Katharine Gammon writes:

Martin Wagner was annoyed that his colleagues were always talking about microplastics in the ocean. It was 2010 and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch had been headline news. Here was this massive gyre, formed by circular ocean currents in the Pacific Ocean, reportedly brimming with plastic particles, killing sea turtles and seagulls. Wagner, a professor of biology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, whose lab focuses on the impact of plastics on human and ecosystem health, felt like scientists were pointing to marine systems as the main repository of these tiny plastic particles. But wouldn’t it make sense for them to exist in other systems as well? “It was like, wait a second, it must be in freshwater too,” Wagner says today. He set out to search for microplastics elsewhere.

As we know, plastic is omnipresent. Plastic is cheap and easy to make and mold. We use this miracle polymer to store and transport food, make our clothes and cosmetics, cars and boats, detergents and fertilizers, transfuse our blood and floss our teeth. But it also takes between 20 to 500 years to break down a single piece of plastic in a landfill. Those bagged salad containers will be with us for generations to come.

When it comes to the environment, plastic is a scourge. We’ve seen the images of marine animals entangled in fishing lines and six-pack holders, beaches piled with plastic items like shopping bags, water bottles, and old toothbrushes. But it’s microplastics that increasingly have been the focus of environmentalists and scientists. Microplastics are plastic debris less than five millimeters long. They enter the environment from the natural decomposition of plastic or by being shed by the countless products that contain plastic chemicals. [Continue reading…]