Commentary
What if 50 years ago we had known the things we know today about plastic? What if we had known tiny pieces of plastic—microplastics and nanoplastics—could enter our bodies, traveling from the gut into the blood and then all the major organs, including the lungs, liver, muscle tissue, and even the brain? What if we had known this process could be harmful, and might be implicated in every type of chronic disease there is, from diabetes to dementia?
If we had known those things, would our world still look the same—a world in which plastic, produced in the hundreds of millions of tons each year, is essential, ubiquitous, and inescapable? More than 9 billion tons of plastic are estimated to have been produced since 1950, with more than half that total in the past 15 years. Global production is expected to double by 2050.
On Oct. 26, The LA Times released a new report that shows executives in the plastic industry knew, as early as 1974, that microplastics could enter the bodies of living creatures, including humans, and end up being deposited in their organs.
This revelation has the potential to upend more or less everything we know about the history of plastics, and in particular, what we know about their harmful effects. The story we’ve believed up until Oct. 26 is that research into microplastics really began only within the past 20 or so years, and it has taken until much more recently for awareness and evidence to grow. The term “microplastics” was coined in 2004, and the first real alarm was sounded in 2018, when researchers at the University of Vienna discovered microplastics in human feces. Since then we’ve learned that the average person may swallow a credit card’s worth of plastic per week, microplastics are found in arterial plaques, and quantities in the brain may have increased by 50 percent in less than a decade, among other things.
Thanks to the Los Angeles Times, and to a trove of documents unearthed during litigation, we now know that executives from companies such as Union Carbide were worried enough, 50 years ago, to describe the ingestion and retention of plastic in the body as a “horror story.” But it was a horror story they had good reason to believe was anything but fiction. And yet nothing, apparently, was done.
Or maybe worse, an inconvenient truth was suppressed in the name of profit. Today the industry is worth close to $1 trillion annually.
Tracy Woodruff, a professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford, has already compared the news to previous scandals involving asbestos and tobacco, in which whole industries deceived regulators and the general public about the safety of their products.
The story begins in 1974. An emergency conference of scientists and industry representatives was convened after a spate of rare cancers among workers at a PVC plant in Kentucky, followed by similar cases at other plants in West Virginia, New York, and Pennsylvania. Vinyl chloride and polyvinyl chloride were used in a wide variety of applications, from food packaging and water pipes to hair spray and pesticide, and regulators and manufacturers judged them to be totally safe. Now they weren’t so sure.
Among the scientists who presented his work on PVC was a German named Gerhard Volkheimer. Since the 1950s, Volkheimer had been feeding tiny pieces of PVC to various animals in his lab, at Berlin’s Charité, a prestigious university hospital. He had also been feeding a proxy for PVC—potato starch—to humans, having discovered that it behaved in much the same way. His research had received little attention.
Volkheimer told the conference that within just two hours of ingestion, PVC could be found in the lymphatic system, blood, and organs, including the brain, lungs, liver, and muscle. He found plastic in the cerebrospinal fluid, which cushions the brain and flows through the spine, and in breast milk. PVC was able to cross the placenta, from mother to fetus. He also discovered that certain substances and conditions—caffeine and nicotine, sleep, youth—sped up and increased the volume of plastic taken up or “persorbed” by the gut.
Other scientists who had been in attendance told the LA Times that they couldn’t recall Volkheimer’s presentation. Documents obtained by the paper show, however, that industry executives were paying close attention. Executives at Firestone Plastics, Shell, and Union Carbide—later bought by Dow Chemical—all discussed Volkheimer’s research in the weeks, months and years after the conference.
It was Union Carbide’s assistant director of safety who described the research as a “horror story” in a letter to fellow executives. Less than a year later, he was looking for evidence with which to counter Volkheimer’s paper. He found it in a 1947 Harvard study, paid for by the plastic industry, that showed animals could be fed PVC particles without getting sick. The assistant director said the paper “supported the use of PVC in food packaging” and would “offset some of the damage done by the Volkheimer paper.”
Internally, at least, for the next two decades the industry continued to talk about and cite Volkheimer and his research. The evidence suggests that they took seriously the possibility that their products could accumulate within the human body, with unknown but probably toxic effects.
As the LA Times notes, this is in marked contrast to the attitude of the industry today, which urges caution about accepting the burgeoning scientific literature on microplastics at face value.
“The media is moving faster than the science on this issue,” the president of America’s Plastic Makers said in a paid advertisement in The Washington Post last year.
“Our view is we need to let the science lead.”
At this stage, I think it’s premature to call what the LA Times has found a “coverup.” Certainly, there’s no reason, on the basis of the evidence presented, to accuse plastic companies of malfeasance of the kind perpetrated by makers of PFAS chemicals (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances). Lawsuits have shown that companies including DuPont and 3M systematically, over a period of 50 years, misled the public and regulators about the safety of chemicals such as Teflon. Internal safety tests revealed that PFAS chemicals were severely toxic, even fatal to living creatures, but manufacturers continued to say their products were safe—withholding their own data—in contravention of the law. In a memo sent to employees in 1980, DuPont dismissed worries about the toxicity of its C8 PFAS by saying it was no more dangerous than “table salt.”
Industry-wide liabilities for PFAS are expected to equal or surpass the $206 billion that Big Tobacco was forced to pay, and nationwide cleanup costs in the United States are also likely to reach into the hundreds of billions.
Microplastics, rightly so, are one of the principal targets of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again crusade. In April, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a groundbreaking new program called STOMP (Systematic Targeting of Microplastics). STOMP has three aims: develop new technologies to quantify microplastic contamination, determine the harms it causes to humans, and find ways to eliminate microplastics from the human body. Given how worried plastic executives were by Volkheimer’s research, we might expect them to have carried out their own research to see if he was right.
Companies perform internal studies, including toxicity studies, all the time. In his quest to provide answers and protect Americans from exposure to microplastics, Kennedy has a duty to demand further disclosures from plastic companies, including historical records, and to use every power at his disposal to get them. If plastic companies did hide a “horror story”—and allow it to become far, far worse—they must be held to account.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
