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This is an opinionated piece by Megha Satyanarayana, now chief opinion editor at Scientific American and former scientist, Knight-Wallace Fellow, a cohort member of Poynter’s Leadership Academy for Women in Digital Media and a Maynard 200 Fellow.

This is the problem with the slew of research finding microscopic shards of plastic in our arteries, kidneys and livers, the findings that our oceans, food, soil and air are teeming with tiny bits of Tupperware. Scientists still don’t know what this plastic is doing to us. And because research takes time, while scientists are trying to answer question, we just keep inhaling, eating and drinking tiny pieces of plastic.

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Everything that goes into our bodies gets filtered through our livers and kidneys, so maybe it’s not a big surprise that bits of plastic find their way into those organs. Same with our hearts; microplastics end up in our blood and can get stuck in our clogged arteries. But our brains are designed to keep things out, through something called the blood-brain barrier. The researchers behind the brain plastics study think the tiny shards of plastic hitch a ride on fat molecules to get inside brain cells. And what’s worse is how much microplastics the researchers think might be in a whole human brain: 10 grams. Imagine 2.5 teaspoons of sugar. Now sub in plastic. Gross.

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Recently, a group of Italian researchers followed 257 people who had plaque in their carotid arteries. They found that 20 percent of the people in their study who had microplastic-laden plaque had had a heart attack, stroke or had died after almost three years, compared to 7.5 percent of the people who didn’t. In studies of cells, those with microplastics in them also tended to show biochemical signatures of inflammation. And those people who had microplastics in their carotid arteries also tended to show some of those same signatures more often than the people who didn’t.

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I see pictures all the time of beaches covered in plastic pebbles, landfills overflowing with water bottles, and giant dumps of technology products with their sad beige plastic shells. Chemistry is a beautiful thing. When it comes to plastic, when are we going to hold the petrochemical industry accountable for this ugliness?