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Synthetic plastic is one of the defining inventions of the past 150 years, a product with so many uses and such broad applications — making possible everything from water bottles to medical devices to computers to clothing — that it’s had a transformative effect on modern life.

But the incredible durability that’s made plastic a global phenomenon is now also the very thing that experts say makes it so problematic. Plastics are everywhere, and we’re not quite certain how to get rid of them. 

Experts and world health agencies have even been ringing the alarm that microplastics — tiny particles, generally smaller than 5 millimeters in size, that have splintered off larger plastics — are now turning up in humans, from our brains to our reproductive systems. 

The findings have triggered something of a microplastics panic. Media outlets suggest humans might be ingesting a credit card’s worth of plastic each week from sources like our drinking water, leftovers we’re reheating in plastic containers, and seafood such as shellfish that are carrying the ocean’s plastics pollution with them all the way to our dinner plates. 

It’s important to note that scientists still aren’t certain exactly what the plastics pileup in our bodies means for our health, though some research has linked it to the inexplicable rise in cancer rates among people under 50 and to higher risk of heart attack and stroke.

Vox senior correspondent and editor Dylan Scott has been covering public health and health policy for more than a decade. Today on Vox, he’s got the details on a proposed new United Nations plastics treaty that aims to address the pervasiveness of plastic. We caught up to chat about the relatively new public health concerns, and what the treaty could do about them.

(Our conversation has been condensed for length and lightly edited.) 

Lavanya Ramanathan: How do plastics get into our bodies and into our air?

Dylan Scott: Here’s where I make it clear that I’m not a materials scientist, I’m a health policy guy. Plastics are really resistant to heat and other kinds of physical degradation, and that’s what makes them so useful to us. Through things like washing your plastic-tinged clothes in hot water, for example,  polymers, these little molecules, can flake off — I’m sure there’s a more scientific term but that’s how I think of it — or erode, and those particles can find their way into our bodies. 

It creates a really vicious cycle where there’s plastic in my clothes, I wash it in hot water, the hot water goes out to the water system, out to the ocean, and the particles find their way to salmon or some other fish, and then we eat it, and then those microplastics are finding their way into our bodies. That’s a good demonstration of how interconnected it all is.

Why are we hearing about microplastics so much now? 

Plastic has just exploded over the last 100 years. In 1950, we were producing like 2 million tons of plastic; now we’re producing more than 400 million tons of plastic. 

We’ve now been using plastic long enough and frequently enough that the evidence is starting to build that not only can it have negative effects for our ecosystems, but it can also have negative effects for our bodies. 

This really broke through to the public consciousness when a study came out earlier this year examining — and this is crass — human testicles and animal testicles. Every single testicle they examined had microplastic pollution inside it. 

It illustrated very clearly that we all have plastics inside of us, and it did it in a really evocative, visceral way. It was the culmination of this growing body of evidence that this was happening, and the emerging evidence that it could be connected to infertility and heart disease and dementia. And we’ve got a microplastics panic underway. 

AFP

But as someone who is covering plastics, and who is covering public health, this is a real concern, right?

I want to be cautious about being too confident that we know exactly what microplastics are doing to our bodies, but their presence is indisputable.

I don’t think the picture is totally clear yet, but I don’t think this is an unreasonable panic. The foremost environmental and public health authorities in the world are taking this problem really seriously, and that’s all the evidence you need that the situation is pretty grave. 

What are experts saying we should be doing about microplastics in our homes, on a personal level, to reduce the amount we’re inhaling or ingesting?

It’s hard, because they’re ubiquitous. Certainly, trying not to use food containers, or buying clothes that contain these chemicals – trying to minimize your exposure to materials that we already know are problematic, that’s something we could do as individuals. 

At the end of the day, if this is a society-level problem, we’re not going to really be able to reduce our exposure to microplastics until we start reducing the amount of plastic we produce, the amount of plastic waste we leave out in the world, and the amount of plastic that is on planet Earth. 

That’s why we’re starting to see groups like the United Nations working on agreements to reduce plastic pollution and ultimately reduce plastic production so there’s less plastic in the future. It’s got to be a society-wide and long-term project. 

The goal that they set for themselves was to reach a final agreement by the end of 2024. We’re here, in the home stretch, and to be candid, it remains to be seen if a deal will be reached. 

There are a lot of groups opposed to that idea, as you can imagine: big businesses that produce plastics; the oil and gas industry, which provides a lot of the raw materials that go into producing plastics; the big oil-producing nations like Saudi Arabia and Iran oppose limits, and places like China and India are also dubious because they have big manufacturing sectors that could be affected.

There’s also talk of improving plastic recycling and how to influence trade to limit plastic use and waste. But the biggest question going into these negotiations is whether the world can agree to limit the production of future plastic. Sitting here talking to you today, we still don’t know.

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Kamala Harris on abortion bans: Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s remarks last week at a Michigan town hall are still garnering attention. During the talk, which was hosted by Oprah Winfrey, Harris offered condolences to the family of 28-year-old Amber Thurman, a Black woman from Georgia who died in August 2022 after doctors hesitated to treat her following a complication from a medication abortion. Harris has said that as president, she would approve federal legislation protecting the right to abortion.

Why did the chicken nugget cross the line? Nationwide sales of frozen nuggets topped $2 billion last year and they’re projected to bring in $46.5 billion by 2032. While the convenience food favorite is popular across all groups of people in the United States, chicken nuggets are also blamed for childhood obesity and seen as a lazy, fake food alternative. Here’s how chicken nuggets became so simultaneously popular and so reviled.

A Marvel show for non-Marvel fans: Looking for a fun fall watch to usher in the start of spooky season? Agatha All Along on Disney+ is an enjoyable watch even for those who haven’t seen its sister show, WandaVision. Showrunner Jac Schaeffer and Agatha’s creative team were allowed more freedom to create a show on their terms, allowing the spinoff to work well without the pressure of being an integral piece of the Marvel design.

An “America First!” approach to climate: Both former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are increasingly pushing for the US to develop all forms of energy, even at the expense of its allies and its own climate goals. This includes oil and gas, which the US is now producing more of than any country in history. This bipartisan shift away from clean energy efforts comes as current voters seem to care a lot more about the economy and much less about the environment.

The ideology of the internet: Yuval Noah Harari, a historian and the author of Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, argues that although society gains power by building networks of cooperation through technology, the way our networks are constructed makes them likely to produce bad outcomes. Critics of artificial intelligence might agree with that. In an interview with Sean Illing on The Gray Area, Harari explains how human nature could lead us to our own destruction born out of information sharing.

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Betting on the wrong horse: The American Gaming Association expects $35 billion in bets to be placed on NFL games in 2024. Americans may be gambling on sports more than ever now that it’s legal in 38 states and Washington, DC, and social scientists have begun to see alarming patterns that suggest the betting industry’s popularity may correlate with state upticks in debt delinquency, domestic violence, and lower household savings. [Atlantic]

Can a government shutdown be avoided? As of Monday, the Republican-controlled House is expected to advance a bipartisan funding bill that would keep federal agencies open. The three-month funding extension would include additional crisis financing for the Secret Service as the result of a compromise with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown at the end of the month. [Washington Post]

Earlier this year, I was interviewing a prosecutor in Michigan when she mentioned she’d reached out to Thomas Abt, author of the book Bleeding Out, to get his advice on her violent crime reduction strategy.

I wasn’t surprised. Abt’s book has become one of the most influential books among city officials, law enforcement, and community organizers working to end gun violence in cities.

That’s because Abt has compiled the best research about what actually works to prevent gun homicides, with a focus on community-led violence interruption, just policing, and a balanced approach to the issue, all packaged it into a smart, compelling read. The book is well worth reading for anyone who cares about America’s gun violence epidemic because it makes the problem feel less intractable, and more solvable — and therefore a lot more hopeful.

—Marin Cogan, Vox senior correspondent, policy

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade and news editor Sean Collins. We'll see you tomorrow!

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