There's a Spoonful of Plastic in Your Brain. Now What? A Conversation with Aidan Maguire of Plastic Pollution Coalition
A conversation with Aidan Maguire of Plastic Pollution Coalition, part of the Plants Over Plastics Collective, our Plastic-Free July interview series.
We've been talking about plastic for fourteen years now, and we still get stopped in our tracks sometimes. This was one of those times.
Partway through filming this episode of Plants Over Plastics, Aidan Maguire, Business Partnerships Manager at Plastic Pollution Coalition, mentioned that the average human brain now contains an estimated 7 grams of plastic particles. That's roughly the weight of a plastic spoon. Sitting in the organ you're using to read this sentence.
We wanted to understand how we got here. So we asked. What follows is the short version of a long, generous conversation with someone who has spent years inside this issue, and who somehow left us feeling more hopeful, not less.
Plastic was a wartime invention looking for a peacetime market
One thing Aidan reminded us of early on: synthetics have existed for a blink of human history. Plastic was developed largely for military use during World War II. When the war ended, manufacturers had enormous production capacity and nowhere to point it, so they pointed it at us. The pitch was convenience. Why wash, mend, or reuse anything when you could simply throw it away? Of course, Aidan reminded us that there is no “away.”
That pitch worked. From the 1980s onward especially, plastic moved into nearly every industry on earth, including, yes, the humble hair tie.
The role of single use plastics for the industry
Roughly 99% of plastic is made from oil and gas. Fine, we knew that. But here's the number from Aidan that reframed things for us: about 40% of all plastic pollution comes from single-use packaging that the end consumer usually handles for several seconds to a few minutes.
Sit with that. Nearly half the problem is plastic used for mere seconds to minutes that persists indefinitely.
Aidan was careful to draw a line here. Plastic has beneficial qualities and some necessary use cases until we find replacements. Sterile medical equipment is a good example. But Aidan noted that the same qualities that make plastic desirable for so many applications are the same ones that make it so persistent and destructive in the environment (being long lasting, transparent, flexible, etc.)..
The low hanging fruit is with the unnecessary stuff — the single-use applications of plastic driving most of the environmental and health fallout while pretending to be unavoidable. These are the plastics most easily replaced with nontoxic and plastic-free reuse, refill, and regenerative alternatives.
What's actually in your body
This is where the conversation got personal, because it turns out "the environment" includes the one inside our skin.
Researchers have identified over 16,000 chemicals in plastic. More than 4,200 of them are considered hazardous to human health, and many of the rest remain understudied or barely regulated. Emerging research links chemicals in plastic and microplastic exposure to autoimmune disease, certain cancers, infertility, a growing list of reproductive health problems, and more. One US study estimates that health conditions linked to plastic and petrochemical exposure cost the American healthcare system an additional $250 billion a year.
If you want to go deeper on the fertility research specifically, Aidan pointed us to the documentary The Plastic Detox, now streaming on Netflix. More on that at the end, because he had a genuinely fun suggestion for what to do with it.
This research is also why we obsess over what sits against your skin all day. Your scalp is one of the most absorbent parts of your body, which is a strange place to saturate with chemicals. It's the reason our hair ties and scrunchies are made from certified organic cotton, fair trade natural rubber, and dyed with OEKO-TEX certified non-toxic dyes.
Why plastic stays so cheap
We asked Aidan the question a lot of conscious brands quietly chew on: how is plastic still cheaper than plant-based alternatives when extracting and refining fossil fuels takes so much?
His answer, in a word: subsidies. Oil and gas extraction receives massive direct and indirect subsidies worldwide. Since 2012, at least 32 of 50 new or expanded U.S. plastics plants received nearly $9 billion in tax subsidies, an average of $278 million per factory Meanwhile, bio-based alternatives are stifled from higher import/export tariffs and receive little help from tax breaks than their synthetic counterparts.
So when a plastic-free product costs more than its synthetic cousin, that's not the plant-based option being inherently more expensive. That's the plastic option being artificially cheap. And this doesn’t even account for the damage that plastic imposes on ecosystems and communities around the world, all which pay a high price. The fight was never fair, and knowing that changes how "good value" should be measured. (We've written more about who gets to decide what good value is if you want the full soapbox.)
Aidan also flagged that as the world shifts toward renewable energy, the oil and gas industry is leaning harder into plastic production as its next major revenue stream. Plastic isn't quietly fading out; rather, it's being actively expanded. Which makes what we all choose to buy, and refuse to buy, more relevant, not less.
How to spot greenwashing on a label
This was one of the most immediately useful stretches of the conversation.
The chasing-arrows recycling symbol? It doesn't mean an item is recyclable. It never legally has. It's just a symbol that companies love to use, even if there is no means of actually recycling that good at a facility near you. Further, it's estimated that only 5% (7% if being generous) of all plastics are ever recycled. The whole recycling concept is one that's pushed actively by petrochemical giants - a topic we'll need to delve deeper on during our next conversation with Aidan.
"Bio-based" means a material comes from a renewable source like corn, hemp, or seaweed rather than fossil fuels. Sounds great. But bio-based doesn't automatically mean plastic-free. PLA, one of the most common bioplastics, is made from corn and sugar cane and still fragments into microplastics.
Aidan's advice is the test we'd encourage you to carry into every store: look past the word "bio" and ask how it was grown and what the material does at the end of its life. Does it safely return to organic matter, or does it just break into smaller and smaller pieces of the same problem? A KOOSHOO hair tie decomposes in 1 to 10 years. A conventional one outlives your great, great, great grandchildren.
Where to actually start
If the brain-spoon stat has you eyeing everything in your kitchen with suspicion, Aidan's starting points are refreshingly low-effort:
Avoid black plastic. Skip anything designed to be microwaved in its own packaging. Look for solid or powdered versions of things that usually come in liquid plastic bottles (shampoo bars, we see you). Seek out durable or refillable options for anything you buy regularly. Bring your own bags to the farmers market. Purchase goods from companies that use biobased and nonsynthetic packaging, refillable packaging, or best yet, no packaging at all. And favour things built to last over things built to be replaced.
None of it requires spending ten times more. Most of it is just buying better, less often. Which, if we're honest, has been the whole KOOSHOO thesis since day one.
Communicate through levity where possible. The poet, Tomfoolery, has collaborated with Plastic Pollution Coalition on a wonderful, shareable spoken word poem worth a share on your socials: The Plastic Age.
Two things to take away
We asked Aidan what he'd want you to walk away with. He gave us two.
First: stop accepting waste as normal. It isn't. Using something for a few seconds and having it persist in the environment for centuries was never a reasonable trade, no matter how thoroughly we've all been talked into it.
Second, and this one's more fun: invite twenty people over, order some food, and watch Plastic Detox together. Especially the skeptics. Aidan told us his own family used to tease him as "the plastic police." These days they quietly report the products they've stopped buying without him saying a word. Change, it turns out, is contagious over dinner.
You can find Plastic Pollution Coalition's full Material Shift report and more of their research at plasticpollutioncoalition.org.
This interview is episode one of the Plants Over Plastics Collective, KOOSHOO's Plastic-Free July series. New episodes drop throughout July. Follow along at @feelingkooshoo on Instagram.