• Tracey Woodruff is an expert on microplastics, plastic-related chemicals, and their health impacts.
• She told Business Insider how she's been reducing microplastics exposure for her kids.
• She thrifts clothes made from natural fibers, hand-washes dishes, and shops at the farmers' market.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tracey Woodruff, the director of the Program on Reproductive Health & the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco. She studies how microplastics and toxic chemicals impact fertility and child development. The below has been edited for length and clarity.

I've been working on reducing plastic in my life for a long time. I would say it's an iterative process, instead of trying to attack it all at one time.

Microplastics are in the air, they're in food, and they're in water. You can breathe them, eat them, and chemicals on them can also absorb into your skin.

When my kids were babies, science had not caught up. I used plastic baby bottles. Now, I would recommend glass.

This was before a lot of really important scientists and science were talking about: Oh wow, you know, there's chemicals in these plastics that could be hurting the development of my child.

I've studied the concerning health risks of microplastics

I co-authored a systematic review of studies on microplastics and three different types of health effects: reproductive, respiratory, and then effects on the gut and colon.

We found that microplastics were suspected to increase the risk of reproductive health effects, particularly for effects on sperm, as well as chronic inflammation and the potential to increase the risk of lung and colon cancer. It's not known that microplastics contribute to these health problems, but it's suspected.

Then there are the chemicals used in plastic — like phthalates, which can disrupt testosterone levels and affect fetal development.

Plastic production is projected to triple by 2060. There is certainly enough evidence to take action to prevent future harms.

None of the following tips are 100%, but they're how I'm trying to lower my family's plastic footprint.

Cooking at home

We eat a lot of food prepared inside our home. We make food with lots of fresh, organic fruits and vegetables for two reasons.

One is we know that plastic-related chemicals and microplastics can come from packaging that leeches into food. So it's really important to eat food that's not fast food or packaged food.

The second part is that nutrition improves your resiliency to the toxic effects of microplastics or other related toxic chemicals. Basically, it's going to be harder for toxic chemicals to impact you compared to, for example, if you're eating a lot of ultra-processed food.

It's really about your background risk status. Are you starting off as a healthier person? Or are you starting off as a person who has more underlying health conditions?

(This is not really microplastic related, but we focus on buying organic, because the science is clear that eating an organic diet can reduce your exposure to pesticides.)

Keeping plastic out of the microwave and dishwasher

We don't microwave food in plastic.

We also don't use dishwashing pods, because those are packaged in plastic. We used to wash plastic stuff like containers and lids in the dishwasher, but we do it by hand now.

It's basically the same thing as the microwave. Heat causes degradation of the plastic material, and it's super hot in your dishwasher.

Cleaning house

A lot of chemicals and microplastics hang out in dust.

We use a vacuum with a HEPA filter, and then wet mop and dust with a microfiber cloth. Those are things that don't stir up the dust when you're cleaning. Those are great ways to lower exposures to dust.

We probably dust once a week. I would say vacuuming and mopping happens every other week.

That's also why we take our shoes off before we come into the house — not tracking microplastics in from outside. One of the contributors to microplastics pollution is car tires, so that's going to be outside and you can track them around on your feet. There's also degrading plastic from garbage. We know that taking your shoes off can help.

Thrifting and swapping out plastic clothes

There's a lot of plastic used in clothes. So try and slowly switch over to natural materials like cotton and linen as opposed to polyester and rayon.

I also do a lot of thrifting alone and with my daughter. That's another way to reduce plastics too, is just to reduce your amount of purchasing new — which I know is hard. If your clothes are polyester or rayon materials, and you're buying them used, then they've already been made. It reduces the need to make another plastic garment and put it into the environment.

I don't do product endorsements, but there are websites now that you can use, like ThredUp. I love ThredUp.

Everything I'm wearing right now is actually thrifted, so there you go. And I think some of it's mostly cotton.

It took me time to build these habits

I didn't go out and do this all at once, but slowly over time. It didn't happen overnight. I want to emphasize that point. It happens over time.

Eventually, I could replace things or get things, and it just is a little less impact on the planet and my health.

I also want to say people should not feel guilty about their chemical exposures. I mean, they should do what they can to be healthy and to reduce them, but companies have pushed all these products. Even if you're trying to do the right thing, you can't control where they're used or other people using them. They're getting out and about in the environment, and we're getting exposed to them in so many places. I mean, think of car tires. We don't have control over that.

The real challenge, and the culprit, is that we really need the government to identify and remove these toxic chemicals from products before they come into our house and expose us.

A San Diego startup says it's made the world's first 100% biodegradable sneaker — and that most of the competition is greenwashing.

But what does it mean to be "biodegradable"? And are biodegradable plastics really better for the planet?

We tested seven shoes brands to see if they would biodegrade and whether they're truly bio-based. And we explore why it's so hard to make an environmentally friendly shoe.

• Three teenagers in New York designed a cardboard, called Kiriboard, to replace plastic packaging.
• They got the idea when a box of motors for their robotics hobby arrived damaged.
• Their invention won the $12,500 Earth Prize. Now they plan to buy a machine to make more Kiriboards.

Three teenage boys in New York City have invented a clever packaging material that they hope will replace toxic plastics and make plastic-free shipping a reality.

Zhi Han (Anthony) Yao, Flint Mueller, and James Clare are planning to pursue a patent and eventually pitch their product to Home Depot, as well as traditional shippers like Amazon, FedEx, and the US Postal Service.

They call their geometric, cardboard invention Kiriboard, since it's inspired by Japanese kirigami, which is the art of cutting and folding paper.

"Something like this is the wave of the future," Jerry Citron, the teenagers' environmental-science teacher, told Business Insider.

Yao, Mueller, and Clare won the Earth Prize on April 8, making them one of seven winning environmental projects by teenagers across the globe. The award comes with $12,500, which they plan to use to buy a cutting machine, called a CNC router, and test more prototypes.

Plastic-free shipping could change the world

Just like any plastic, Styrofoam and other plastic packaging can shed microscopic bits of plastic into homes and the environment.

Microplastics have been detected from the oceans to the top of Mount Everest, in animals' and humans' body tissues and blood, and even in rain all over the planet. They're associated with heart attack and stroke risk. Some researchers suspect they could even be contributing to the recent rise in colon cancers in young people.

"I didn't realize it was as big of an issue as it was," Yao told BI. "I mean, companies have made sustainable initiatives and greener initiatives, but they haven't really fully replaced plastic packaging."

Enter the Kiriboard: Kiriboard is cut into lattice-like shapes so that it can bend to fill the space between an item and the wall of its box. The cuts give the cardboard a three-dimensional structure that makes it sturdy and allows it to bend and absorb impact, protecting what's inside, similar to bubble wrap but without the plastic.

Once perfected, the three teens hope their design can help ship packages of sensitive or heavy equipment even more securely, at a competitive price.

Broken motors and crumple zones

Clare, Mueller, and Yao are all on the same robotics team at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Clare is a junior, and Mueller and Yao are seniors.

The idea for Kiriboard started when they opened a shipment of Kraken X60 motors, which are about $200 a pop. They found that the brass pins, which connect the motors to a robot, were damaged and unusable. They assumed the pins had been damaged in transit.

"We're like, well, we should do something about this packaging, because clearly the packaging wasn't good enough," Mueller said.

Clare thought about how cars are engineered with crumple zones, meant to absorb the energy of impacts to protect the people inside.

Similarly, he said, "you can make strategic weak points in your packaging so that the package warps and deforms," sparing the package's contents.

With help from the Earth Prize program and Citron, they built and tested their first Kiriboard prototypes.

The matrix

It was a scrappy effort, with cardboard scavenged from their school.

After some research and consulting various teachers, Yao said they drew up eight or nine different designs, and narrowed down to four to build and test. Then, came the fun part: dropping heavy stuff on their creations.

To test their prototypes' durability, the teens slammed them with a roll of tape, a stapler, a can of soda, and a metal water bottle — "which did the most damage, but not as much as we thought it would," Clare said.

They dropped each item onto the Kiriboard prototypes from various heights, so that they could calculate and study the physical forces of each impact.

"Basically, we want to see what's the most amount of force it can take before it snaps," Yao said.

The results were promising, the trio said. The Kiriboard prototypes sustained very little damage, which they judged by checking the cardboard for dents. They plan to move forward with all four designs, which they hope will be useful for different types of shipping.

In the design pictured above, four triangular "legs" hold the Kiriboard in place inside a box.

"This middle section, we call it the matrix. This is supposed to be flexible," Yao said. Once you place an item for shipping inside the box, the matrix "is supposed to form to the product."

Once they've purchased a CNC router to automate cutting the cardboard, they plan to test prototypes by actually shipping them in boxes.

"Right now, we want to perfect our product," Yao said.

When it's ready, they said they might also pitch it to the electronics company AndyMark, which shipped them the robotic motors that arrived broken.

"No shade to them," Clare said, adding that their robotics team frequently orders from AndyMark with no problems.

"We're on the brink of, like, this could become a reality, and it's just up to us to put in that final effort," Mueller said. Clare chimed in: "All from a broken package."

• Chewing gum releases hundreds to thousands of microplastics into your mouth, a new study suggests.
• Chewing gum's base ingredient is synthetic rubber, which is a type of plastic.
• A stick of gum is a relatively small source of microplastics, but a chewing habit could add up.

Microplastics are flowing out of gum as you chew it, preliminary results of a new study suggest.

The burst of flavor in the first few minutes of chewing a stick of gum comes from the hundreds to thousands of microplastics the gum is releasing into your saliva, said the study's lead author, Sanjay Mohanty.

Indeed, the base ingredient of chewing gum — the part that makes it chewy — is synthetic rubber. That's plastic.

"That's something very few consumers know," Mohanty, an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Business Insider.

"You are eating a material that is made of plastic. At least 2% of that is plastic," he said, referring to a piece of gum.

To be sure, microplastics are everywhere. Countless products shed them in your home. They're in your dust, food, and drinking water. They're in soil and oceans all over the world — from the Mariana Trench to the top of Mount Everest. They've been found in human blood, poop, hearts, testicles, placentas, and breast milk.

An especially offputting study recently found human brains potentially contained enough microplastics to make a spoon.

Mohanty said, "99% of things I see around me are plastic, so I should not be surprised to find plastic in everything, including my own body."

Research has found correlations between microplastics and inflammation, infertility, lung and colon cancers, and risk of heart attacks and stroke. However, it's unclear if microplastics caused or contributed to those conditions.

"My goal is just to inform what we could do differently," Mohanty said.

Chewing less gum, it seems, is one thing we can do.

Mohanty presented these findings, which have not undergone peer review through a scientific journal, at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society last week.

"Chewing gum was not something on my radar," Britta Baechler, the director of ocean plastics research at the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, who recently co-authored a study on microplastics in food, told BI.

"I think scientists are getting really creative with trying to get a more complete picture of our exposure to microplastics," she added.

Natural gum released plastic, too

Mohanty and the graduate students in his lab chose five brands of synthetic gum and gave seven pieces of each brand to a single person, who chewed each piece for up to 20 minutes, rinsing with clean water in between pieces to clear out residual plastic.

Knowing the plastic base of gum, Mohanty wasn't surprised when he measured hundreds to thousands of tiny plastic polymers swimming in the person's saliva as they chewed each piece.

He was surprised, however, when they ran the same tests with five brands of natural gums, which are made from plant materials like chicle instead of a rubber base.

Natural gums resulted in about the same quantity of microplastics in the chewer's saliva.

They even found the same plastic polymers in both types of gum: polyolefins, polyethylene terephthalates, polyacrylamide, and polystyrene. Those types of plastics are also used in food wraps, shopping bags, car parts, egg cartons, and packing peanuts.

Because of the measuring techniques they used, this experiment was only able to detect plastic particles 20 micrometers wide or larger. That's about one-fifth the width of a human hair. It's likely that gum also releases plastic of even smaller size — nanoplastics — Mohanty said.

Should you chew gum?

There's good news — sort of.

The researchers found the most microplastics within the first two minutes of chewing gum. After eight minutes, 94% of the plastic particles they detected had already been released.

A simple way to cut back on plastic is to chew your gum for longer instead of popping a new piece, Lisa Lowe, a graduate student who ran this study with Mohanty, said in a press release.

In the grand scheme of your daily microplastic ingestion, a stick of gum probably isn't much. You ingest billions more microplastics from a cup of tea made with a plastic-containing teabag (which is more common than you might think), a 2019 study found.

Still, a gum-chewing habit could add up. Based on their findings, the researchers calculated that someone who chews 160 to 180 small sticks of gum per year would ingest about 30,000 microplastic particles annually.

Mohanty said his wife stopped chewing gum altogether after hearing their results.

"Why eat chewing gum and directly ingest plastics? Chewing gum is non-essential," Mohanty said.

If you do chew, Mohanty added, throw your gum in the garbage instead of leaving chewed-up plastic in the street.

The publisher of a high-profile, now-corrected study on black plastics has been removed from a critical index of academic journals after failing to meet quality criteria, according to a report by Retraction Watch.

On December 16, Clarivate—a scholarly publication analytics company—removed the journal Chemosphere from its platform, the Web of Science, which is a key index for academic journals. The indexing platform tracks citations and calculates journal "impact factors," a proxy for relevance in its field. It's a critical metric not only for the journals but for the academic authors of the journal's articles, who use the score in their pursuit of promotions and research funding.

To be included in the Web of Science, Clarivate requires journals to follow editorial quality criteria. In an email to Ars Technica, Clarivate confirmed that Chemosphere was removed for "not meeting one or more of the quality criteria." According to Retraction Watch, Chemosphere has retracted eight articles this month and published 60 expressions of concern since April.

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Editors of the environmental chemistry journal Chemosphere have posted an eye-catching correction to a study reporting toxic flame retardants from electronics wind up in some household products made of black plastic, including kitchen utensils. The study sparked a flurry of media reports a few weeks ago that urgently implored people to ditch their kitchen spatulas and spoons. Wirecutter even offered a buying guide for what to replace them with.

The correction, posted Sunday, will likely take some heat off the beleaguered utensils. The authors made a math error that put the estimated risk from kitchen utensils off by an order of magnitude.

Specifically, the authors estimated that if a kitchen utensil contained middling levels of a key toxic flame retardant (BDE-209), the utensil would transfer 34,700 nanograms of the contaminant a day based on regular use while cooking and serving hot food. The authors then compared that estimate to a reference level of BDE-209 considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA's safe level is 7,000 ng—per kilogram of body weight—per day, and the authors used 60 kg as the adult weight (about 132 pounds) for their estimate. So, the safe EPA limit would be 7,000 multiplied by 60, yielding 420,000 ng per day. That's 12 times more than the estimated exposure of 34,700 ng per day.

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