EP 616  Microplastics: An Environmental Hazard Few of Us See

There is an insidious new pollutant that is harmful on its own and contributes to climate change. However, given industry pressure and economics its impacts will be very difficult to reverse.  It’s called microplastics.  And if you want to break down the problem in a more granular way, it’s called nannoplastics.  These are bits of synthetic materials that have infested the atmosphere and are falling out of the sky and accumulating on land, in rivers and lakes and the sea.  It’s so pervasive because plastics are used to package most of our consumer goods and can be found in everything from tires and clothing to couches and flooring.  Plastic creates mountains of polymers, almost none of which is recycled.  It is broken into an incalculable horde of synthetic specks, which are actually visible if you look carefully through a window.  We will leave it to Matt Simon, author of “A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies”, to lay out chapter and verse what is happening here and how much these plastics are affecting our environment–and what we must do to get a handle on this problem.

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