29 April 2025
Watch part one of our six-part series on microplastics.
Plastic pollution. It’s one of the riskiest uncontrolled experiments inflicted on the environment — and on us all.
Du Pont — the chemical giant known for its innovative household materials like Lycra, Teflon, and Kevlar — licensed the American rights to produce and sell the world’s first transparent packaging film: cellophane. Shiny, futuristic, and hygienic, it was marketed as the perfect wrapping for the modern age.
In the 1950s, one of Du Pont’s most iconic adverts shows a baby freshly delivered by a stork, swaddled/perfect in plastic — a symbol of innovation and purity.
Today, that advert carries a chilling undertone: many babies may be born with plastic already inside their bodies.
Du Pont’s famous 1950s advert. (Fair use)
In 2024, scientists from the University of New Mexico analysed 62 human placentas — and found microplastics in every single sample. Foetuses are being exposed to plastic particles, derived from fossil fuels, before they’ve even taken their first breath. And the exposure doesn’t stop at birth: microplastics have also been detected in breast milk.
The same research team recently found microplastics in the human brain, estimating that human brains may contain up to 7 milligrams of plastic— about the weight of a plastic spoon.
What is all this plastic doing to brains? To bodies? We just don’t know.
Marketed largely to women — the primary shoppers of the 1950s and 60s — plastic promised ease, hygiene, and modern convenience. Housewives could choose from neatly portioned cuts of meat, lined up in transparent, cling-wrapped trays. Plastic was cheap, durable, colourful, and mouldable. And it lasted forever.
But that is the problem. Plastic doesn’t just disappear; it breaks down over time into smaller and smaller pieces. Depending on the type, plastic can take anywhere from 20 to 1,000 years to decompose.
Large pieces of plastic are called mega or macroplastics. When these degrade and reach a size of 5mm or smaller, the size of a grain of rice or a lentil, they are called microplastics. When microplastics degrade further and are small enough to be seen only under a microscope, under a thousandth of a millimetre, they are called nanoplastics. A large nanoplastic particle and the Covid virus are about the same size — both invisible to the naked eye and both small enough to enter cells or cross biological barriers.
With time, plastic became more than just a convenient covering for a meat tray; plastic waste degraded and migrated into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat.
Today we publish our first video in a six-part series. This one shows the extent of plastic pollution on a Durban beach. We interview Musa Majola, who with his colleagues at The Litterboom Project, is trying to clear plastic waste from our beaches and our rivers.
Our series looks at
We will be publishing the videos every second Tuesday afternoon, starting on 29 April.