Basically the title, how exactly plastic gets into our body and won’t recycled plastic make things worse? Also what it does to our body?
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I mean, mainly in what we drink and eat. Tiny little plastic fragments are pretty much everywhere these days.
And possibly, recycled plastic is generally less structurally sound than virgin plastic, so a recycled plastic water bottle might break down faster than a virgin on.
You eat small amounts of plastic. For example if you fry some food on a non-stick pan then the plastic of the pan is going to erode away slightly and end up in your food. When you eat the food the teflon plastic molecules will be present in your stomach and digestive system. Or when drinking water goes through plastic water pipes or are stored in plastic bottles it is going to pick up tiny amounts of that plastic. The membrane in your intestines separating your blood and the digested food is rather porous in order to allow nutrients through into the blood. And it will accept some plastic as well. Fortunately you kidneys will filter out any foreign substances and you end up peeing out the plastic eventually.
Recycled plastic is no different as it is chemically and physically identical to freshly made plastic. Recycling plastic just might reduce the amount of petroleum used in the plastic production but does not change how the plastic is used or how it affects us.
The effect plastic have on our body is hotly debated. First of all there are thousands of different types of plastic all with different properties so it is impossible to study them all. And secondly it is hard to do comparative analysis between the health of people with or without plastic in their body as everyone have plastic in them. Even the early studies in the 50s could not find people without plastic in them even though these plastics had just been invented.
Most of the plastic is probably harmless. It is made to be chemically inert and will therefore not react with a lot of things in our body. But some plastic compounds might interfere with some biological function in our body and cause medical issues. For example while Teflon itself is not considered of any danger it can form toxic chemicals when heated and can have trace amounts of chemicals from its production which causes increased levels of cancer and other medical issues.
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