Microplastics hysteria will waste taxpayer money

The Trump administration announced a new initiative to tackle microplastics in the environment. It is a waste of time and taxpayer money, and worse.

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. said that the federal government would spend $144 million “to measure, understand, and to remove microplastics from the human body.”

Microplastics are microscopic bits of plastic ubiquitous in our environment. We’ve been manufacturing plastic, which is essential to modern society, for more than 100 years. There is no modern world without plastic.

As plastic slowly degrades in the environment, its tiny particles get everywhere – in our air, water, and food. Human exposure to microplastics is unavoidable.

With respect to the human body and environment, plastics are essentially inert and non-reactive. That’s one reason they are so useful. The body manages microplastics by excreting them.

The microplastics scare became headline news in February 2025 when researchers reported that human brains contained as much as two plastic spoons’ worth of microplastics. But the study results were totally misleading.

The researchers reportedly examined the amount of microplastic particles in a few dozen human brains from autopsies occurring between 2016 and 2024. But as I showed at the time, even the study’s graph of the results contradicted the scary headlines.

The hypothesis of the microplastics scare is that microplastics accumulate in the body over time. But the graph showed that a 5-year-old who was autopsied in 2016 had more microplastics in the brain than a 75-year-old who was autopsied in 2024.

If microplastics accumulate over time, it is extremely unlikely that a 5-year-old would have more microplastics in the brain than a 75-year-old. It was obvious that the researchers merely assumed they were measuring microplastics in the study. This reality was so stealthily buried in the fine print of the study that it made no news reports.

Other researchers later confirmed my suspicions, calling the study a “joke” and saying, “Fat is known to make false positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60% fat. That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.”

So much for “plastic spoons in the brain.”

Allow me to pause a moment and express my continuing astonishment – now going on 36 years – at how junk science propagators excel at dreaming up these powerful but false images that get fixed in the public’s mind and outlast any and all attempts at disproof, correction, or retraction. Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” and the climate alarmist “hockey stick” come to mind.

Just this week, another study reported that researchers are mismeasuring microplastic “contamination.” Microplastics apparently shed from the researchers’ gloves and contaminated the samples they were examining. “We finally traced it down to the glove,” they said in a University of Michigan media release.

Much research has already been conducted on microplastics. It has produced nothing except fearmongering. Now the government is going to fund researchers and their institutions to promote more unsubstantiated microplastics fear.

Our bodies already have a way of removing inert microplastics that have been inhaled and ingested – it’s called excretion. No federal spending required.

U.S. life expectancy, the most objective measure of public health, just hit an all-time high of 79 years. If chemicals and other manmade substances in the environment are harming us, it’s certainly not obvious. And if it’s not obvious, $144 million in spending – 60% of which goes to institutional overhead – is not going to find it. But what’s another $144 million wasted when we’re already $39 trillion in debt?

If the Trump administration aims to make America healthier, the best way to do that is to raise our standard of living by making us wealthier. Around the world, wealthier people are healthier people. As we’ve learned from decades of environmental research and reality, chasing boogeymen in the environment only wastes resources and needlessly scares the public.

Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.

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