We (mostly) got rid of acid rain, but now there’s another scary thing falling from the sky. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Miles Bryan, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Further reading: We got rid of acid rain. Now something scarier is falling from the sky. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is plastic rain and why is it a concern?
It's springtime. Happy springtime. Maybe your 401k is looking more like an FMLK. Maybe you're putting those plans to buy a house or a condo on hold. Maybe you're worried about a recession. I certainly am. But at least we've got springtime, you guys. You ever go out in the rain in the springtime? Feel a little sense of renewal? Yeah.
humor, all the possibilities ahead, tilt your head back, close your eyes Andy Dufresne style, maybe even open your mouth and take in a few drops of that high quality H2O. Maybe don't do that. It turns out there's plastic in that rain. Not like big chunks of plastic. Our old arch nemesis microplastics are in the rain. And we are going to explain.
Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we are launching our much-anticipated book club, and we're doing it with Abby Wambach and Glennon Doyle, who will introduce their upcoming book, We Can Do Hard Things, Answers to Life's 20 Questions. Plus, we've got some fun and important updates from The W and the NWSL, and of course, we've got a new Are You a Megan or Are You a Sue?
Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Yes, sir. Are you listening? Yes, I am.
Today Explained, Sean Romsferm here with Benji Jones, environmental correspondent at Vox. And Benji's here to talk about a piece he wrote for Vox on plastic rain. But before we get there, Benji, you know, regular listeners of the show will be familiar with microplastics. But for all the irregulars out there, could you just remind them what they are?
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Chapter 2: What are microplastics and how do they get into the rain?
Sean, it's in the name, micro. It's just that easy. No, yeah, basically it is really tiny bits of plastic. Technically speaking, we're talking about plastic pieces that are less than five millimeters long on their longest side.
So it's like half a centimeter, not necessarily invisible, but you can get much, much, much smaller and into another category called nanoplastics, which are less than one micrometer, which is a millionth of a meter or a thousandth of a millimeter. So they can get very, very, very small. Basically everywhere scientists look on this planet, in our bodies, in animal bodies, we find microplastics.
So they are truly, absolutely everywhere. And these are like plastic fibers, so like the fibers that make up your nylon or polyester jackets or t-shirts. They could be broken down pieces of water bottles that have been crushed on highways. They could be nurdles, which are like these little pellets that are used to make other things out of plastic.
They're like the virgin material used to make plastic. So they're like they're just all over the place.
And that includes in our rain.
Yeah.
Which I didn't know until I read your piece.
Yeah, so, like, on the one hand, microplastics are absolutely everywhere, so, like, the fact that it's in the rain is maybe not as surprising, but to me, when I was learning about plastic rain, that there is plastic in our rain, it was really shocking to me because it suggests that, like, Plastic is part of our ecosystems. It is like as fundamental at this point as like microbes and bacteria.
It's just like part of the world that we live in, part of the fiber of the planet. And that to me is quite scary and like another level.
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Chapter 3: How widespread is plastic pollution in the environment?
Seafood, which is like, again, it's in the ocean, so it's in our fish... It's in our homes, it's in the carpets, plastic fibers, etc. It's in snow in Antarctica, it's in sea ice, it's at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. One of my favorite studies, but also kind of sad, scientists looked at dolphin breaths, like the size of dolphins, and found microplastics in the breath of these dolphins.
So, like, dolphins are breathing out microplastics.
This is a microplastic fiber found in dolphin breath, and it's 14 times smaller than a human hair. We found it by holding a petri dish over dolphins' blowholes so we can analyze what they breathe out.
Dolphins are top predators in marine ecosystems, so scientists use them as a way of monitoring the effects of plastic pollution on marine ecosystems and coastal communities.
Ocean waves are basically plastic confetti machines, and they can launch 100,000 metric tons of plastic into the air every year.
And then it's also everywhere that we've looked in the human body. So it's in our blood, it's in our kidneys, it's in our semen, the placenta. And in the human body, we're finding microplastics that are so small, these nanoplastics, that they're actually able to cross the blood-brain barrier.
I mean, one of the big news stories of this year was that scientists found a plastic spoon's worth of microplastics in the human brain, like in an average brain by weight, which is like terrifying. to think about.
New research out of the University of New Mexico finds alarmingly high levels of that plastic in human brains at much higher concentrations compared to the liver and kidney.
They looked at some individuals with dementia. They had higher levels of microplastics in the brain.
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Chapter 4: What evidence shows microplastics in human bodies and animals?
just the tires degrading over time can put microplastics into the air. And it's not just plastic that's in our rain, it's actually other chemicals like PFAS. So a bunch of studies have also found these forever chemicals in the rain too. So our rain is like quite dirty.
And just for the people out there who are maybe like, yeah, there's plastic in the rain, whatever, there's plastic in my bed, there's plastic in my brain. Why do we not want plastic in the rain, Benji?
Yeah, this is like the most important question in my mind is like, is there an actual risk to being exposed to all this plastic that it has many benefits, right? Like we benefit from plastic. We're talking on devices made of plastic right now. It's light, it makes cars less polluting, et cetera.
Scientists are learning that microplastics in our bodies, which could get there because of what we're drinking and what we're eating, are linked to a number of health concerns, like cardiovascular disease, mental issues like dementia. So there is actually quite a long list of health problems that are linked to exposure to microplastics.
Could it be increasing the risk of stroke or heart attack? Could it be increasing the risk of cancer? inflammatory bowel disease, infertility. So there are any number of things, preterm birth.
It is thought that it can disrupt your hormones, so it can cause some fertility issues, it can mess with your metabolism, and it can cause neurological issues.
Part of that is... just the physical bit of plastic being in your body. It's like this foreign substance that your body is trying to get rid of. And so it's going to have an inflammatory response, which can be bad over time. But also there are a lot of chemicals. There are like hundreds, if not thousands of chemicals used in plastics.
And those chemicals like phthalates, which make plastic bendy, are also associated with other issues like hormone disruption and fertility issues. So Yeah, I would say it is pretty fair to say that there are health problems linked to all this exposure. That personally makes me worried. Personally, but you're also worried for, like, your fellow human. Oh, I don't care about anybody else.
Yeah, I am worried. And, like, we do have chronic illness problems in the U.S. in... countries all over the world, like we know that chronic disease is getting worse over time in terms of like how many people have it. And I think that we should be looking at things like the spread of microplastics. Well, Benji, is there anything we can do about it? Yeah.
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Chapter 5: Where does the plastic in rain come from?
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Here comes the plastic rain. Have you seen the plastic rain? Plastic rain. Plastic rain.
Today, explained back with Benji Jones, who's going to tell us how we fixed acid rain. Is that what we did, Benji?
Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say we have mostly fixed acid rain.
Huh. And remind us what the problem was.
Okay, so acid rain, rain that is slightly acidic, like several times more acidic than regular rain. Probably not like... pure lemon juice, but maybe like lemonade or something slightly diluted. The rain was largely acidic because of a handful of gases, so sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which is nitrogen oxide and nitrogen dioxide.
These were gases largely emitted by coal power plants and the tailpipes of cars.
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Chapter 6: What are the health risks associated with microplastic exposure?
In our time, acid rain has become a subject of international concern and scientific research.
Acid rain looks, feels, and smells like any other rain. But the water in acid rain carries poisons like sulfuric acid. That acid and its effects have been blamed for killing fish and plant life in hundreds of lakes in the northeastern United States and Canada.
Our Canadian neighbors to the north are becoming impatient to a point where U.S.-Canada relations are more strained than ever. At the center of this irritant is the acid rain problem, one that has no respect for international boundaries.
And as all this acidic rain was falling, we started to see impacts from that. So like, I don't know, maybe you've seen the photos of statues that look like they're kind of melted. But we also saw like forests starting to collapse, fish die in lakes in the Adirondacks. So it was like a human problem and an environmental problem. And then we did something about it? Yes, we did. The U.S.
in 1990 passed amendments to the Clean Air Act, which is like the seminal regulation in the U.S. to clean up the air that started to limit the amount of sulfur dioxide that coal power plants were able to produce. This bill will cut emissions that cause acid rain in half. and permanently cap them at these new levels. And also around the same time, catalytic converters were becoming a big thing.
Those reduce emissions in tailpipes. And so you started to see these regulations limiting the amount of pollution coming from these important sources like coal and cars. And as a result, we saw acid rain start to decline. Huh.
Did anyone like celebrate it? Was there like a day where we said we did it, guys? We beat Acid Rain?
I didn't come across anyone being like, congratulations, we fixed this. I think like when regulations work, they don't maybe get the attention they deserve.
Let's take a moment now on the show to just celebrate that we, at least for now, managed to beat Acid Rain.
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Chapter 7: Can history teach us how to address plastic pollution?
Can we apply any of the learnings from how we, at least in some places in the world, defeated acid rain to this plastic rain, plastic rain situation we've got currently all over the world? Yeah.
Okay. Great question. So I think in some ways the plastic problem is worse because plastic stays around forever, like decades, centuries, really hard to get rid of once it's in the environment. PFAS, same story. But... But? But, and this is my rare bout of hope, which is that we learned from acid rain, from the ozone hole, that...
When we as a species, humans, governments, want to solve a problem, want to solve an environmental problem, we do it. There was public outcry around acid rain. We fixed it, largely. And so I think that is a lesson in, like, this is a question about will. Do we have the will to get rid of plastics and do we have the regulations in place to do so?
And that is the other kind of important takeaway, which is that when you have major industries that are benefiting from this incredible amount of plastic flowing into the environment, We need to often create regulations that are tamping down on that supply of plastic. Do we have any of those?
Well, I don't think folks who follow the plastic conversation closely are very hopeful about the current administration. Hmm. As you may have seen, Trump is trying to bring back plastic straws.
Oh yeah. We're going back to plastic straws. These things don't work.
He seems to be passionately against paper straws, which like, okay, there's some merit to that.
I've had them many times and on occasion they break, they explode. If something's hot, they don't last very long, like a matter of minutes, sometimes a matter of seconds. It's a ridiculous situation.
Though that one seems to have unified left and right. He is right on this one.
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