Simple Kitchen Swaps to Reduce Your Exposure to Microplastics

As scientists look into how these tiny particles may affect your health, here are eight easy switches that could help you—and the environment—avoid them.

No matter if you’re tossing your empty milk jugs and detergent bottles in the recycling bin, plastics are accumulating around the world—and become especially unavoidable when they break down into miniscule bits called microplastics. Microplastics are pieces of plastic measuring anywhere from five millimeters across (the span of a pencil eraser) down to tiny, microscopic particles, and they are finding their way into our air, water, and food supply. Researchers have been looking into what that influx of plastic particles means not only for our environment, but for our health, too.

It boils down to the fact that microplastics are made up of a cocktail of chemicals that, when absorbed into the body, can disrupt its inner workings. These chemicals are known as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) due to their negative impact on our hormones. A recent Endocrine Society report cited “direct cause-and-effect links between the toxic chemical additives in plastics and specific health impacts to the endocrine system,” pointing out possible downstream conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and reproductive disorders that could result.

Here, we take a quick look at what’s behind the growing concern with microplastics and give expert advice on how to reduce them in your life—and community.