Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Plastic Detox’ on Netflix, a Scary, Sometimes Funny Documentary About the Effects of Microplastics on Fertility

By John Serba

In my daily-newspaper days we called it “news you can use” – the type of documentaries Netflix occasionally turns out, tackling health, consumerism and other practical realities, e.g., The Plastic Detox. This one is about the dreaded microplastics, which are the subject of much scrutiny by this film’s for-lack-of-a-better-word protagonist, environmental and reproductive epidemiologist Shanna Swan. Her scientific studies contend that the manmade petroleum-based plastics that are found in countless items we use daily – water bottles, food containers, clothing, hygiene products, the list goes on – is not only detrimental to our health, but likely making many people infertile. Directed by Louie Psihoyos (The Cove) and Josh Murphy, the film follows Swan as she consults with six American couples who’ve struggled to conceive a child, has them remove the problematic plastics from their lives, and gets some surprising results. 

THE PLASTIC DETOX: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Documentaries on streaming services are all but mandated to hook you right away so you don’t get bored too quickly, and The Plastic Detox kinda plays dirty by telling us right off the bat that microplastics are making America penises smaller. We have no reason to question that result – the film seems to be built on some pretty solid scientific foundations – but it’s not really the focus of the film, which is on what comes out of those penises. See, it seems that high rates of microplastics found in the human body (one claim leaping forth from a montage of annoying social media videos that clog up the opening moments of the doc: you have enough plastic in your brain to make a spoon!) are increasingly correlated with low sperm counts and increases in miscarriages. How much so? Swan, a leading expert on the environmental impacts on fertility, says it’s enough to “imperil the future of the human race.” So, significant.

Swan visits six different couples living in different areas of the U.S., all of whom have been trying to conceive for anywhere from 22 months to 10 years. She raids their homes and has them shitcan everything that comes in containers containing phthalates (they make plastic soft, like your rubber ducky) or BPAs (which make plastic hard, like water bottles), and that includes a lot of food products (did you know your “aluminum” can of seltzer or soda is lined with plastic?), and personal hygiene and cleaning products, especially those with scents (we see one couple tossing plug-in air fresheners in the trash). Even toothbrushes and kitchen utensils are made with microplastics, so they’re all replaced with bamboo versions. Any clothing with manmade ingredients is ditched for 100 percent cotton. And your deodorant is now “natural,” unscented, and comes in a cardboard package. Even the receipt you’re handed at the grocery store contains microplastics, so they commit to not touching those things anymore. The couples will do this for six weeks, with periodic drop-ins by Swan to chart sperm counts and amounts of plastic in urine, etc. 

Those are the bones of the documentary, and the remainder of it is some significantly terrifying stuff: Seeing how many supplements one of Swan’s guinea pigs takes to allegedly boost her chances of conceiving – it’s a counterful – as her husband strolls into the backyard on a frigid day for a cold plunge to allegedly improve his testosterone levels/sperm count. We learn that microplastics can negatively affect three generations, from mother to grandchild. The film diverts from the strict confines of fertility for a while, delving into microplastics’ role in Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. How U.S. regulations don’t dictate toxicity testing before a product is introduced to the market. We see scientists study deformities in chicken embryos exposed to microplastics. We meet grassroots activists in Louisiana, fighting to stop chemical corporation Formosa from dropping a massive manufacturing plant in their community. To lighten things up a little, Swan shows – on a doll, thank you – how she measures the distance between babies’ genitals and anus, sharing that small taints (note: not a scientific term) are an indicator of exposure to microplastics. To which I say, I hope all of you, my friends, have MASSIVE freaking taints.

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The portion of The Plastic Detox that reveals how only nine percent of plastic consumables in the U.S. are recycled – an expose revealed that the chemical-plastic corporations backed the popular recycling movement just so they could produce more highly profitable plastic products – correlates with elements of another Netflix news-you-can-user, Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy. 

Performance Worth Watching: Sharon Levine is one of the aforementioned Louisiana activists. At one point, she says she prayed on whether she should move away from Louisiana, or stay and fight, and she did the latter; eventually, Formosa couldn’t legally construct on the designated land because it was home to unmarked graves of enslaved people. This brief chapter of the film deserves its own feature-length doc. 

Sex And Skin: None. 

Courtesy of Netflix

Our Take: It’s crucial to note, at the top of the doc, Swan points out that her “experiment” with the six couples is not scientific: there’s no control group and it’s a small sample size, narrowed to people with unexplained infertility. So keep that in mind when the results are encouraging, hopeful even (no spoilers, but prepare to have your heart warmed a little); near the end of the film, she says they’re strong enough to inspire a much bigger, more rigorously scientific study. It’s also worth noting that the scientific community’s rigorous reviews of studies addressing the effects of microplastics in the human body put some of the more shocking claims into question – science, as ever, is an ongoing process, and The Plastic Detox doesn’t acknowledge the pushback. But Swan’s status as one of her field’s leading researchers bolsters the film’s core credibility.

Psihoyos and Murphy piece together a wide-ranging, occasionally amusing, frequently eye-opening, not always focused, but consistently informative and entertaining documentary. When the film sidetracks away from the main infertility plot, it at least features interviews with credible scientists trying to suss out the correlation and causation of microplastics to various human ailments, and how the location of manufacturing facilities affects communities (Levine lives in a portion of Louisiana dubbed “cancer alley,” where the population is primarily Black). The filmmakers don’t bulldoze us with gloom and doom, and are careful to lighten the mood on occasion so we don’t get overwhelmed and tune out – regardless of what you think of Joe Rogan, a clip of him proclaiming Swan to be “the Paul Revere of tiny testicles and taints” is never going to not be funny.

So are we going to watch The Plastic Detox and change our lifestyles? The doc is convincing, he says, as he types on a plastic computer, with a package in a plastic bag, a plastic-lined soda can, a plastic phone attached to a plastic charging cable, and a bunch of oranges in a plastic bowl all within reach. The film’s vignettes about activism and the creation of a “green chemistry” field of scientific study are encouraging; the statistic showing that the U.S. has banned nine harmful chemicals compared to the European Union’s 1,100 is less so. As ever, the subtextual conflict is between capitalistic industry and the consumer, as the former inevitably thrusts the responsibility for change on the latter, when the opposite should be true. The frustration lives on. But Swan’s little experiment shows hope, her science being used for the benefit of people’s emotional needs and biological imperatives. “It’s a basic human right of every person to have a child if they choose,” Swan says, an undeniable truth that fuels her, and therefore this documentary.

Our Call: The Plastic Detox uses some fearmongering to convince us of its assertions, but it balances it out with humor and hope. Bottom line, it’s informative, not manipulative. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.