Modern Dentistry Is a Microplastic Minefield

If you are like me, you brush your teeth—too vigorously, I’m told—with a plastic rack of plastic bristles. You use your plastic brush to lather a paste pushed from a plastic tube. When you have a cavity, you go to a dentist who might fill the hole with a plastic composite then sand it flush right there in your mouth. Say you grind your teeth at night. Your dentist might prescribe you a fitted piece of cured acrylic to grind into instead, the surface of which eventually gets visibly rough and worn. Perhaps your teeth are not very straight, so you contemplate getting aligners—thin sheets of thermoplastic that would be heated and then molded to the contours of your mouth and that you would need to wear almost constantly. The retainers you’d wear afterward to keep your newly straight teeth in place might also be plastic.