Microplastic within humans now a health crisis: Interview with ‘Plastic People’ filmmakers

In a lab in Türkiye, researcher Sedat Gündoğdu zooms in on the image of a small red fiber. For the first time on film, viewers are witnessing microplastics in the human brain. The moment is emblematic of an emerging environmental and health crisis affecting nearly every corner of life on Earth, from the deepest depths of the ocean to the blood in our veins. Microplastics, it seems, are everywhere.

The award-winning documentary Plastic People: The Hidden Crisis of Microplastics follows science journalist Ziya Tong as she examines her own body for microplastic contamination and traces the latest microplastic science and solutions around the globe. The thesis: we are all becoming “plastic people.”

“I was surprised at the ubiquity of microplastics in the human body,” Rick Smith, executive producer of the documentary, said in an interview with Mongabay.

The film grew out of Smith’s 2020 reporting for The Globe and Mail, in which he worked with scientists to test his own body for microplastics. “The question isn’t, ‘do we have microplastics in us?’” Smith said. “The question is, ‘how much?’ And the question isn’t where in the human body microplastics exist. The question is, ‘where doesn’t it exist?’ We haven’t actually found a human organ without measurable microplastic levels yet.”

The film takes viewers on a global journey, tracking researchers who are finding microplastics not only in the environment but in human bloodstreams, brains and placentas. Recent studies confirm these findings, showing that microplastics have infiltrated virtually every part of the human body, with researchers now investigating links to disease, fertility issues, and even cognitive decline.

“In the movie we visit researchers in Italy who are some of the first in the world to find measurable increasing levels of microplastics in human placentas,” Peter Raymont, also an executive producer of the film, told Mongabay. “We are surrounded by plastic from the moment, from before we’re born to after we’re dead. We’re becoming plastic people.”

As the film travels the festival circuit, nations worldwide are negotiating a United Nations treaty on plastic pollution, with the next crucial round of negotiations scheduled for August 2025. The treaty aims to address the overwhelming tide of plastic waste; an estimated 400 million tons are produced annually (about 60 times the weight of The Great Pyramid of Giza).

“The solution here is not rocket science,” Smith said. “We know what we need to do. We need to eliminate the unnecessary use of plastic, and we need to ban the most toxic formulations of plastic. How weird is it that there’s probably a half dozen common plastic types that people come in contact with on a daily basis, and the best science now tells us, medical professionals now tell us, that some types of common plastic are far more carcinogenic than others?”

Plastic People highlights some solutions already emerging around the world. “We feature lots of places, cities, countries, in the movie that are figuring this out,” Smith said. “Rwanda and the Philippines have made incredible progress in cleaning up plastic pollution and protecting their populations. Little, tiny, rural municipalities, major cities all over the world [are] making big progress.”

After screenings, Raymont said, viewers report returning home and immediately removing plastic items from their households. “So many people, after seeing the film, sort of went back to their kitchen and started throwing away their plastic cutting boards and other containers and other things, which is one small step,” he said. “Of course, it has to happen on the global level and governmental level.”

The film will be screened in Washington, DC, on March 29 at the 2025 DC Environmental Film Festival, where Mongabay is a media partner. Its creators hope to inspire meaningful action on both personal and policy levels and to contribute to a growing global movement to address what may be, as Smith said, “the most serious type of pollutant our society has ever created.”

Rick Smith is the president of the Canadian Climate Institute and has spent over twenty years working to protect people from pollution. He authored the international bestseller Slow Death by Rubber Duck and previously served as executive director of Environmental Defence Canada. Smith holds a Ph.D. in biology and first tested his own body for microplastic pollution for his 2020 Globe and Mail article that inspired the documentary.

Peter Raymont is a veteran filmmaker who has produced and directed over 100 films and television series during his 53-year career. His documentary “Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire” won an Emmy Award and the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Raymont has collaborated with Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard as executive producer, and his recent work “Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On” won the 2023 International Emmy for Best Arts Documentary.

Mongabay’s Liz Kimbrough interviewed executive producers Rick Smith and Peter Raymont about Plastic People and the human health crisis that plastic has caused.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mongabay: Rick, your 2020 reporting in The Globe and Mail described testing your own body for microplastic pollution. How did the film “Plastic People” evolve from your reporting into a full documentary?

Rick Smith: I’ve been working on pollution issues for a couple of decades, and whenever possible, I’ve tried to talk about pollution in a way that makes sense to people, in a way that connects with people’s daily lives, because I think that’s how change happens. I think that’s when people are motivated to change when it becomes clear that it’s affecting them and their families in the here and now.

A few years ago, I noticed the very first article in a very obscure European journal finding microplastics for the first time in the human body. And I thought it would be interesting and impactful to try to replicate that study and to tell the story of that experience. So, that’s what I did. In 2019, I found a lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology, leaders in the field in terms of microplastics and the environment, and they were interested in working with me on this new approach to looking for microplastics in the human gut.

I told that story, how we set up this experiment, and the results in Canada’s The Globe and Mail. And the punchline is, what happened is that not only did I find measurable levels of microplastics in me, but over the course of a week, as I deliberately tried to crank up my daily exposure to plastic stuff, the levels increased dramatically. For instance, for a few days, I only wore a fuzzy polyester fleece, and for a few days, I only ate out of plastic containers and plastic takeout containers, you know, things like plastic ramen bowls that I nuked in the microwave. So I tried to do everything I could think of that would increase my daily exposure to plastic, but nothing too outlandish. And then, by the end of the week, my microplastic levels dramatically increased.

That story then led to a meeting with Peter Raymont. Peter is one of the most prominent Canadian documentary filmmakers and a real leader in our country. So, being able to work with him on this Plastic People project was a real joy over the last four years.

Peter Raymont: I read Rick’s article in The Globe and Mail that he just backgrounded and was blown away. I had no idea about microplastics. I sort of vaguely had heard about it, but to see the results of his blood test… I had no idea about microplastics inside the human body to this extent. So I reached out to him. He had worked with us on a previous film called Toxic Beauty. So we got a lunch and decided to work together and determined to try to raise money to make the film.

I finally landed on a home for the project with TELUS. We had a great premiere at South by Southwest, which got a lot of publicity. It got a wonderful review in Variety, which called it “one of those essential state-of-our-world documentaries.” We’ve sold it to other countries around the world, but we’re still looking for a US broadcaster or streamer. If a US broadcaster or streamer is interested in the film, please contact us at White Pine Pictures.

Mongabay: What storytelling decisions did you make to visualize something invisible like microplastic?

Rick Smith: The first storytelling decision we made, of course, was to work with our friend and colleague, Ziya Tong, who’s a great science journalist. The story centers around her personal quest to get her body tested for microplastics, test her immediate environment for microplastics, and then, as she travels the world, talking to the great community groups, researchers, and elected leaders who are trying to grapple with this challenge all over the world. So it’s really her story, a personal story about what she’s learning, not just about microplastics and the environment, but about microplastics and herself. The film foreshadowed what has become an avalanche of research over the past few months on this topic.

We’re very proud that this was the first time a film or television production captured the presence of microplastics in the human brain. So when we released that at South by Southwest, that was brand new information. Of course, since then, there have been a few studies not only finding microplastics in the human brain, in every one sampled, but actually an increase in levels. We talked to researchers in the film who are finding microplastics in human placentas and the human bloodstream and human organs. There’s been just a tidal wave of science in the last few months from around the world confirming these results and showing what a mess we created for ourselves with this new kind of pollution challenge.

Peter [Raymont] is an Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker, so I was so grateful to work with him on this because a lot of the structure was with him.

Peter Raymont: Well, it’s hiring the best director. In this case, we had Zaya as the co-director and science journalist. We had Ben Addelman, who did a fantastic job directing the film. We traveled to Türkiye to film microplastics in human brain tissue. We traveled to Amsterdam where a doctor was finding microplastics in placentas and fetuses. A lot of imaginative filmmaking was used. Trying to document something invisible is not the easiest thing to do. We used animation, of course. And [had a] great use of the archive, I think, in backgrounding the history of plastic use by human beings and throughout time, especially post World War II. It’s very much a post-World War II phenomenon, this use of plastic in our lives and how it’s kind of taken over our lives.

So many people, after seeing the film, went back to their kitchen and started throwing away their plastic cutting boards and other containers and things, which is one small step. Of course, it has to happen on the global level and government level. That’s why we filmed in Paris and at INC, and that’s why we were showing the film for the first time in Ottawa at INC-4 [the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution], the big UN Conference. It also played at INC-5 in South Korea [in November 2024]. So we’re hoping the film can be a useful tool.

When I started my life as a filmmaker, I was at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal back in 1971, and I was hired by a part of the film board called ‘Challenge for Change.’ They believed that the purpose of making documentaries was as a tool for social change, for changing legislation, also changing people’s minds and government policies. This grew out of the Saul Alinsky school at the University of Chicago. So, this film, I think, embodies that. It’s a tool for change.

Mongabay: You follow scientists around the world, and there was the big moment of finding microplastics in the brain. Were there other findings during the film that surprised you or were revelatory despite your background in this subject?

Rick Smith: The first study finding microplastics in the human body is only five years old. The first time microplastics were found in the human bloodstream was only two years ago. So this is new information and was developing as we were filming.

I was surprised at the ubiquity of microplastics in the human body. I mean, it turns out that the question isn’t, ‘do we have microplastics in us?’ The question is, ‘how much?’ And the question isn’t ‘where in the human body microplastics exist?’ The question is, ‘where doesn’t it exist?’ And we haven’t actually found a human organ without measurable microplastic levels yet.

Some of the numbers we dug up for the film have really stuck with me, even though I’ve worked in this area for many years. When you tell people that half of all the plastics ever made by humans have been made in the last 15 years, they have a hard time believing [it]. It’s hard to wrap your head around, even though that tracks with our daily experience as consumers, right?

Those of us who are parents — how many Christmases did I have when my kids were younger, wrestling with ludicrous multi-layered plastic history packaging? It’s not people’s imagination that every time they walk into the grocery store, another one of their favorite products comes wrapped or contained in plastic instead of metal, glass or paper. Plastic really has taken over every aisle of the grocery store. And this is a recent phenomenon. You literally can see it accelerating on a monthly basis. So, I guess, setting out to make the movie, we obviously knew there was a problem. I mean, we set out to sketch out the contours of the challenge, but I was surprised. We were surprised at the scope of what was going on.

Peter Raymont: What surprised me is that they’re starting now to really find links between microplastics in the human body and disease, obesity, cancers, fertility rates. So that’s new. It was certainly new to me, shocking to me, and also the suppression of information about the effects of plastic by the plastic manufacturers. I think there is enough guilt to go around here on what they knew and what the dangers could be to human health, and they did nothing about it. They were interested in making money and in making as much plastic as possible, as quickly as possible, and that doesn’t seem to be slowing down, especially in the new era, in the United States in the Trump administration, where there’s an emphasis on oil and gas, which are, of course, where the plastic comes from in the first place. So it’s worrying. It’s very worrying in this Trump II era.

Mongabay: What has been the response from the plastic or petrochemical industry to your reporting? Have you encountered any resistance?

Rick Smith: The work for solutions when it comes to plastic pollution is a global phenomenon. The film has been really gratifying. It’s been taken up by great community organizations and nonprofits working in every country and in every city around the world on this topic, often in the face of pushback by the petrochemical industry.

In my day job, I work on the climate change issue, so I can’t help comparing and contrasting the discussion around climate change and plastic pollution. And, of course, there’s a perverse relationship between these two debates. As we make progress in the climate change discussion, most petrochemical companies around the world now realize that despite their best efforts, we’re not going to be burning their products in our cars 50 years from now.

Many petrochemical companies have started plowing their efforts and capital into a new generation of gigantic, new plastic factories. In the movie, we actually feature what was, at the time, the largest plastic factory in the world on the Texas Gulf Coast. So as petrochemical companies’ hopes for uptake of their product as fuel diminish, their hopes for dramatically increasing plastic production globally have just gone through the roof.

Peter Raymont: How are you in New Orleans in terms of plastic bags and plastic utensils? In Canada, we are doing away with plastic bags. In grocery stores and on Air Canada flights, for example, there are no more plastic utensils. How about New Orleans?

Mongabay: New Orleans is probably one of the worst places in the country for plastic pollution. We just had Mardi Gras, which is a beautiful celebration with so much art and music. But they are throwing plastic beads, throwing plastic cups. We have a million tourists, and everything’s in plastic. I was just walking through the French Quarter yesterday; the streets were covered in glitter. As part of the ceremony on Mardi Gras Day, some groups go down to the Mississippi River, and there’s a tradition of people throwing the ashes of their loved ones into the river. And people are just throwing the ashes [with] the glitter and the plastic bags.

Peter Raymont: There’s a strange, horrible symmetry to that. Of course, in the movie we visit researchers in Italy who are some of the first in the world to find measurable increasing levels of microplastics in human placentas. So we’re surrounded by, and can contain plastic, from the moment before we’re born, to after we’re dead. In the case of Mardi Gras, that’s crazy. I think we’re becoming plastic people. That was the thesis, really the point of Rick’s article in the first place that started all this.

Mongabay: Some of the numbers in the film stuck with me as well, like the 400 million tons of plastic produced annually, with nearly half being single-use. What makes this problem so uniquely difficult to solve compared to other environmental challenges?

Rick Smith: I don’t think it is actually uniquely difficult to solve. I mean, it’s obviously an enormous problem. It’s growing bigger by the day in terms of the combination of increasing plastic production, increasing use of plastic in kind of frivolous things where we could do without, 40% of all plastic use is single-use items, and then just a complete collapse of any sort of rational system of plastic disposal, recycling, and reuse globally. Only about 9% of plastic around the world is successfully recycled. It’s crazy.

All this effort that so many people go to in cities around the world, separating their recyclables and carefully putting their plastics in cases — my parents washing out their plastic containers before they put them in the recycling bin. It’s all an elaborate pantomime in most places and completely useless because so much of that plastic winds up not in a recycling facility but in disposal, landfill, or, in many cases, shipped to the Global South. We cover that story within the movie with quite incredible footage from the beaches of Türkiye and the cities of the Philippines.

But you know, at the end of the day, this is a highly solvable problem. Not only that, many of us are old enough to remember when — even last year, two years ago, 10 years ago — the problem wasn’t as big as it is now. In many places around the world, and in many places where the film has [been] screened or is screening, these debates are raging right now.

In fact, the day that we had the world premiere in Austin, Texas, at South by Southwest, there was an article in the Austin newspaper about a local organization pushing the municipality of Austin to reduce the use of plastic grocery bags and single-use plastic items. And a lot of these initiatives around the world are being successful.

The solution here is not rocket science. We know what we need to do. We need to eliminate the unnecessary use of plastic and ban the most toxic formulations of plastic. How weird is it that there are probably a half dozen common plastic types that people come in contact with on a daily basis? The best science now tells us, medical professionals now tell us, that some types of common plastic are far more carcinogenic than others.

If you look at your standard plastic coffee cup lid and look at the little symbols in the lid, sometimes that lid might be rigid polystyrene or polypropylene. The science tells us that polystyrene is more carcinogenic than polypropylene, and to your average consumer, they’re indistinguishable. So why on Earth wouldn’t we move immediately to ban the most carcinogenic types of plastic?

And then with the plastic that still remains in use, because, of course, plastic is an extremely useful material, it’s not like we’re going to get rid of plastic in the world. We need to be far more careful. We need to rethink the way we’re disposing, recycling and reusing plastic.

But these are solvable problems and, in fact, we feature lots of places, cities and countries in the movie that are figuring this out. Rwanda and the Philippines have made incredible progress in cleaning up plastic pollution and protecting their populations. Little, tiny, rural municipalities, [and]major cities all over the world are making big progress. So, there are lots of bright. We just need to scale up these solutions.

Peter Raymont: We’re honored. This film is having its Washington, D.C. premiere on March 29 at the National Academy of Sciences. I had worried, you know, as a Canadian, you think of the National Academy of Sciences, it must be an arm of the government, but it’s not. It’s a private organization that created the National Academy of Sciences, and that beautiful building was built back in the 1920s, all privately funded. So the screening is going ahead. The festival, the environmental festival, is going ahead, and we’re delighted to be invited to showcase the film there for people of Washington.

Mongabay: In August 2025, the world’s nations will meet for the sixth time to hammer out what will hopefully be a legally binding plastics treaty. Many nations want a treaty that ends plastic pollution by 2040, sets plastic production limits, creates a circular economy for plastics, and bans the most toxic polymers, but with the US now embracing the petrochemical industry and abandoning environmental goals. What are you hearing? Will there be a strategy for getting a strong treaty in Geneva?

Rick Smith: One of our goals with this movie was to contribute to a change in the plastic pollution debate, to highlight the increasing, really disturbing evidence that plastic is not just a threat to the environment. It’s an urgent, accelerating threat to human health, and that change has happened now in the plastic discussion over the last couple of years. You can see this change in the discussion over the course of these successive rounds of UN treaty negotiations. When this process started a couple of years ago, plastic as a human health threat was kind of an afterthought on the agenda. It’s now front and center.

I don’t care how clever the PR flak for the plastic industry is, or how determined the petrochemical industry is to stall any progress on this discussion. There’s no way that they can explain away the fact that you, me, our entire families, and our kids have increasing levels of their product in our brains and that scientists are increasingly worried about links between plastic particles in the brain and terrible problems like dementia and Alzheimer’s. So many of our families now have loved ones who are afflicted with these problems.

There was a really scary study a couple of months ago showing a link between the levels of microplastics, the number of microplastic particles embedded in people’s carotid arteries and their chance of serious cardiac events and death. So I think Donald Trump trying to make plastic straws into the latest battle in the culture wars is going to look really foolish in the rearview mirror really quickly, as everybody realizes, including conservatives, that we are hurting ourselves. We’re hurting our kids. We’re hurting our communities by persisting in this clearly failed approach to plastic.

So I expect that this next round of UN treaty negotiations will underline yet again that we’ve created a massive human health problem, and I think that is going to propel some serious solutions. Maybe that’s not enough this year to change Donald Trump’s mind. Still, I bet you that we’re going to see an increasing number of Americans and people around the world paying attention to this, because, all of a sudden, it’s affecting their lives in the here and now — their chances of succumbing to cancer, dementia, hurting their kids. This problem is now impossible to deny. I’m quite confident it’ll propel increased progress on this debate over the next few months and years.

One interesting thing that’s happened in Canada, and we’ve seen it in other countries as well, is that when it comes to toxic chemicals and consumer products … it wasn’t that long ago that every baby bottle, sippy cup, soother, kids toy, was full of this hormonally active chemical called BPA. And I’m very proud that it was Canada, in 2008, under a staunchly conservative government, that banned BPA in baby bottles and started cleaning up toxic chemicals in kids’ toys because of a conservative argument. A conservative argument that revolved around keeping our kids safe, keeping their families safe, and improving the protection of consumers.

This same conservative government totally overhauled consumer protection legislation in the country to increase responsibility by companies, not across the board, but certainly when it comes to clearly dangerous things like toxic chemicals and consumer products. And we’ve seen leadership at a time when, quite often, the climate change debate is driven on an ideological basis between conservatives and non-conservatives.

Up until recently, we haven’t seen the same divide when it comes to toxic chemicals. We’ve seen lots of conservative governments around the world taking action on toxic chemicals because of this kind of clear, measurable, urgent human health angle. So I suspect that this digging in by Donald Trump on plastic straws is a temporary phenomenon.

Mongabay: Your film touches on this concept of waste colonialism. And we see that nations like the U.S. are exporting plastic waste, much of it to the Global South, which has neither the funding nor technology to properly dispose of it. I’m wondering what you see as an equitable solution to this, or what the conversations are around that particular issue of waste colonialism.

Rick Smith: Well, this issue of the global north trying to ship all of its waste to the Global South is a huge element of the discussion around a global treaty for plastic. In plastic, we’ve created a truly global problem, top to bottom. The flows of plastic waste around the world are actually not well understood, not well-tracked.

The creation of microplastics is really a story of local items. Your average disposable plastic water bottle becomes pulverized into tiny microplastic particles by the passage of time, the action of waves, sunlight. Then those tiny particles become so light and so buoyant that they’re now a permanent part of global ecosystems, water flows, air currents. So we’ve created, through local careless disposal of plastic items, an international threat that needs an international response.

The only answer here is that plastic disposal, recycling and reuse happens within the countries where it occurs. There needs to be some national accounting here, and national solutions when it comes to plastic pollution. We see this in the climate change area, of course, where the first thing that started happening with respect to carbon dioxide is a careful tracking of the problem, a careful national accounting of the problem, and then some national targets to reduce the scale of the problem. It’s those national contributions that aggregate into a global solution — that’s got to be what we have with plastic.

I was talking to [a] guy that runs one of the larger retailers in Canada a couple years ago and asked him, “How much plastic does your company contribute to the environment every year? How much plastic do you use every year in terms of packaging, in terms of plastic grocery bags and the like?” And he said, “We actually have no idea, and at the moment, we’re not even sure how we would go about trying to calculate that. We’re just at the beginning of trying to calculate that.”

So that’s where we’re at with this plastic discussion. We don’t even have reliable estimates yet of the scope of the problem, and that needs to happen on a national basis. This notion of just, in the dead of night, shipping off North American countries’ and cities’ plastic to the Global South and just forgetting about it — this is just terrible. It needs to stop.

Mongabay: When faced with the ubiquitous microplastics problem, a lot of individual viewers or readers might feel a little bit hopeless or overwhelmed. Where do you suggest an individual person should start? Where do you start?

Peter Raymont: In the ’60s we used to say, “think globally, act locally.” And, certainly, many people have gone home from watching this film and thrown out all their plastic cutting boards, as I said, and plastic containers. There are a lot of beautiful glass containers you can buy that last forever and clean easily. So that’s one small end, and [stop buying and using] plastic water bottles too.

We were delighted that South by Southwest invited our film to have its world premiere at their prestigious Film Festival. But when we got to the theater, there was a table outside with plastic water bottles for people to pick up and take into the theater to drink. That was disturbing, but it’s because it’s so much a part of our lives. It’s ubiquitous and we forget that we’re drinking out of plastic containers.

So that’s what we can do on an individual level, very quickly and very easily. But it’s got to happen on a municipal level, by our cities and our states, and provinces and countries, and it’s got to happen on an international level through these treaties. And I’m optimistic. I’m not sure how optimistic I would be in the United States right now. But I think on the international level, it is happening. There is much more consciousness about this. So I’m optimistic.

Rick Smith: On a personal level, it’s actually not hard to go through the house and relatively cheaply eliminate some uses of plastic. And to the extent that people can do that, that really matters. My own personal experiment of a few years ago showed that that really matters.

Whether or not you microwave your food in plastic containers really matters. Whether you use a plastic or a glass container, whether you track at least the types of fabric in your clothing, if you think about where your daily exposure to plastic particles comes from, it comes from what you eat, what you inhale, and what you absorb through your skin.

For example, because you lie on them for eight hours a night, seeing whether your sheets are cotton or polyester — that’s the kind of thing that really matters. We talk a lot to researchers in the film who are trying to think through this question of how your average human body absorbs plastic, and there’s only a few ways, and it’s mostly what you inhale, what you ingest, and then what you absorb through your skin.

It’s very hard, in fact impossible, to completely eliminate your daily exposure to plastic. Let’s start with the fact that [in] any car, any bus, any subway that you’re traveling in, every bit of upholstery is plasticized, and there’s just no getting around it. Most carpeting you buy these days is plastic. But we still have lots of options as consumers to try to limit our daily exposure to plastic, and that’s something that people can do.

We’ve tried to put some tips on the movie website, plasticpeopledoc.com, and there are also some links there to some great organizations in many countries around the world and in many cities in the U.S. that are doing great work trying to improve regulation and keep people safer. Supporting the efforts of those organizations is also important.

Banner image: The documentary ‘Plastic People: The Hidden Crisis of Microplastics’ reveals microplastics have been found in human brains, placentas, and virtually every organ, highlighting a global environmental and health crisis. Image courtesy of White Pine Pictures.

Liz Kimbrough is a staff writer for Mongabay and holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Tulane University, where she studied the microbiomes of trees. View more of her reporting here.

Thousands of chemicals from food packaging found in humans, a major study reveals

See more

FEEDBACK: Use this form to send a message directly to the author of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.