Fast fashion and the plastics you’re inhaling

Sam Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal Land. This is ABC News Daily. We know fast fashion is incredibly damaging to the environment. But have you ever thought about what it’s doing to your health? Cheap fashion is full of microplastics and you’re almost certainly breathing them in. Today, War on Waste host Craig Reucassel on his shock and rather uncomfortable discovery.

Sam Hawley: Craig Reucassel, in the past six years, have you ever used a disposable coffee cup?

Craig Reucassel: I think I did use one actually, because it was confusion over ordering. I thought I’d ordered one in a ceramic cup, but I was given otherwise and I guess by that time the damage had been done. So I drank it.

Sam Hawley: Alright. So not your fault. And of course, in your War on Waste series, six years ago, you went a big way to encouraging Australians to take reusable coffee cups to their favorite cafes, didn’t you?

War on Waste audio: Today I want to convince the good people of Melbourne to ditch their disposable coffee cups and to bring a reusable cup instead.

Craig Reucassel: Yeah, yeah. And I guess that was just an indication of an overall thing, which is that just generally if you can change to reusables over single use, it’s better overall. And the coffee cup was just an example of that.

War on Waste audio: Sorry guys, you can’t get on this tram. It’s filled with coffee cups. What a waste.

Sam Hawley: Now you’ve been delving very deep into our rubbish again and don’t we have a lot of it? You even tried to get some beachgoers in Manly in Sydney to pick it up, per se.

War on Waste audio: Can you lift it? Step up and we’ll see.

Craig Reucassel: Australia creates 2.6 million tonnes of plastic waste a year, which is about 100 kilos per person. So you’re not individually throwing that out, but that’s overall, our Australian plastic consumption, and we try to get people to lift it. And they struggled and we struggled to lift our plastic waste.

War on Waste audio: Use those muscles, they look good. Can they lift? I can climb up it.

Sam Hawley: Please tell me, while you’ve been trawling through our rubbish, what shocked you the most this time?

Craig Reucassel: Look, we did a little experiment to find out how many microplastics were inside me, and it was one I was reticent about doing. Not just the process, but seeing the results. Microplastics are tiny bits of plastic, so I think less than a millimeter in size.

Sam Hawley: So tiny you can’t see them with the naked eye. But you did establish that there were lots in you. How on earth did you manage to do that?

Craig Reucassel: Look, I hate the details of this, but I had to provide a sample to Professor Fred Leusch at Griffith University.

Sam Hawley: A sample of…

Craig Reucassel: A sample of poo, yes. So it’s come from my digestive tract.

Sam Hawley: All for a good cause, Craig.

Craig Reucassel: All for a good cause. Exactly. What I found fascinating about talking to Professor Fred Leusch is that it’s really in the early stages. We don’t know a lot of the health consequences of this yet.

Professor Frederic Leusch, Griffith University: The universe of chemicals that we’re dealing with in these microplastics is so large that it’s a huge amount of research, which is just scratching the surface at the moment.

Craig Reucassel: We are aware that microplastics are in sea ice, are in the ocean floor, are in birds, fish are in beer, and are in us. But the question of how much is in there and what the actual impact is – we’re still in the early stages of figuring it out.

War on Waste audio: We’ve covered the globe with a layer of microplastics by now. Well, I guess the next question is how much is getting into us. Into us? That’s a good question. And we have.

Sam Hawley: Yeah, I think that’s something we want to know. Just remind me, Craig, how many microplastics were in you?

Craig Reucassel: There was about there were about 30 pieces of microplastics in me from that one sample.

War on Waste audio: So the 30 bits of plastic and they’re long thought they’d be like little tiny little bits. These are what we call fibers. Okay, so the long ones are fibers.

Craig Reucassel: According to the scientists there, it was about the average. So it can be different for different people. What shocked me about it, interestingly enough, is that I think I presumed that microplastics would have inside me would have come possibly from the food chain. We’ve seen a lot of reports over the years of microplastics being found in water bottles or actual tap water as well, beer, you know, fish, all of these types of things. And you go, okay, well, this has become part of, you know, the human food chain.

Is that where they will come from? From what I’ve eaten or drunk? The actual microfibers that we did find inside me, most of them were microfibers of polyester or fabric. And that did surprise me. And that would have come predominantly through inhalation, through actually breathing it within the air. And it’s, you know, it’s either coming from clothing or, you know, our carpets or our rugs or, you know, so many things Nowadays.

Over 60% of clothing and textiles are made from fossil fuels, made of plastic, predominantly polyester. So that surprised me that that was the major thing within me, although there were some other pieces as well.

War on Waste audio: You put it together, it’s probably about a ping pong ball size of fibers put together a year. Okay, so it’s not just going through me. It could be becoming more part of our bodies. You’re becoming a plastic man. Oh, my God.

Sam Hawley: We spend all this time trying to eat well, not to drink too much, you know, do the best by our bodies. And now you’re telling me we’re full of microplastics? That’s, that’s not great.

Craig Reucassel: We need to pause and not overreact to it. So, for instance, there are lots of things that we ingest in small quantities that don’t necessarily have a negative effect. It’s a lot about quantity. With plastics themselves as well, plastic, in a sense, is reasonably inert. So it’s not necessarily that plastic is going to do something negative. But one of the complex parts about it is that when plastics are made, there’s an enormous amount of other chemicals that go into them.

There are stabilizers, there are fire retardants, there are colorants, there’s a massive amount of that. So we spoke to the scientists saying, well, can you take the sample you found in me and then break down the next level, which is to find the chemicals in it? And unfortunately, we didn’t have the time and the ability to be able to do that yet. But that’s the broader question. It may not be specifically the piece of plastic, but maybe what is being used to make that plastic or is linked to that plastic.

And plastic has also been shown, for instance, to be bad for coral life because other micro-organisms attach to it and grow on it. So again, it may not be necessarily the plastic itself that does the damage, but it may be things associated with it.

Sam Hawley: Mhm. And you mentioned, of course, there’s a lot of these microplastics in clothing, and gosh, don’t we have a lot of clothing?

Craig Reucassel: We do. And this is the fascinating thing is that over 60% of our clothing is made from plastic, it’s made from fossil fuels, over 50% is from polyester and then you have nylons and other things as well. And that’s interesting because it’s one of the ones, to be honest, that is difficult to find a solution.

I’ve been hearing from people for years: “Oh, it’s okay, we’re going to put a filter on our washing machines to solve this problem”. And then I’ve spoken to people saying, well, yeah, but to do that you need a washing machine, you need a filter next to your washing machine that’s almost the same size as your washing machine. It’s difficult to do this now.

Some of it is picked up in the water treatment plants, they can filter out some of it, and maybe that’s where we need to do it. But at the moment, it’s difficult to find a solution because a lot of people say, well, we should just not have plastics in clothing, we should go back to natural materials. But, cotton, which is about 25% of our clothing, has an environmental footprint. There are enormous amounts of water used to make cotton.

There are fertilizers used in that as well. And it has its footprint. And even things like wool, obviously sheep at the moment, have high, very high methane content because of global warming. So it’s a really difficult one because you go, well, yes, I can potentially solve this microplastic problem by shifting to all-natural fibers, but that doesn’t necessarily overcome the overall environmental footprint of fashion.

And that comes back to which is why the major message we give in the War on Waste is that, what’s happening is we’re buying more and more clothes and wearing them less and less, and we need to go the opposite way, which is to buy less, wear longer, extend the life of clothes, whether it be through mending resale or swapping because that’s what then reduces that overall environmental impact of fashion.

Sam Hawley: We’re inhaling all these plastics. I’m pretty sure every Australian would say they don’t want to be doing that. But there doesn’t seem to be…

Craig Reucassel: There’s not a simple solution. No, there isn’t. And as I said, the only thing I would caution on is just to say, look, some early studies suggest that maybe these plastics, at certain rates, might affect reproduction. There are potential links to some cancers. But again, I don’t want to over-scare people. We’re at the early stages and it depends on how much, of course, is in there. At the rates that were inside me, I’m not freaking out at this point. Whilst I am not thrilled by the fact either.

Sam Hawley: Alright. Well, Craig, you had a win on coffee cups the last time you did a series like this. What do you think you might change this time?

Craig Reucassel: Interesting. We’re going back to some of the themes that we started with to see how far we’ve come. And we have made some positive changes. And that’s been great to see. We have had some single-use plastic bans. We’ve seen a fundamental change in approach to, for instance, plastic bags and shopping centers.

It used to be the single-use plastic ones just given out at will. Ever since they started charging for those, one supermarket showed that now 80% of people are bringing their own, which is a great example of changing your habits has reduced waste overall. We’ve seen that happen. There’s been an increase in organics recycling. I think that’s the area where we need to ramp it up because, again, our food waste is one that we control a lot in our own homes.

We create a lot of food waste in our own homes. About a fifth of the food that we buy, we end up throwing out. And that’s something we can control. But also in Australia, the thing slightly outside of our control sometimes is that if we dispose of that and if we don’t have compost, for instance, that ends up going to landfill and food breaking down in landfill without oxygen creates methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. So food waste is one that we need to be getting onto very quickly and changing that habit very quickly.

Sam Hawley: Yeah. Alright. And it is a war on waste, isn’t it? A real battle that we need to solve. What happens if we don’t solve this?

Craig Reucassel: Well a lot of these waste impacts do have, not only long-term effects in terms of litter, in terms of just the enjoyment of the environment, they have long-term impacts in terms of our use of resources, often dwindling resources as well. So the fact that we don’t reuse these things or recycle them or avoid them in the first place means we’re burning through the resources that go into them. And that then also has often a carbon footprint. It has a global warming footprint as well. This single-use approach to living has a carbon footprint.

Sam Hawley: Craig Reucassel is the host of War on Waste. You can find it on view. This episode was produced by Veronica Apap, Nell Whitehead, and Sam Dunn, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is David Cohen. Just letting you know, each Sunday this month we’ll be bringing you an episode of if you’re Listening with Matt Bevin. So look out for that in your feed. I’m Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again on Monday. Thanks for listening.