Babies’ faeces contain up to ten times more tiny pieces of plastic than adults’ stools, which is not without risk to their health.
- Used in everyday consumer products such as bottles and food containers, microplastics have been found in the stools of adults and babies.
- But the stools of toddlers contained up to ten times more polyethylene terephthalate (PET).
- Studies have shown that microplastics can lead to cell death, inflammation and metabolic disorders when ingested.
Microplastics are not only an environmental disaster and a threat to ocean biodiversity. They are also a serious public health problem. Omnipresent in our daily lives, from the dust in our homes to the food we eat, including bottled water, these tiny pieces of plastic measuring less than 5 mm are regularly ingested by us and our pets.
Polyethylene terephthalate in the viewfinder
But it is toddlers who are most at risk from ingesting microplastics. This is shown by a new study published in the Environmental Science & Technology Letters of the ACS. According to its authors, infants have much higher amounts of a type of microplastic in their stool than adults.
For the time being, few studies exist on the extent of human exposure to microplastics or their effects on health. While researchers once thought that microplastics passed through the gastrointestinal tract before leaving the body, more recent work suggests that smaller pieces can pass through cell membranes and enter the circulation, where they gradually degrade. Studies in cells and in laboratory animals show that exposure to microplastics can lead to cell death, inflammation and metabolic disorders.
Bottles and toys
In the present study, the researchers wanted to assess human exposure to two common microplastics: first polyethylene terephthalate (PET), used in the manufacture of plastic bottles, food containers and certain clothing, and second polycarbonate (PC), also present in a number of everyday consumer items.
For this, they measured the levels of these two plastics in the stools of infants and adults using mass spectrometry, which is used to determine the concentrations of PET and PC microplastics. Six stool samples from infants and ten stool samples from adults collected in New York State, as well as three meconium samples (the first stool from a newborn), were analyzed.
It turns out that all the samples contained at least one type of microplastic. Although the average levels of fecal PC microplastics were similar between adults and infants, the stools of infants contained, on average, concentrations of PET more than 10 times higher than those of adults. For the researchers, if infants are more exposed to higher levels of microplastics, it is due to their intensive use of products such as baby bottles, teethers and plastic toys. Placed in the mouth, these objects contain thousands of microplastics which are then ingested by toddlers.
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