Microplastics

Paint is so common that it’s easy to not think about, and it’s easy to buy into the inertia of the industry. In this post I’ll explain the health risks of commonly-used paints, and present some alternative choices.

Ingredients and their risks

Lead

Even though lead paint is regulated in a growing number of countries¹, it was so common in the past that many houses still have a layer of lead paint under the more modern layers, which pose real health risks when it’s time to re-paint.

Lead paint has a sweet taste, incentivizing children to eat the paint chips, and put objects covered with lead dust in their mouths. Lead exposure causes nervous system damage, stunted growth leading to lower IQ, kidney damage, and delayed development, ultimately resulting in greater violent tendencies.

As the economist Rick Nevin revealed to the Washington Post:

It is stunning how strong the association is […] Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead.²

It’s important to recognize that lead paint was known to be very harmful for centuries before it started to be banned.

In 1786, Benjamin Franklin wrote about a Massachusetts act prohibiting lead in still-heads and worms in rum, after people developed a “dry bellyache with a loss of the use of their limbs”, and his letter ended with:

[…] the opinion of this mischievous effect from lead is at least above sixty years old; and you will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known and exist, before it is generally received and practised on.³

It is now 238 years since he wrote that, and the majority of countries still haven’t banned it:

As of 16 January 2024 48% of countries have confirmed that they have legally binding controls on the production, import, sale and use of lead paints.⁴

What’s worse is that even in countries where lead paint is banned, it is still used in road paint, which is everywhere, especially in densely-populated areas:

Although in many countries, architectural/decorative paints still contain significant concentrations of lead, “industrial” paints generally have lead concentrations that are up to 10 times greater. For example, road marking paints can contain up to 20,000 ppm lead.⁵

This is a worrying timeline of events, showing how difficult it is to eradicate a substance even hundreds of years after it is known to be incredibly harmful. It can be tempting to imagine that we know better now, but the same thing continues to happen across industries, from cooking to building to farming.

VOCs

VOCs (Volatile Organic Chemicals) are perhaps now in the same position that lead was in in the 1900s; evidence of their harm is well-established, but they are not yet regulated in many countries.

*https://worldhealthorg.shinyapps.io/AirQualityStandards/*

According to the EPA, health effects of VOC exposure may include:

Eye, nose and throat irritation

Headaches, loss of coordination and nausea

Damage to liver, kidney and central nervous system

Some organics can cause cancer in animals, some are suspected or known to cause cancer in humans.⁶

It’s common when choosing paint in major hardware and paint stores to see products that are labeled as “low-VOC”, which can make that seem like a good choice. However, it is likely that is a form of greenwashing, and is a false-dichotomy. You are being offered two types of products that are known to damage health, but one has less of the poison than the other.

*Based on data from https://www.thespruce.com/low-voc-paint-and-no-voc-paint-1976533*

In reality, there are VOC-free paints, and many major paint manufacturers seem happy to pretend they don’t exist. We’ll talk more about alternatives like VOC-free paint soon, but first let’s look at the next problem on the horizon.

If lead is our past, and VOCs are our present, maybe microplastics are our future. Evidence for ill health effects of microplastics and nanoplastics are beginning to pour in.

When we think of microplastics in the ocean, we typically think of sources like plastic bottles, fishing nets, plastic bags, cling film, and polyester/nylon/elastic clothes, but the number 1 source of ocean microplastics is paint.⁷

That’s particularly bad news because as bad as lead and VOCs are, they may not be anywhere near as wide-spread and hard to remove from the environment as microplastics.⁸

The health effects of microplastics appear to be many, and the area is still relatively under-researched. It seems every few months a new risk is identified, like this one from Nature:

People who had tiny plastic particles lodged in a key blood vessel were more likely to experience heart attack, stroke or death during a three-year study.⁹

And this one from Harvard Medical School’s “Microplastics Everywhere” article:

Studies in cell cultures, marine wildlife, and animal models indicate that microplastics can cause oxidative damage, DNA damage, and changes in gene activity, known risks for cancer development.¹⁰

Recently, The Guardian’s article “Microplastics are infiltrating brain tissue” had this to say:

The researchers found that 24 of the brain samples, which were collected in early 2024, measured on average about 0.5% plastic by weight.¹¹

Which was based on a preprint study¹² which included these examples of their findings:

Clearly, this is a serious problem for us, so…

What choices do we have?

Prevention

Firstly, the obvious and best choice is prevention. This often isn’t possible because paint is used to protect surfaces, but if you are painting something that doesn’t need it, it’s worth considering.

Healthy paint

If you do need to add paint, there are companies offering paint that is free from lead, VOCs, and plastic/petrochemicals. I hope the big players in the industry catch up, and these attributes become normal, but for now it takes a little extra effort to find them. You’re not likely to find them in stores, so you will need to order samples online.

The best company I found when I looked is Natural Paint co. They disclose all of their ingredients, which is rare, have great performance guarantees, and they ship worldwide. Other companies like Graphenstone, Earthborn and Farrow & Ball look good too, but often they don’t disclose their ingredients, so you have to decide whether to trust them.

Ventilation

Whether you have the ability to choose a healthy paint or not, home ventilation is a great choice.

This topic deserves its own article, but briefly, all of these pollutants like lead, VOCs and microplastics accumulate in indoor air, especially overnight when windows tend to be closed. It’s at those times that particularly unsafe levels of VOCs occur in the home. This is especially true of well-built, modern homes, because they’re more airtight than older homes.¹³

Dyson analyzed the VOC and particulate matter data via their air purifiers and found that in all countries, the levels of pollutants rose overnight:

When it comes to VOCs, most geographies experienced a u-shaped curve, registering higher VOCs in the evening and early hours of the morning, compared to the middle of the day.¹⁴

The use of a ventilation system that exchanges indoor air with outdoor air will smooth that curve overnight by preventing the accumulation of pollutants inside.

The EPA also summarizes that:

Studies have found that levels of several organics average 2 to 5 times higher indoors than outdoors. During and for several hours immediately after certain activities, such as paint stripping, levels may be 1,000 times background outdoor levels.¹⁵

There are many different types of ventilation, from low-tech passive ones that are basically filtered windows, to balanced-pressure HRV systems that actively circulate and filter incoming air while reclaiming heat on the way out.¹⁶

In terms of health, these are both much better than the kinds that circulate air between the house and the attic/roof cavity, because the roof cavity is often more polluted than the inside or outside of the house.¹⁷

Conclusion

We can see a cycle happening with paint ingredients, where they are identified and banned only after they have caused widespread and irreversible damage. It’s reasonable to assume that we are still in the middle of this game of whack-a-mole, meaning that more ingredients we think of as safe will be identified as harmful in the future.

Given that likelihood, the best course of action is to use only paints which:

Disclose all ingredients
Have a small number of ingredients
Have no ingredients that are known to be harmful
Are mostly comprised of ingredients commonly found in livable environments in nature.

Combining that with good ventilation and filtration sets you up to greatly reduce exposure to even ingredients that aren’t yet known to be harmful.

Thanks for reading this article. I’d love to see any comments you have.

Tag: Microplastics

The risks of paint