2 . We are what we eat, and what we eat reveals something about what we are in return. So it shouldn’t be all that surprising that humans are now apparently eating plastic.

A small trial at the Medical University of Vienna found tiny pieces of it in the digestive systems of people from eight different countries. The study involved just eight people and doesn’t tell us what if any effect eating plastic was having on their bodies. We already knew fish were eating plastic. Did we really think it wouldn’t reach back up to the top of the food chain, that the consequences of our own actions couldn’t return to us?

This goes beyond cleaning up the oceans. Six of the eight subjects of the study ate sea not all of them did. Other possible theories involve drinking out of plastic bottle. eating food that’s been wrapped in plastic, or tiny plastic pieces floating in the air which then land on our food. But our environment is so filled now with plastic that it seems that we were going to absorb it somehow.

Does it actually matter? This study can’t answer that question, because all it tells us is that microplastics were found in human wastes. If it’s just passing through the body, then perhaps there’s no damage done. However, if there were evidence of plastics being absorbed and gathering in our internal organs, as some animal studies have suggested, that would potentially be a red flag.

Solving plastic pollution is nowhere near as simple as some campaigners make it sound. Switching away from plastic packaging to other materials would create other environmental dilemmas. Bottling liquids in glass rather than plastic makes them heavier which potentially means more trips to transport them, paper production has a bigger carbon footprint. Even if it were possible to stop using the stuff tomorrow, it would take up to 1,000 years for some of what’s being produced right now to break down.

But just because it’s difficult, it doesn’t mean we shrug our shoulders and do nothing. There is something genuinely mad about a society that is on the one hand crazy about the quality of the food we put in our mouths, and yet also mindlessly eats its own garbage. The war on plastic, it seems, just got personal.

Fashion's Melt Down

Throwaway culture is trashing the planet-but one young chemical engineer has her own way to turn it over．

Fast fashion has changed the way we dress．We buy more clothes, more often-but we wear them less．Alina Bassi, founder of Kleiderly, wants to give our clothing waste another chance at a useful life．

Bassi has always cared about the threat of climate change, but she actually started her career in the oil industry．After a few years, she landed at bio-bean, a startup that turned waste coffee grounds into products that could be burnt for heat and fuel．After a year, Bassi was keen to branch out-used coffee grounds are not the biggest threat facing the planet．Instead, she poured her efforts into tackling a much bigger global polluter: the fashion industry．

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, we produce 100 billion items of clothing per year, and this is set to double by 2050．But they don't last long enough to offset（抵消）the carbon cost of producing the material, creating the clothes, and then shipping them to customers．"It makes no sense that we have such a high carbon footprint for something so short-lived," Bassi says．

Using the principles of a circular economy, Bassi has developed a low-energy, multi-stage process to turn clothing fibres into an alternative to oil-based plastic．This new plastic can then be used by manufacturers in their existing machines, so that your old T-shirts and jeans will become different products instead of clothes, such as clothing hangers, or even furniture．

Fashion companies have some other ways to reduce fashion waste, from creating clothes designed to last, to recycling the fabric to make more clothing．But "a problem this big needs multiple solutions," Bassi says．"We think about the multiple lives of a product and how we can keep reusing it instead of letting it fall into landfills or incinerators（焚化炉）,"she says．