Get up, after a restless sleep. Shower, using products that contain plastic and are in plastic containers. Fix your hair and deodorise your body using sprays smoothed by plastics, before putting on clothes woven from synthetic (plastic) fibres, picking up your plastic phone and heading out, sipping water from a plastic bottle. Chew plastic gum. Buy a snack wrapped in plastic and receive a receipt printed on plastic-covered paper. Come home, take food out of its plastic packaging, cook it with plastic utensils, then store the leftovers in plastic tubs and clean up with detergents that contain plastics and come in plastic bottles. Clean your teeth with a plastic toothbrush and plastic-infused toothpaste. Go to bed.
The list of ways in which humanity is committing species suicide may be long and growing, but The Plastic Detox is here to suggest that room should be found for the overwhelmingly widespread use of petrochemical-derived plastics. It focuses on one way we are affected by microplastics (the tiny particles that enter our bodies, having broken loose from the surface of plastic), which is called endocrine disruption: these minuscule invaders mess with the body’s hormones and contribute to all kinds of health problems, among them infertility. That’s the main concern of this documentary’s protagonist, epidemiologist Shanna Swan, whose 2021 book Count Down claimed that chemicals in plastic are a factor in falling sperm counts. (The programme doesn’t go into the debate about the difficulties of measuring exactly how vulnerable we are to microplastics: some studies have produced unlikely numbers.)
