Letter to the editor: What are microplastics doing in our bodies?

To the Editor:

Fossil fuel companies double plastics every 10-15 years, leaving an environmental soup of engineered and degraded microparticles (the size of a sesame seed) and invisible nanoparticles (three gold atoms equals one nanoparticle) that easily slip into water, air, blood and organs. Better equipment gives us new facts.

Summer 2024- A liter water bottle — said to have 240 plastic microparticles — has 240,000 with 90% nanoparticles.

Fall 2024- New England Journal of Medicine - Heart patients with nanoparticles in their carotid artery are four times more likely to have another serious heart episode within three years. Nanoparticles pass the blood-brain barrier.

March 2025- The silky-seeming pouch of mint tea is plastic. Hot water releases a trillion nanoparticles into your tea, to go coffee as well, according McGill University

Tuesday- national media - Adults have five water bottle caps of microplastics in our brains. Our kids are far more vulnerable.

Recklessness with our health extends to the desired solar destruction of Fearing Hill watershed, its vulnerable neighborhoods for unspecified solar panels whose degraded nanotoxicity becomes the groundwater in our wells.

Similarly, the estimated hundred thousand solar panels, many/most with anti-reflective and hydrophobic composite chemical coatings, can shed microparticles and engineered nanoparticles via air, water and soil degraded throughout 1,533,000 continuous hours (25 years) of humidity, UV light, extreme precipitation, temp fluctuations, wind/dust abrasion.

Public records documenting solar panels’ make, model and constituent materials-Bill of Materials- are critical for all solar installations past and present. That panel information will be extracted under the Freedom of Information Act from individual plans kept by the Building Department.

Nano-Microplastic linkage to Alzheimer’s, lung and kidney cancer, Parkinsons, endocrine disruptors etc. Finding in newborns ... .is of utmost alarm.

A construction moratorium to transparently weigh the facts for such a serious inquiry would appropriately coincide with the upcoming public review and revision of our bylaws.

April 14, Don’t Kill Fearing Hill- 6pm Multiservice Center Room 520

Annie Hayes