“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.
