The Plastic in Your Body, and Why We Use Bioplastics

The Study: Seven Days, Measurable Change

In April 2026, researchers at the University of Western Australia published the PERTH Trial (Plastic Exposure Reduction Transforms Health) in Nature Medicine — one of the most respected medical journals in the world. It's the kind of rigorous, peer-reviewed work that's rare in this space.

The team followed a cohort of 211 Australians, then ran a randomised controlled trial with 60 participants. For seven days, the intervention groups ate food that minimised plastic contact from paddock to plate, cooked with plastic-free kitchenware, and used personal-care products low in plastic chemicals. The control group changed nothing.

Then they measured the plastic-associated chemicals in participants' urine. The results were striking.

That's the genuinely encouraging part. These chemicals didn't take months to clear — a week was enough. The body was carrying them largely because it was being continuously topped up from packaging, utensils, and the everyday plastic that touches what we eat. Reduce the source, and levels fall quickly.

Why These Chemicals Matter

BPA and phthalates belong to a class of compounds called endocrine-disrupting chemicals. That's a clinical way of saying they interfere with your hormones — the signalling system that regulates growth, metabolism, and reproduction.

The research linking them to health outcomes has been building for two decades. The PERTH researchers point to associations with infertility and cardiometabolic disease, and their own cohort found relationships between these chemicals and cardiometabolic biomarkers. This is an active field rather than a closed one, but the evidence has been pointing in a consistent enough direction, for long enough, to be worth taking seriously.

The other thing worth understanding is that these compounds aren't locked into the plastic. They migrate out of it gradually, and they do so a little faster in warmth and in contact with moisture. That's true of the container in your fridge and it's equally true of plastic anywhere else.

What This Has to Do With Grow Gear

Let's be honest about the starting point: a grow room is full of plastic. Pots, trays, drain lines, hoses, pump housings, impellers, reservoir fittings, sensor enclosures. It's the material the entire industry is built from, and nobody — hobbyist or commercial — is going to swap all of it out.

We're also not going to suggest that growers are worse off than anyone else. Plastic is simply everywhere in modern life. The PERTH participants cut their exposure by changing food packaging, kitchenware and personal-care products, not grow equipment. This isn't a horticulture problem, and if you grow indoors you haven't done anything to be concerned about.

What does seem fair to say is that it accumulates in both directions. Every piece of conventional plastic that gets replaced with something better is a small reduction — for you, and for anyone who eats what you grow. You won't get to zero, and you don't need to. It's a long game, and the choices that are easy to make are worth making.

Why We Build From Bioplastic

We can't do much about your pots or your pump impellers. What we can control is what our own hardware is made from, so that's where we started. Every OMGrow enclosure and housing is 3D printed from polylactic acid (PLA) — a bioplastic made from renewable plant starch rather than petrochemicals.

The critical difference isn't just that it's plant-based. It's what PLA doesn't contain. There's no BPA, because PLA isn't a polycarbonate. It doesn't need phthalate plasticisers to hold its shape. The endocrine-disrupting compounds the PERTH Trial measured simply aren't part of the material.

• ✓ No bisphenols — PLA contains no BPA or BPS
• ✓ No phthalate plasticisers — its rigidity is inherent, not chemically added
• ✓ Renewable feedstock — made from plant starch, not crude oil
• ✓ Nothing to leach into your grow — no hormone-disrupting compounds to migrate out in heat and humidity

Why 3D Printing Makes This Possible

There's a reason most grow equipment isn't made from bioplastic, and it isn't that manufacturers haven't thought of it. It's tooling.

Injection moulding runs on steel moulds, and a mould is only worth cutting if it's going to run a very long time. Once a design is committed to that process, the material decision becomes an economic one: whichever resin flows well, cycles fast, and costs least per tonne. That's how ABS, polycarbonate and PVC became the industry default. Not because anyone weighed them against your health, but because they're cheap in bulk.

Printing takes that constraint off the table entirely. With no mould dictating the decision, the material becomes an open choice rather than a financial one, and we can specify PLA for the simple reason that it's the right material for gear that lives in a warm, humid room next to your plants.

Being Honest About Bioplastics

We're not going to pretend PLA is perfect, because that's not how we talk to growers. Like any solid material, PLA can eventually break down into microplastic particles. That's a real limitation, and anyone who tells you their plastic is completely consequence-free is selling something.

But there's a meaningful difference between the two problems. The concern with microplastics is partly the particles themselves and partly what rides along on them — the cocktail of additives like bisphenols and phthalates that conventional plastics carry. A PLA particle isn't carrying a payload of styrene, BPA, or phthalate plasticisers, because those were never in the material to begin with.

So the honest position is this: bioplastic isn't a magic wand, but it does remove the part of the plastic problem most directly tied to hormones and health. Given the choice between the two, that's the trade-off we're comfortable standing behind.

The Bigger Picture

One blog post isn't going to change the industry overnight. But it's worth saying plainly: the material something is made from matters, and the manufacturing industry's default is not the only option available.

If reading this makes you look a little harder at the plastic around your food and your grow, that's a win, whether or not you ever buy anything from us. The PERTH Trial showed how readily the body responds when the source is reduced. Choosing better materials where it's easy to do so is how that starts.