Plastic is not very biologically active (that’s like half the reason we use so much of it) so I’d guess whatever effects it has are very mechanical things like impaired breathing or higher risk of blood clots/strokes.
Plastic itself, sure. But it happily, greedily adsorbs pollutants (that is, picks them up on its surface where they can be released into whatever consumes them) and is full of additives like plasticisers and so on which have a variety of toxic effects, particularly around increased oxidative stress and endocrine disruption. The physical presence of the plastic inside our bodies is absolutely a problem but they do also poison us.
But a spoon worth of it is already in our brains and this amount is set to rise. Even if it just mechanically acts on the brain, that might still alter behavior.
Plastic is not very biologically active (that’s like half the reason we use so much of it) so I’d guess whatever effects it has are very mechanical things like impaired breathing or higher risk of blood clots/strokes.
Plastic itself, sure. But it happily, greedily adsorbs pollutants (that is, picks them up on its surface where they can be released into whatever consumes them) and is full of additives like plasticisers and so on which have a variety of toxic effects, particularly around increased oxidative stress and endocrine disruption. The physical presence of the plastic inside our bodies is absolutely a problem but they do also poison us.
Also when you have microplastics you have an enormous surface area:volume ratio so the reactivity is massively increased.
But a spoon worth of it is already in our brains and this amount is set to rise. Even if it just mechanically acts on the brain, that might still alter behavior.