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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
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Little more than a century after the widespread adoption of plastic, microplastics (MPs) and nanoplastics (NPs) have wormed their way into every corner of the environment—including our own bodies.
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A new study analyzed the concentrations of MPs and NPs in the atmosphere over Chinese megacities and found that there are likely two to five times more plastics present than originally believed.
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Too little is still known about how microplastics travel through the atmosphere, but this study serves as a crucial step towards understanding how this microscopic detritus could impact human health.
The phrase “microplastics are everywhere” may sound like exaggeration, but the statement is concerningly and painfully true. Researchers have found troubling amounts of these microscopic plastics everywhere from our oceans to our brains, and incredibly, the problem has even penetrated into the geologic history of Earth to fuse with sedimentary rock and form plastistone.
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So, in some ways, it comes as no surprise that this ubiquitous plastic detritus can also be found in the air we breathe—a troubling development that’s been confirmed by a new study from scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It isn’t exactly easy to track microplastics (MPs) and nanoplastics (NPs) across a system as large and varied as Earth’s atmosphere, so researchers limited their scope to two cities: Guangzhou (the fifth largest city in China) and Xi’an (in north-central China).
To quantify these particles, scientists developed a microanalytical method using a computer-controlled scanning electron microscopy system and found that total suspended particulates and dustfall fluxes were two to six times higher than amounts estimated by visual-based analytical methods. In other words, there are even more microplastics in the air than we realized. The results of the study were published in the journal Science Advances.
“Over the past two decades, plastic as an emerging pollutant has become a global issue because of its widespread distribution in every environmental compartment of the Earth system,” the authors wrote. “Even during stable, low-wind conditions, megacity traffic remains a potentially major source of atmospheric MPs and NPs through the continuous resuspension of road dust.”
According to The Independent, the study also surmises that particles can remain suspended for long periods and trigger cloud formation. Interestingly, this is the second such study analyzing man-made impacts on the hydrology of China. A study published back in December revealed how the country’s big push to plant trees upended some aspects of China’s water cycle.
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Because microplastics are a relatively new ecological threat, scientists are still learning about the mechanisms by which they circulate through natural systems and their potential impacts on human health. According to this team of researchers, this prevalence of microplastics in the skies over megacities is definitely bad news for the populations within.
“Airborne plastics pose substantial health risks because of their rapid atmospheric transport,” the authors wrote. “Once inhaled into the human body, both MPs and NPs are believed to release their constituents, sorbed species, and pathogenic organisms […], size, shape, and specific surface area are proposed as possible drivers for MPs and NPs’ toxicity.”
Of course, like the circulation of microplastics throughout the world’s oceans, this problem isn’t unique to Guangzhou and Xi’an, so developing accurate models for how microplastics travel through the atmospheric system is key. This study represents the first time that particles as small as 200 nanometers have been detected, but the authors note that more work is needed.
“A critical prerequisite remains unquantified: the size-resolved abundance of atmospheric plastic particles and their fluxes across Earth’s environmental compartments,” the authors wrote. “Major efforts are currently underway to develop rapid and reliable methods for identifying, quantifying, and characterizing atmospheric MPs and NPs in environmental samples.”
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