News & Analysis
October 28, 2026
As Big Oil companies flood the world with ever-greater amounts of plastic waste, human exposure to microplastics has been linked to higher rates of cancer, reproductive health issues, cardiovascular and neurological diseases, and other health harms.
Now a new investigation has revealed that Big Oil companies and other major plastics producers knew about the risks of microplastics in the body more than 50 years ago — but failed to warn the public.
The Los Angeles Times reports that representatives from Exxon, Shell, and other major plastics producers attended a 1974 conference at which a German gastroenterologist, Gerhard Volkheimer, “presented a scientific paper that showed for the first time that ingested particles like microplastics could infiltrate the rest of the body.”
The convening of industry representatives, health officials, toxicologists and others was hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences after workers at plastics factories in several states were diagnosed with a rare and deadly form of liver cancer. One of the featured speakers was Volkheimer, who presented his research, as described by Times reporter Susanne Rust:
He performed his experiments on dogs, pigs, goats, rats, guinea pigs, rabbits and chickens. For the purposes of this meeting, he highlighted the studies in which he’d fed them microscopic PVC particles. Within two hours of ingestion, he found the particles moved to the lymph system, blood and organs, including the brain, liver, lungs and muscle tissue. He also found little PVC flakes in cerebrospinal fluid — the watery liquid that flows through and around the brain and spinal cord — as well as breast milk. He confirmed the particles crossed the placenta … He used potato starch as a proxy in humans, having shown in previous studies that it behaved similarly to PVC.
According to Rust, the findings sent shockwaves across the plastics industry. Internal industry documents show executives sharing Volkheimer’s research, with one referring to them as a “horror story,” and expressing concern about the exact types of health threats scientists are increasingly documenting. But there are no signs that they warned the public about the threat.
The documents unearthed in the Times investigation add to the growing body of evidence that Big Oil and the plastics industry have knowingly fueled the plastic waste crisis and deceived the public about it for decades. A 2024 CCI investigation, “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling,” showed how Big Oil and the plastics industry deceptively promoted recycling as a solution to plastic waste management for more than 50 years, despite their long-standing knowledge that plastic recycling is not technically or economically viable at scale. Evidence from that investigation was later cited by the State of California in its pending lawsuit seeking to hold ExxonMobil accountable for a “decades-long campaign of deception that recycling is the solution to plastic waste.”
