Our Second Body: How the Plastics Crisis Invaded Our Bodies, and How We Can Fight Back

There is a powerful concept from the essayist Daisy Hildyard that helps to explain the unsettling reality of our modern world: the “second body.” We each have our first body, the one of flesh and bone that sits here, reading these words. But we also have a second, distended body woven through the external world—floating over a pharmaceutical plant, inside a freight container, and in another person’s lungs on the other side of the planet. We are, in a way that is both beautiful and terrifying, permeable beings. The world is inside us.

For decades, we saw this as a philosophical concept. Now, science is proving it to be a horrifying biological fact. We are navigating the world like cleaner fish, filtering the waste of our own civilization by absorbing it. Plastic is now threaded through the flesh of fish, the stalks of plants, and much of what we place upon our dinner plates. It has been found in our saliva, our blood, our hearts, our kidneys, our breast milk, and on both sides of the placenta. Because it has been found in ovarian fluid, testicular tissue, and human sperm, it is already embedded not just in the yet-to-be-born, but in the yet-to-be-conceived.

The penetration is so complete that some scientists estimate that, as of last year, there might be the equivalent of a full plastic spoon inside your skull. This is the new reality of the “exposome”—the sum of all external exposures we encounter over a lifetime. This is the story of our second body, and how it is being systematically poisoned.

Part I: The Scale of the Contagion

The sheer scale of the global plastics crisis, as laid out in a new, comprehensive review in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, is difficult to comprehend. The numbers are a brutal indictment of a system that has run completely out of control.

Global plastic production has grown more than 250-fold, from a mere 2 megatonnes in 1950 to 475 megatonnes in 2022. In the absence of intervention, that number is projected to nearly triple again, to 1.2 billion tonnes, by 2060. The primary driver of this explosion is the fossil fuel industry, which, in response to a declining demand for its energy products, has pivoted to petrochemicals as its next major profit center.

The result is a planet drowning in its own waste. An estimated 8 billion tonnes of plastic now pollute every corner of the globe, from the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The crisis is compounded by what we can call the “recycling lie.” For decades, the plastics industry has sold the public on the idea that this problem can be solved through individual responsibility and recycling. The data proves this is a fallacy. Less than 10% of all plastic is ever recycled. As the Lancet report states unequivocally, “It is now clear that the world cannot recycle its way out of the plastic pollution crisis.” The financial cost of this failure is staggering, with health-related damages from plastic pollution estimated to be at least $1.5 trillion every single year.

Part II: The Toxic Cocktail

The true horror of the plastics crisis, however, is not just the volume of the material, but its chemical nature. A plastic bottle or food container is not a simple, inert polymer. As a recent report in the journal One Earth detailed, it is a secretive, “proprietary cocktail” of chemical additives—plasticizers, flame retardants, dyes, and stabilizers—that can make up as much as 70% of the product’s total weight.

The scale of this chemical exposure is terrifying. Scientists have identified more than 16,000 different chemicals used in the production of plastics. Of those, more than 4,200 are “of concern” because they are known to be persistent, bioaccumulative, and/or toxic. For another 10,000 chemicals, there is simply no publicly available hazard information at all. We are living in a global, unregulated chemical experiment, and our bodies are the test tubes.

These chemicals are not stable. They leach out of their plastic containers into our food, our water, and our blood. One study found over 3,600 chemicals present in both plastic food packaging and in human blood samples. The health consequences, as detailed in The Lancet, are devastating. Exposure to these chemicals is linked to increased risks of miscarriage, premature birth, birth defects, impaired lung growth, childhood cancer, and fertility problems later in life. Even the act of recycling can amplify the danger, with reports of toxic black plastic from electronics being recycled in unregulated facilities and turned into kitchen spatulas and children’s toys, re-introducing carcinogens and flame retardants into our homes.

Part III: The Political Battleground

This is not just a scientific or health crisis; it is a political one. This fall, in Busan, South Korea, the world’s nations will convene for the final round of negotiations on a legally binding Global Plastics Treaty. At the center of the debate is a simple, powerful proposal backed by a “High Ambition Coalition” of over 100 countries: a global cap on plastic production. The goal is to turn off the tap.

Opposing this common-sense solution is a small but powerful bloc of petrostates, like Saudi Arabia, and a massive army of fossil fuel and chemical industry lobbyists. Their strategy is to derail the talks, to deflect, and to focus the conversation solely on the “recycling lie.” And they now have their most powerful ally yet: the United States.

As reported by Mongabay, the Biden administration had previously signaled that it would support limits on plastic production, a move that would have put the full weight of the United States behind a strong treaty. But with the election of Felonious Punk, that position has been reversed. The U.S. has now reverted to a “weaker… position, of allowing nations to voluntarily set their own limits.” This act of political sabotage aligns the United States perfectly with the interests of the petrostates and the fossil fuel industry, and it critically undermines the world’s best chance to solve this crisis. This is a direct political betrayal, a choice to side with polluters over the health of the planet and its people.

A Roadmap for Hope

The situation is dire. The scale of the contamination is almost unimaginable, and the political will to confront it is being actively undermined by the most powerful nation on Earth. It is a reality that can easily lead to despair. But as The Lancet report so powerfully reminds us, this is not an unwinnable fight.

We have stood at the edge of similar, seemingly insurmountable environmental health crises before, and we have won. We did it when we took on the powerful oil and auto industries to remove lead from gasoline, a move that has saved millions of lives and is estimated to have added trillions of dollars to the U.S. economy. We did it when we passed the Clean Air Act, which still saves over 200,000 American lives each year. And we did it when the world came together to pass the Montreal Protocol, which healed the hole in the ozone layer and prevented a global catastrophe.

The lesson from these victories is clear: change happens when we shift the narrative from a simple “environmental issue” to a fundamental human health crisis. The launch of the new “Lancet Countdown on health and plastics”—a permanent, independent, global monitoring system to track the crisis—is the first salvo in this new battle. The goal is to arm the public and policymakers with the undeniable truth. The fight to save our “second bodies” has just begun.