Plastics

NY Times -  Plastic is now threaded through the flesh of fish, where it is interfering with reproduction, and the stalks of plants, where it is interfering with photosynthesis, and in much else we place upon our dinner plates and set about eating. There might be plastic in your saliva, and almost certainly in your blood. Plastic has been found in human hearts and kidneys and other organs, in the breast milk expressed by new mothers and on both sides of their placentas. And because plastic has been found in ovarian follicular fluid and testicular tissue and in the majority of sampled human sperm, it is already embedded in not just the yet-to-be-born but the yet-to-be-conceived.

The penetration appears so complete that some researchers have begun to worry that their methods, too, are compromised by ambient contamination and plastic materials in the lab. Some have called for whole new protocols to systematically stress-test the findings of their colleagues, which seem on first blush simply impossible. But to trust their findings is to believe, for instance, that the buildup inside brain tissue has grown 50 percent in just eight years, and that, as of last year, there might be inside your skull the equivalent of a full plastic spoon — by weight perhaps one-fifth as much polymer as there is brainstem in there....

Beyond plastics, there is PFAS, that category of long-lasting industrial compounds often called “forever chemicals,” pervasive enough that the better branding might be “everywhere chemicals”: found in sea foam and sewage sludge used as fertilizer; in our eggs, in our seafood, in our food wrappers and nonstick pans; in fields of artificial turf, in groundwater serving up to 95 million Americans and in almost half of all sampled tap water in the country. “There’s a new acid in our rain,” the journal Nature recently declared, referring to the forever chemical TFA that has, in two decades, grown six times more prevalent in American surface waters.