Polychlorinated biphenyl or PCBs  - a known carcinogen - into the water.

Despite this, nobody really cared.  Carpenter recalled a few senior  

scientists at Woods Hole advising him  to just "stick to biology". A member  

of the plastics industry in Michigan  gave him some grief over the paper.

A little while later, Carpenter  is studying plankton in cooling  

water from a nuclear power plant in  eastern Connecticut. He later says:

> I squeezed, with forceps,  what I thought was a fish egg,  

and it flew out of the petri dish and  dropped on the table. I found that this  

was a clear polystyrene sphere,  and that they were very abundant

These spheres were identified as  polystyrene "suspension beads".  

Plastic manufacturers do not produce  plastics in their final shape,  

but rather in pellets sold to fabricators  for final shaping. Carpenter continued:

> When I got back to Woods Hole, I  threw my plankton net off the village  

drawbridge to catch the outgoing tide. To  my amazement, when I held up the cod end,  

I could see the same polystyrene  spheres drifting with the plankton

He then writes a second paper about this  discovery, noting that fish might swallow  

and choke on these beads. Carpenter's two 1972  papers are by no means the first to discuss ocean  

plastics, but them showing up in Science Magazine  brought greater attention. Historically speaking.

## Spreading Signs

Throughout the rest of the  1970s, an increasing number  

of publications were noting small  plastic particles in ocean water.

A 1973 report from the National Oceanic  and Atmospheric Association counted 24,000  

plastic items washing up on 60 miles of  Alaskan shores. Scientists at the time  

were surprised because these areas  were not heavily populated at all.

Then in 1974, another paper in  Science confirmed the presence of  

plastic particles across wide  areas of the North Atlantic.

50-69% of samples taken up by various  ships in the area found them to contain  

the same polystyrene spheres, cylinders and disks.

And it was more than just the United  States. A 1972-1976 survey in New  

Zealand discovered the same plastic pellets  and granules washing up on their beaches.

Despite this, concerns about ocean plastic  pollution remain small throughout the 1970s.  

Nothing like when news of other  pollutants like DDT or PCBs first  

emerged - which immediately generated  an explosion of publicity and research.

Yes, there certainly was concern about  plastic debris entangling or choking  

sea animals. Seagulls, turtles, and the like.  But that seemed to be about the extent of it.

Carpenter himself realized that plastics  ocean pollution did not convey a viable  

future of research and eventually  went back to studying marine bacteria.

Many years later, he mused that the  public did not pay as much attention  

to plastic particle pollution in the water  because: One, the public mistakenly thought  

that all plastics were being recycled  when in reality, less than 10% were.

And second, he cited a misconception that all this  plastic was coming from illegal dumping into the  

ocean by fishing boats or container ships.  Efforts thus began to ban those practices.

There was the International Convention  on the Prevention of Marine Pollution  

by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter,  London in 1972 - which banned the dumping  

of synthetic plastics into the ocean.  Some 80 countries have ratified it.

I might add one more thing: Uncertainty.  Scientists could not positively say that  

these plastic particles were "something to  worry about", as one newspaper article put it.

It was there, but was it a human health  problem? This, nobody could say for sure.

And lastly, the ocean is large and  deep. The plastic was literally out  

of sight and thus out of mind. And  pellets on the did not capture the  

minds of the public. Nothing like  oil-covered birds or baby seals.

## The Debris Conferences

By the late 1970s, published papers have  observed industrial plastic pellets on the  

beaches of Canada, Bermuda, Lebanon, and Spain.  It was clear that this plastic debris was global.

It was also clear that animals like  seabirds were eating them - creating  

concerns about possible toxic effects  or intestinal blockages down the line.

In 1982, concerns about the impacts of  plastic waste on the marine ecosystem  

eventually caused the Marine  Mammal Commission to approach  

the US National Marine Fisheries  Service about arranging a workshop.

Thus in late November 1984 we had  the Workshop on the Fate and Impact  

of Marine Debris in Hawaii. Attended  by 125 people from eight countries,  

the workshop invited researchers to share  notes on where the debris was coming from,  

its impact on marine resources,  and what was going to happen to it.

The workshop concluded that  the marine debris was in all  

of the world's oceans - though  nobody knows the extent of it.

And that it presented a threat to marine animals  like seals and turtles, either via entanglement  

or consumption. Some positives were mentioned  - like the fact that debris can offer shelter  

to fish. And there was a potential threat  to human safety, but uncertain how so.

Finally, they recommended a few  basic things like regulating the  

disposal of plastic goods so that  they do not end up in the sea,  

the use of more biodegradable material in fishing  gear, and mandating more recycling of fish nets.

This 1984 workshop went off so well that  other symposiums and conferences were  

organized in 1986 and 1989. As these got  larger and more information was shared,  

people began to grasp the magnitude of the issue.

## Improving Things?

The late 1980s and 1990s see growing awareness  of the plastics problem for the environment.

The media blared out images of sad seabirds  with plastic rings around their necks,  

or told of turtles eating plastic  bags and starving. These motivated  

work to stem the flow of plastic into the sea.

Another point that struck a chord with  the public was the possible toxic effects.  

Plastics are often made with proven  toxic chemicals like PCBs or heavy  

metals. When they degrade in the ocean,  they might start releasing those chemicals.

In the mid-1980s, nonprofits and  volunteer groups start to get involved,  

arranging cleanups to get plastic off the beaches.

You had things like the Adopt-a-Beach program in  

Texas or a recycling station  in Alaska for handling nets.

And then in late 1988, MARPOL Annex  V came into effect. It restricted  

the dumping of garbage, plastics, and  other synthetic materials like ropes,  

fishing nets, and plastic bags with limited  exceptions like in the case of safety.

And then there was the plastics industry  itself, which largely regulated itself.  

During the late 1980s, they encouraged measures  like voluntary industry recycling commitments.

And the Resin Identification Code, a  triangular-ish looking symbol meant  

to help recyclers sort goods. But often ended up  confusing the public about what can be recycled.

It should be acknowledged that things did  change. Researchers found fewer industrial  

plastic pellets in the stomachs of birds in the  1990s. But the total amount remained elevated  

as those industrials were replaced by consumer  plastics like disposable cutlery and packaging.

## Microplastics

The microplastic concept - a small fragment of  

plastic - has been around  since the very beginning.

But we do not start calling  these "microplastics" until 2004,  

when the term became popularized  in a paper titled "Lost at Sea:  

Where is All the Plastic?" by Richard Thompson  and others at the University of Plymouth.

Thompson's short paper defined the "microplastic"  

term as plastic debris less than 20  micrometers large. It postulates that  

these plastics come from degradation of  or fragmentation from from larger pieces.

It also highlighted their growing  prevalence in nature using sediment  

analyses in the United Kingdom as well as  plankton samples dating back to the 1960s.

They also introduced these microplastics  to a tank of barnacles, lugworms,  

and other detritus feeders. Those  animals ate up the microplastics  

within a week - showing these  can indeed enter the food chain.

Prior to 2004, microplastics' existence had  been noted in studies and samples, but people  

paid more attention to the larger fragments  because of their perceived threat to wildlife.

Few considered that these large plastic pieces  might break apart into millions of tiny pieces.  

And even if they did, they probably  believed that these microplastics  

were too small to cause serious harm.  Thompson's paper showed otherwise.

The paper caught people's attention. A spokesman  

for the American Plastics Council put the  blame on improper disposal methods, saying:

> You can't point your finger at one  type of material ... We all share  

the responsibility for keeping  stuff from going into the ocean

## Microplastics Today

Over the next ten or so  years, substantial work has  

been done to demonstrate just how widespread these  particles are in our environment and food supply.

In 2008, the NOAA sponsored another international  

workshop to figure out whether  microplastics are a problem.

They formally defined them as plastic  fragments smaller than 5 millimeters  

large. People afterwards have also advocated  for new categorizations in the future for  

yet smaller fragments, like nanoplastics  which are less than 50 micrometers large.

The 2008 workshop participants recognized  that little research had been done and  

large knowledge gaps remained. In part due  to the lack of good methods to collect,  

isolate and quantify the microplastics themselves.

Over the next decade and a half,  

substantial research has been done in the  space - concluding a number of things.

First, there are a stunning amount of  microplastics, particle-count wise. A  

2015 paper estimated that there were  about 15 to 51 trillion microplastic  

particles in the surface of the sea,  weighing between 93,000 to 236,000 tons.

A more recent estimate from 2023 has updated the  number to 82 to 358 trillion plastic particles  

weighing 1.1–4.9 million tonnes in 2019.  Their cumulative weight is not significant  

compared to larger pieces of plastic,  but the particle count is astounding.

Second, these particles have gotten absolutely  everywhere. They are on the shorelines,  

sediments of the deep sea, sea  ice, rivers, lakes, streams, soil,  

and the atmosphere. They are drifting  in the rain and falling in the rains.

There was even one report of finding  microplastics at the top of Mount Everest.

Third, animals eat these - leading  them to accumulating inside their  

bodies. Microplastics have been found  in over 1,300 aquatic and terrestrial  

species ranging from fish to birds to mammals.

Considering how ubiquitous it is, human  exposure to microplastics particularly in  

the food supply chain is unavoidable.  One 2020 study found around 50,000 to  

200,000 microplastic particles under 10  micrometers large on fruits and vegetables.

## Human Health

So here comes the part about  microplastics and human health.

Before we continue, I want to say that I am not  a doctor. I want to give a measured take on this.

It is known that the microplastics are everywhere.  

Researchers have also demonstrated possible  ways in which microplastics can cause harm.

For example, a well known 2013  paper showed that fish that eat  

large amounts of microplastic  can accumulate toxins like PCBs,  

DDT, or trace metals in their bodies  until they get liver or tissue damage.

And it is also widely acknowledged - and has  

been for a long time now - that these  microplastics can do the same to people:  

Absorb toxins from the environment and  then release them again inside a person.

There are also various studies that show  that particles can cause inflammation  

inside animal test subjects and  laboratory human cell lines.

But studies showing actual harm to humans have  been few and far between. The microplastic term  

is a catch-all, and covers a wide variety of  things. Some degrade in less than a year or get  

broken down by gut bacteria. Others might last  forever. Just finding them might not mean much.

And there is the standard thing that correlation  

is not causation. Massive confounding  factors like wealth and health habits  

exist. And also we are not very good at  detecting these micro or nanoplastics.

There was one landmark study recently  published in the New England Journal of  

Medicine in 2024. It enrolled 304 patients  doing surgery to remove plaques from their  

hearts. Those patients with microplastics in  those plaques suffered higher risks of stroke,  

heart attacks, or death in  the 33 months thereafter.

And just for you guys out there, I  want to shout out this 2024 study  

showing that people - and dogs - with PVC  and PET microplastics in their balls tend  

to have lower sperm counts than  their peers. Something to ponder.

## Conclusion Estimates are hard to come by, but it is said that

each year 11 million tons of plastic  enters the ocean. Roughly speaking,  

that is one garbage truck of plastic  being dumped into the ocean each minute.

The globe now produces about 300 million  tons of plastic each year. Considering  

less than 10% of that gets recycled, the  vast majority will end up in the ocean.

Even if we somehow manage to stop it all today,  

there still remains an estimated 75-200  million tons of plastic left in the ocean.

Methods do exist for removing microplastics  from water. Filtration methods in wastewater  

seem to work pretty well. And there  are some interesting methods that use  

green algae or chemical aggregate to collect them.

But we cannot filter the oceans. And we  still do not really know where on earth  

all these plastics are ending up. They have  to be somewhere. We just are not sure where.

I still think efforts are worth it.  I still think we should be cleaning  

up the oceans of large macroplastics.  I still think that we should be cutting  

down on our use of single-use disposable plastics.

But even so, I fear that the microplastic  problem is practically unsolvable.