JUST WANTED TO know if there was plastic in my penis, and maybe get a little advice.
This is how it started: I came across a recent study—June 2024—from a team at the University of Miami that found, for the first time, microplastics embedded in penile tissue. Six guys with erectile dysfunction had come to the hospital to have inflatable prosthetics surgically inserted, and they agreed to let researchers examine some of the tissue removed as part of the process. If the tissue contained plastic particles, it could help explain why these men experienced ED.
No doubt you’ve heard of microplastics. These are the tiny particles, technically smaller than five millimeters in size but frequently much smaller—so small as to require expensive, specialized microscopes to see—that have now been found everywhere, both inside and outside our bodies. They’re hot on TikTok and Instagram. In the mouths of influencers—and hucksters. Since I started trying to track down the truth about the potential harms of microplastics, I’ve been bombarded with ads for microplastic tests, for services that centrifuge the plastics right out of your blood, for products that limit your exposure. I’ve been inundated with advice, and I bet your feed is polluted with microplastics too: Don’t drink from water bottles. Don’t microwave takeout containers. And I get it. How could plastic in our bodies be good? Microplastics have been floated as potentially related to everything from dementia to heart problems to compromised gut function to preterm birth. Maybe infertility. And of course, ED.
Matt Campen, PhD, in his lab at the University of New Mexico, has found microplastics nearly everywhere he’s looked.
And today, microplastics are everywhere. We’ve thrown away about a ton of plastic per person on this planet, according to some experts. It gets ground up, or it shatters. It gets warped by the sun and transformed by UV radiation. It wears down into microparticles, which become nanoparticles. It could be decades until they degrade back into the carbon cycle, during which they continue to accumulate.
They’ve been found in the snows of Everest and the waters of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. They’re in the air. They’re in the soil. They’re in the food we eat, and they’re likely deep inside us.
When tissue from the guys in Miami was analyzed, researchers found that five out of six had microplastics in their penis. Upwards of 80 percent. That didn’t sound like particularly good odds to me, but then, it also didn’t say anything about whether the microplastics were actually causing any ill effects. As one of the authors told me, the study wasn’t the kind that could answer that. But before we got off the phone, he mentioned that if I was really interested in understanding what was going on down there, I should reach out to another team, in New Mexico, that had looked at testicular tissue. Of course I was.
That’s how I ended up talking to Matt Campen, PhD, a toxicologist at the University of New Mexico who worked on that research. He’s been studying microplastics for years, and every time he’s looked someplace new, he’s found them. Back in 2023, he was slicing up testicles in search of the experimental result that would instill the average person with appropriate fear about what microplastics might be doing to us. He thought male sexual health might be the thing. He’s deeply concerned about reports of infertility—by some accounts, sperm counts have halved since the ’70s and the decline is speeding up—and he’s noticed they coincide pretty neatly with the exponential postwar rise in the production of plastic. Plus, men listen up when their penis is at risk, and if sex doesn’t work, it’s an extinction-level issue for everyone.
Around the same time Campen started looking at testicles, John M. Masterson, MD,
was a third-year urology resident at Cedars-Sinai, the legendary hospital in Los Angeles. He thought there was at least a chance that the decline was being overstated. But they both realized someone ought to have a look to figure out, at least, how much plastic was in guys’ junk.
Masterson’s study was an undertaking. He realized he couldn’t do the imaging he needed at Cedars, so he started cold-emailing researchers with the requisite experience, finding collaborators at Thomas Jefferson University and Temple University. He asked pathologists at the Cedars-Sinai Biobank, the library of tissue kept on hand from cadavers and surgeries for research, if they had any testes that could be mounted on slides for a microplastics study. That kicked off an endless process of paperwork and bureaucratic red tape. It took months, but eventually, testes, penile tissue, and lung tissue from five cadavers, sliced five microns thick, left one of the most renowned hospitals in the country for laboratories nearly 3,000 miles away.
Both Masterson and Campen released their findings—the first two studies of microplastics in American guys’ sex organs—in May 2024. Masterson’s study found one total particle across five testes samples; none were found in the penile samples. Campen found 12 types of plastic, and not a single one of the 23 human testicles he examined was plastic-free. They had used different scientific methodologies to look for plastics. Masterson used a microscope to get a visual, then other tools to understand the plastic’s composition. Campen “digested” samples in a solution that would eliminate human tissue, then relied on another tool to detect the type of plastics left behind.
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