HIGH-DEGREE SLOP

We all know plastic pollution is ubiquitous, present in the soil, water, and air. At minimum it’s gross and all this plastic seems to be disgustingly persistent in the environment, too. But all over the place and for many years now we’ve been hearing that the situation is far worse than we imagined. Microplastics! Those petroleum-based fragments, and their infinitesimal nano off-spring, appeared to be far more problematic than a wayward Ziploc bag or pop bottle cap. And yet, though the underlying threats to human health posed by these products (of our products) seemed clear, the phenomenon and consequences remained largely unstudied.

Research was eventually conducted. And it didn’t look good. Studies from all around the globe found itty-bitty plastics migrating from the environment into people’s blood, arteries, brains, testes, and placentas. The results were published and reported on everywhere. Soon documentaries were out, several of them, and those toured the world and your favourite streaming sites, too.

Everyone likes a shocking new study and no one more than newspaper editors, television producers, podcasters, and social media activists. And this was the kind of scary story the press and other commentators, particularly anyone with a health or environmental leaning, just could not fail to lap up and spread far and wide. "Your balls are full of plastics!" they blasted, all while connecting this to every disorder and illness out there. Apparently this could potentially, or obviously, explain chronic illness, cancers, auto-immune issues, infertility and more. Diabetes? Autism? It didn’t matter, of course, that review, reproduction, and further study was still pending.

But people eventually did look into these studies and their methods and analysis. And it soon appeared that, in the race to publish results, at least in some cases, research teams with limited analytical skills rushed to their conclusions skipping routine scientific checks. In no time, at least seven studies were challenged by peer researchers publishing in respective journals with findings like, “The study as reported appears to face methodological challenges, such as limited contamination controls and lack of validation steps, which may affect the reliability of the reported concentrations.”

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