An update on the unacknowledged public health emergency of international concern - micro-plastic pollution

Regular readers will recall I have a bee in my bonnet around the pollution of the planet from micro-plastics.

One of my first articles on SubStack was this one back in August 2022:

An Inconvenient Truth - by Peter Halligan

Th thrust of that article was the packaging and contents around the C19 responsive.

For example, 5 billion people using two masks a week for three to four years. 5 billion people times two masks a week, for 150-200 weeks – maybe 2 trillion masks – each requiring packaging of carboard and plastics AND disposal. Same goes for wet wipes, test kits, protective clothing, plastic screens and so on and so forth. An ecological disaster of pollution.

And then three are the almost 14 billion injections - their packaging in cardboard and plastic and their disposal of empty and partially full vials – hazardous waste.

Then, a sign of some hope in early 2023:

. Some actual relevant and promising work by the United Nations and governments around the world! Tackling fiber micro-plastics!

Then another article in May 2023 from me:

Micro- and nano-plastics – the real environmental and species ending threat

Which had this table of the worst offenders for plastic pollution:

Indonesia, Brazil and Thailand stand out like the proverbial.

Where does all the plastic waste go? From Brave AI:

Total Imports: In 2023, Malaysia received shipments of more than 405 thousand metric tons of plastic waste from around the world.

In 2021, Vietnam imported around 364,000 metric tons of plastic waste.

Turkey imported 756,000 tons of plastic waste from the UK and EU27 in 2020.

(Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0025326X21008067)

Total Plastic Waste Imports: The total plastic waste imports in Indonesia surpassed 252 thousand tons in 2023.

The above four countries accounted for 1.8 million tons of plastic waste out of the 4.5 million tons from the top 15 producers of that plastic waste.

Maybe 3-5% is recycled.

Here is a recent article:

Are microplastics really destroying our health?

“In 2022, scientists found microplastics — pieces of plastic less than five millimeters long — in human blood. Since then, they’ve been discovered throughout the human body, including in our lungs, kidneys, livers, hearts, and brains.”

You would think that this would be ringing alarm bells all over the world – with solutions being feverishly sought - rather than pushing out poisonous and badly made experimental injections, right?

“… only about 9% of the world’s plastic waste is recycled, while 19% is incinerated. The rest goes into landfills (50%) or becomes litter (22%).”

Maybe there is a lot being caught in oceanic garbage patches!

Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Wikipedia

North Atlantic garbage patch - Wikipedia

I have visions of super large oil tankers being converted to “giant garbage fishing trawlers” to clean this crap up – a fleet of a few hundred for a few years should do the trick!

Here’s za little more from the Freethink article:

“The fragments appear to have resulted from degradation of larger items,” the researchers wrote. “Plastics of this size are ingested by marine organisms, but the environmental consequences of this contamination are still unknown.”

“In 2024, Thompson led a new study, also published in Science. This time, his team looked back at the 7,000 microplastics studies that followed their 2004 discovery to see what we now know about the pollutants — and the answer wasn’t great.

Not only had the amount of microplastics in the ocean increased over the past two decades, scientists had also found the particles in tons of other places — they’re in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the animals we eat, as well as hundreds of species outside our food chain. They’ve also been found in other foods that we consume, from vegetables to ice cream.”

Yikes!

“A study published in March 2024, for example, analyzed plaques removed from the clogged heart arteries of about 300 people with heart problems and found microplastics in about 60% of the samples. People with microplastics were 4.5 times more likely to have a heart attack, stroke, or die within 34 months of the plaque removal surgery, compared to those without. “

Double yikes!!

Here’s a reference to the number of plastics we consume in a lifetime (h/t Emily):

Humans Eating Plastic - 40 Pounds In A Lifetime | PlasticOceans.org

“A 2019 joint study by Dalberg and the University of Newcastle in Australia has revealed the extent of humans eating plastic: every week we eat – on average – one lego brick; every year a dinner plate (100,000 tiny pieces of plastic); every decade a lifebuoy. Yes, every ten years we consume the amount of plastic it would need to save our lives at sea. That much buoyancy; that much. “

Triple yikes!!!

But hey, the World Health Organisation can keep forcing countries to spend trillions on keeping people poisoned with toxic injections - and stay polluted, right?

The supranational bodies formulating global strategy are not the best people in the world. Neither are they the best of individual countries – they are often promoted “out of the way” of domestic political actors.

Allowing these unelected appointees to vote on global issues is an insult to the tens of thousands of brilliant minds in populous countries like India and China – whilst ignoring the higher IQ minds in the EU and the US. All this without formulating policy that is subject to the democratic process anywhere – UN representatives and those in its organs like the IPCC, WHO, FAI and IOM – are not the best that humanity can come up with to address global issues.

Onwards!!!

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