(GRI) MICROPLASTICS

Twenty years ago, a team of U.K. scientists sounded the alarm on a then-underappreciated problem: the breakdown of plastic litter into small, even microscopic, fragments. While many previous reports had documented the buildup of plastic bottles and bags in the natural environment, much less attention had been paid to what the scientists dubbed “microplastics.”

Due to “the rapid increase in plastic production, the longevity of plastic, and the disposable nature of plastic items,” the researchers concluded that there was “considerable potential” for microplastic pollution to become a major problem for the environment and human health.

It turns out, they were right.

Over the past two decades, the rate of plastic production has roughly doubled, to more than 400 million metric tons per year, about the weight of 1,200 Empire State Buildings. In the same time period, microplastics — defined as particles with a diameter less than 5 micrometers, about the width of a human hair — have exploded into the public consciousness, riding on a wave of research into the particles’ prevalence across ecosystems and in humans’ bodies. Since that 2004 paper, one of the first to use the term “microplastics,” microscopic plastic fragments have been found everywhere from deep sea sediments to the top of Mount Everest, as well as in human blood, breast milk, colons, kidneys, livers, lungs, placentas, and other body parts.

Many of these findings are synthesized in a review paper published this week in the journal Science. The paper considers what we’ve learned from thousands of research articles about microplastics — including where they come from, where they end up, and how they affect organisms — and appraises regulatory options for dealing with the problem.

Research on the topic has “kind of taken off,” said Richard Thompson, a professor of marine biology at the University of Plymouth in the U.K. who was lead author on the paper from 20 years ago and the new one published on Thursday. “It’s now pretty clear that this stuff is everywhere,” he added, and that unless something changes, humanity will eventually reach a point of “wide-scale” and “irreversible” harm to the environment.

One thing that has become much clearer since the early 2000s is the sheer extent of microplastic pollution. While Thompson’s 2004 paper documented small fragments of acrylic, nylon, and polyester in coastal environments around the U.K., further investigation has shown that contamination is global. By now, microplastics have been found in virtually every ecosystem researchers have looked, including in soils, lakes, and rivers, and on remote mountains. One alarming study from 2020 found that microplastics are present in rainwater, while others have shown that the particles are ubiquitous in the indoor air we breathe. Earlier this year, the environmental consulting firm Earth Action estimated that nearly 13 million metric tons of microplastic enter the oceans and terrestrial environment annually. More of this article (grist.org) - link - more like this (microplastics) - link - more like this (pollution) - link - more like this (microplastics) - link