“75% of all plastic used is made of really thin alternating layers: hard, soft, hard, soft, and so on. We’ve known since the 1950s that the soft stuff is holding the hard stuff together.
What we show in the new study is how easily those soft connectors break even under quiescent conditions such as in a landfill. Once that layer fails, the hard segments have nowhere to go — they scatter into the environment.Why is that a problem?
These pieces float around, and some end up in human bodies. The smallest pieces pass through cells and into the nucleus, where they can start messing with DNA. Nano- and microplastics, which seem to have similar sizes and shapes to asbestos, raise the potential that they could cause cancer, heart disease/stroke, and other diseases.”