Plastics are everywhere. It’s on the ground and in our oceans. It’s in the air, in our food and in our water. It’s in our guts, lungs, and blood streams. It’s in placentas and breast milk. We breath it. We drink it. We eat it and we wear it.
This one really snuck up on us. One moment we’re revolutionizing the future and the next we’re swimming in a forever land of nondegradable microplastic particles, fibers and the cornucopia of toxic forever chemicals used to make them. Plastics are complex petroleum-based carbon chains with the same climate impacts as burning coal and gasoline, and a centuries-long lifespan that will leave them clogging our waterways and landfills centuries after we’re gone. They never break down into their component chemicals; they just get brittle and break down into smaller and smaller pieces of – well, “plastic”.
The health problems of having hundreds-of-millions of tiny plastic particles taking up space inside our bodies is just now being studied. Early research on the chemicals leaching into our bodies from these microplastics suggest links to ADHD, obesity, Alzheimer’s and a pantheon of other neurological and hormonal issues.
Just as the 1980s laid the scientific foundation for global warming, the 2020s will be the decade that research provides the hard plastics science to be debated and denied for decades to come.
Grove’s Field Guide to Plastics unpacks this plastics pandemic. Like all of Grove’s field guides, the deep history and hard science is explained in clear layman terms in the book’s introduction with lots of endnotes and a full bibliography. Once past the intro, the book reads in an easy, friendly manner full of humor and trivia, with each chapter ending with lists of talking points and action items to help you practice what you’ve read.
We can’t hide from this modern world of plastic pollution, but we can unpack the problem and choose to avoid the greatest risks. Grove’s Field Guide To Plastics (eBook version) is available for pre-order at a 25% discount ($2.99) through April 1st, 2024, on Amazon Books.
Grove’s Field Guide To Climate Change is available now in Paperback on Amazon, and in eBook on Amazon, Apple, Android and Barnes & Nobles.
