Thank you.
Let me give you a little scenario. They use plastics for drug delivery, and it's a very specific design and shape because it can pass through blood-brain barriers. It can pass through any part of the body because it's so spiky that the body can't see it. It doesn't generate the immune response. When you look at microplastics under the microscope, you will find they're the same shape. That's why they can move into and out of our bodies quite easily. Studies done on scallops and things showed that when they fed them microplastics and nanoplastics, they were in every part of the animals within a few hours.
Currently, if you have a look at what can pass into the blood through the gut, it can be up to 150 microns, which is quite big, but with nanoplastics—and I do a lot of work with nanoplastics—there's nothing to stop them going everywhere in the body. They contain an endocrine-disrupting chemical. They can absorb DDT and all the other chemicals that we prefer to forget about. They can stick to those nanoplastics. Imagine what that could do to a developing baby's pituitary gland. If you had enough of those particles lodged in that gland, what could that do to the development of a human? What could it do to the development of any creature on the planet?
We talk about the guts of worms being blocked up because their mouths are bigger than their anuses. They normally take a whole particle in, digest it and then release it. However, plastics block them up so that they're full forever, until they die of starvation.
My research is in remote areas, and I'm looking at those because these are our reserves for all that biota that keeps the world working, and we're flooding them with so much atmospheric plastic falling onto the ground there—in hurricanes in Newfoundland, for example. At the peak season, when everything's growing and everything's feeding, we're suddenly feeding them literally tons of plastic particles at the exact size that they want to eat, and they smell like food. They release pheromones like the EDCs, the endocrine-disrupting chemicals. All these chemicals look like food.
We've had it in breast milk and placental serum. It's in testes. It was in baby's first poo. It's in every part of the human body already, and it's a foreign object. We have not developed any resistance to this material. We only got nanomaterials at all when we started smelting metals. Thankfully, they were mostly inert, except for lead, which we know does bad things to us.
Plastics have no place in our lives. Very soon, we're going to know just how bad this is.