Microplastic accumulation in the human body could be a serious health hazard, according to some researchers, and might be linked to cancer, heart attacks and other threatening medical conditions. We’ll never eliminate all microplastic from the environment, but we could significantly reduce the volume if we’d just shut down plastic recycling.

A Stanford Medicine article says scientists estimate that “adults ingest the equivalent of one credit card per week in microplastics,” which sounds frightening, even though only a “few studies have directly examined the impact of microplastics on human health, leaving us in the dark about how dangerous they really are.”

The fear, however, is already out there, and policymakers, particularly in California, have gone to war with all plastic, hoping to ban as much of this modern convenience as possible.

These, of course, are going to be the same policymakers who regard recycling as a golden calf that can never be challenged. Not that they’d ever admit it, but they are part of the problem – a large part.

There are a number of pathways for microplastic to enter the human body. Plastic litter that’s been degraded into tiny particles can be inhaled and ingested. But we also pick up plastic from automobile tire wear, microwave-heated food containers and textile fibers.

But for this argument, we focus on one source: recycling.

Recycling plastic requires the destruction of consumer products, which are shredded by industrial machinery, washed, rinsed, dried and transported. The process creates an enormous body of microplastic.

“Environmental exposure can almost double the microplastic generation during the shredding step in the recycling plant,” says Faisal Hai, head of the School of Civil, Mining, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Wollongong in Australia.

“The commercial process for plastic recycling may have been emitting microplastics since its first use nearly half a century ago.”

Other research suggests that as much as 400,000 tons, “or the equivalent of about 29,000 dump trucks of microplastics,” is produced by recycling each year in the U.S. alone, says Inside Climate News.

Hai based his comments on a research article published last year in Science, Recycling process produces microplastics, that he and doctoral candidate Michael Staplevan wrote. The pair looked into the amount of microplastic that “can be generated during the recycling process” and the “environmental exposure affect the amount of microplastics generated.” The article is “the culmination of a series of recent publications by the UOW researchers uncovering the limitations of current plastic recycling practice,” according to the university.  

Hai and Staplevan “are strong advocates of recycling,” says the university, so rather than calling for an end to plastic recycling, they instead want increased government “regulation of the recycling industry to control and monitor the amount of microplastics being produced and released into the environment.” 

But a far better idea is to bury plastic waste in landfills.

Almost three decades ago, then-New York Times reporter John Tierney wrote the lengthy article Recycling Is Garbage in the Sunday Times magazine. It generated the greatest volume of hate mail in the magazine’s history.

Tierney’s argument that, rather than recycle, “the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill” was not well received by the paper’s readership. But he was right, which he proved again in 2015 with The Reign of Recycling.

No, depositing waste plastic in landfills won’t eliminate all microplastic. But it would substantially cut how much is produced. The hard part will be convincing the recycling zealots that their religion is likely a threat to human health and must be abandoned as soon as possible.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board