You might be familiar with Chris Jordan’s widely shown photographs of sliced-open albatross corpses—laced with bottle caps, lighters, utensils, indeed, all manner of plastic stuff. But wild animals’ consumption of microplastic is particularly concerning because of the small particles’ tendency to pass chemicals used in plastic manufacturing and acquired in nature into the bodies of the living beings who consume them.
Many plastic-manufacturing chemicals, called plasticizers, are known as toxic, as proven by studies on nonhuman animals and people alike. Bisphenols, like bisphenol A (BPA), and phthalates are two common classes of plasticizers known to interfere with hormone activity in wild and laboratory animals, leading to metabolic and growth problems, as well as cancer.
Those chemicals commonly adhering to microplastic particles in the oceans include pesticides, such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), which has been banned worldwide except in cases of controlling insect-borne epidemic diseases like malaria. Other toxins that adhere to ...
