Your Poop Is Probably Full Of Plastic:
https://www.wired.com/story/your-poop-is-probably-full-of-plastic/All of this is a mess, from an ecological perspective. But it's that last bit—the microplasticine infiltration of food webs—that worries not just ecologists but gastroenterologists. If microplastics are invading the things we eat, it's possible that they're invading our stomachs and intestines, too. But while the matryoskha-nature of food chains certainly suggests that human guts harbor microplastics, nobody's really bothered to look in a systematic way.
Until now! Today at the United European Gastroenterology meeting in Vienna, researchers announced they have detected microplastics in stool samples from every single one of a small group of international test subjects. "Plastics are pervasive in everyday life and humans are exposed to plastics in numerous ways," said Philipp Schwable, a gastroenterologist at the Medical University of Vienna, who led the study, via email. And yet, even he did not expect that every poo would test positive. The pilot study tested eight subjects from eight different countries: Austria, Italy, Finland, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, and the UK.
Every participant's poop tested positive for plastics, from polyethylene (commonly found in plastic bags) to polypropylene (bottle caps) to polyvinyl chloride (the "PVC" in PVC pipe). In fact, of the ten types of plastic that the researchers screened for, nine were detected. On average, the researchers turned up 20 particles of microplastic per quarter pound of poop. Their findings raise many questions, chief among them being: How did the plastic get in the poop, and is it harmful?