Guest Editorial: This Earth Month, it’s people versus plastics

Photo by Tom Fisk on Pexels.com & In May 2018, National Geographic’s cover featured a giant plastic bag shaped like an iceberg, floating in an empty ocean. The headline bore the title of the organization’s plastic reduction campaign: “PLANET OR PLASTIC?” Fast forward nearly six years. The official 2024 Earth Day theme is “Planet vs. Plastics.”& That similarity highlights the depressing fact that the world has made basically no progress on addressing plastic waste. One& March 2023 study& found that there were about 21,250 pieces of plastic in the ocean for every person on Earth. Those researchers also estimated that the amount has likely doubled in the years since the plastic iceberg magazine cover. & Both the National Geographic campaign and this year’s Earth Day theme have titles that focus on “the planet.” With ads tending to show trash-strewn coastlines and choking turtles, it’s easy to get the impression that plastic waste is a crisis happening far away. It isn’t. Scientists have now found microplastics (and nanoplastics, which are even smaller) in people’s blood, hearts, lungs and brains. The tiny plastic pieces show up in placenta and in breast milk. Humans are eating, drinking and inhaling this stuff constantly, and...