A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies

"Informed, utterly blindsiding account." - Booklist, starred review

It's falling from the sky and in the air we breathe. It's in our food, our clothes, and our homes. It's microplastic and it's everywhere--including our own bodies. Scientists are just beginning to discover how these tiny particles threaten health, but the studies are alarming.

In A Poison Like No Other, Matt Simon reveals a whole new dimension to the plastic crisis, one even more disturbing than plastic bottles washing up on shores and grocery bags dumped in landfills. Dealing with discarded plastic is bad enough, but when it starts to break down, the real trouble begins. The very thing that makes plastic so useful and ubiquitous - its toughness - means it never really goes away. It just gets smaller and smaller: eventually small enough to enter your lungs or be absorbed by crops or penetrate a fish's muscle tissue before it becomes dinner.

Unlike other pollutants that are single elements or simple chemical compounds, microplastics represent a cocktail of toxicity: plastics contain at least 10,000 different chemicals. Those chemicals are linked to diseases from diabetes to hormone disruption to cancers.

A Poison Like No Other is the first book to fully explore this new dimension of the plastic crisis, following the intrepid scientists who travel to the ends of the earth and the bottom of the ocean to understand the consequences of our dependence on plastic. As Simon learns from these researchers, there is no easy fix. But we will never curb our plastic addiction until we begin to recognize the invisible particles all around us.

ISBN-13: 9781642832358

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Island Press

Publication Date: 10-27-2022

Pages: 252

Product Dimensions: 9.07h x 6.23w x 0.84d

Matt Simon is a science journalist at Wired magazine, where he covers the environment, biology, and robotics. He's the author of two previous books, Plight of the Living Dead: What Real-Life Zombies Reveal About Our World--and Ourselves and The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar: Evolution's Most Unbelievable Solutions to Life's Biggest Problems. He enjoys long walks on the beach and trying not to think about all the microplastics there.