Pillar three

Rivers and oceans

There is plastic in your blood. Not a figure of speech.

Photo: Ramiar Dilshad, via Pexels.

Scientists tested the blood of 22 healthy adults and found plastic in 17 of them. Another study found plastic in the artery walls of heart patients, and those patients were about four and a half times more likely to have a heart attack, a stroke, or die within three years. The researchers are careful to say that does not yet prove the plastic caused it, and so are we. But it is in us, and pretending otherwise is not an option.

It gets there through water

Just over a thousand rivers carry about eighty per cent of the plastic that reaches the sea, up to about 2.7 million tonnes a year. The rivers are the arteries. The ocean is the body.

That is why we start with pilot clean-ups of rivers and dams: damage still small enough to stop, and a job a person can actually finish. Then the coast. Then the ocean.

Several of our inventions exist to catch waste in the water and turn waste back into something useful on land, before it ever reaches a river. They are products people buy, not a clean-up fund people are asked to keep donating to.

When this moves, each figure will say which river, which date, and how it was weighed.

Sources: Leslie et al., Environment International, 2022 (plastic in blood). Marfella et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 2024 (plastic in artery plaque). Meijer et al., Science Advances, 2021 (rivers and plastic).